There’s a reason growing SaaS companies, including most we work with, tend to choose HubSpot. Especially for B2B software, the platform does a great job turning a notably difficult marketing and sales process into a testable, repeatable, and executable science. This can be game-changing for the trajectory of the business - and often is.
Why? Because more than any other industry, software requires marketing and sales to operate in a tightly orchestrated, highly complex dance: one full of thought leadership, person-to-person interaction, multiple levels of high-quality content, and (most importantly) near-constant engagement.
That necessitates a marketing and sales tech stack powerful enough to loop a lot of different functions and roles in from the start. And that’s where HubSpot for B2B software companies comes in.
We’ve seen firsthand the transformative effect HubSpot can have in growing software and SaaS businesses. And in our estimation, it’s the single best “growth engine” for companies in this broadly defined space because it does so much on its own–and includes so many powerful integration options to further expand its capabilities. In a B2B tech world where success requires mastery of digital publishing, sales, sales psychology, content strategy… and a million other factors, we can’t think of a better ally to have.
One of HubSpot’s defining capabilities for B2B software companies is its ability to help outline, enhance, and plot out the business’s workflows. While many people within your organization may have an idea of what your various flows look like–and while you may have bits and bobs of them written down and patterned out–leaning on HubSpot to fully converge and automate your process can yield significant results fast.
Diving a little deeper into the process, let’s start at the beginning of your prospects journey. HubSpot’s powerful workflow tool helps businesses automate workflows, helping to improve the process of leads moving through the funnel (the right way). Using workflows in HubSpot, you can:
That’s a lot of functionality for three little bullets… the kind that would’ve taken multiple dedicated tools to carry out not long ago. If you haven’t taken time to map out your workflows in detail–or even if you have with other tools–HubSpot makes it easier and more effective to derive value from process by automating your workflows.
HubSpot works best for B2B software companies when their communications come as part of a concerted larger effort. That’s why we strongly advise using the campaigns tool in HubSpot to link together your inbound and outbound campaign efforts.
HubSpot’s Marketing Hub makes it easy to plan, collaborate, build and track performance all from a single location. With campaigns in HubSpot you can:
Aligning campaign efforts is a huge task for most teams, that typically requires the use of multiple tools. HubSpot makes the process easy and efficient for B2B SaaS teams. Do yourself a favor and utilize this feature to better engage your audience, reduce friction between your sales and marketing teams and deliver real results for your organization.
If you’re selling software, there’s a chance you’re selling to multiple personas. To ensure you’re getting the right messages to the right audience you need to segment your data. HubSpot makes it easy to segment your audience based on key attributes. Many come as standard fields within the CRM and for others you can easily create custom fields.
We recommend creating segmented lists to ensure your marketing initiatives are targeting the right audience. You can also set up contact views using filters to create custom views for your sales team to help simplify prospecting efforts.
Once you have your data segmented and your ready to kick off your marketing efforts, HubSpot makes personalization a breeze. Wether you’re sending a one off email or a series of automated emails, personalization is key to meaningful marketing.
By combining personalization with segmentation you’re creating a truly relevant experience for your prospects. People pay attention to marketing that is not only personalize, but actually speaks to their pain.
As above, every outbound contact your company has with a prospect or customer should have a driving goal, and it should nestle in with the overarching message and position you are trying to push. In this regard, one of HubSpot’s benefits for B2B software companies is its ability to give shape to (sometimes nebulous) sales processes.
Note here that HubSpot offers your sales team and the people architecting their process a lot of flexibility in devising what that actual process looks like. Using the tool, you can log precisely when your prospects and customers receive emails, phone calls, and other critical interactions, with all engagements charted and logged in-platform. (You’ll need to follow some setup steps to make sure all the relevant tools and systems your business uses are looped in–but that’s what we’re here for.)
You can also exert a high level of control over the individual sales actions that contribute to your larger process. And that leads us to…
B2B SaaS sales and marketing is a high-engagement process, but figuring out exactly what kind of engagement works for your prospects and customers can be a heady task. Utilizing and making the most of sales sequences within HubSpot allows you to make great use of your time while still personalizing your outreach. Plus, they can help you figure out what’s needed to flip future prospects into fully converted customers.
Our biggest tips in this regard:
HubSpot gives B2B software businesses tools to monitor the performance of their sequences and adjust them based on their findings; you may discover–for a general example–that a “blog recap” email full of curated content performs better as an initial outreach than, say, a direct, let’s book a meeting email, or that customers in a specific segment perform better when they receive a cold call earlier in the process.
The visualization, organization, and orchestration benefits of HubSpot shine through in the platform’s in-depth deal management utilities. As the platform itself says on its product page:
Deal pipelines help visualize your sales process to predict revenue and identify selling roadblocks. Deal stages are the steps in your pipeline that signal to your sales team that an opportunity is moving toward the point of closing.
One key tip for B2B software companies utilizing HubSpot? Make sure you understand the default “deal stages” in the sales pipeline. For a lot of businesses, the seven default stages–which include traits like Appointment Scheduled and Contract Sent–add plenty of definition to the pipeline; others may wish to refine the categories further, reflecting a more realistic take on the stages their own prospects and customers go through.
Another quick tip: HubSpot helps visualize costs and revenue associated with each deal stage. This capability alone can be of substantial use to B2B SaaS companies, who tend to benefit even more than the average business from a regimented marketing/sales approach. For two examples, companies can use this capability to direct marketing funds to the appropriate stage of the funnel, or to cut financial bloat from stages that–upon inspection–don’t need as much attention.
A final quick tip: It’s–very much–worth the time and effort to configure your HubSpot Sales Dashboard. If you’re having trouble understanding what you want from the platform, talking to an expert guide can help you define success parameters and visualize them in a logical, role-based format.
HubSpot enables professionals across the sales and marketing spectrum to work together in a focused environment; the groundwork you lay to allow this interplay can create strong alignment between the divisions fast, a huge boon for any growing software company.
Our two big tips:
The same tools you use to delineate your marketing funnel and sales pipeline can also be used to keep everyone–from top-level leadership to the team members executing on the plan–informed and productive.
The key notion here: visibility. HubSpot gives your leadership team a quick glimpse into the inner workings of your sales and marketing process. That enables them to make quicker, better decisions and reduces the chance that informational blind spots create unforeseen problems.
Building a comprehensive sales and marketing approach–let alone configuring a tool that helps you manage all the critical aspects–isn’t easy. That’s ultimately why we have HubSpot: For B2B software companies primarily concerned with growing the business, fine-tuning a deeply complex pipeline and funnel (in tandem!) may seem like too much to manage without a single tool to direct it all.
But getting the platform integrated tightly with your company takes a lot of specialized knowledge and more than a little time. Just for starters, you need to know:
…and those are just a few small considerations on the technical end. You also need to know how to translate all your business processes to the platform you’re adopting–and that combines to require a tech stack that supports your implementation from the start.
Every day you experiment to see what works best with your HubSpot implementation is another day of optimal performance lost. Thaynes Marketing offers growing software companies a turnkey path to HubSpot integration, helping you align your overall business strategy and growth goals to the platform’s considerable growth potential right out of the gate.
Lean on our experience–and derive optimal value from your Sales and Marketing Hubs at a much faster pace. Contact Thaynes Marketing today and start an investment that will reap you major benefits for a long time.
