One of the biggest challenges that companies face today is scaling operations, especially when business growth happens faster than investment growth. Companies rely on their operations teams to identify and combat problems that arise from expansion. Typically, the operations teams are responsible for streamlining business processes to ensure their holistic success.
The reality today for many organizations is that operations teams still function separately from other departments internally. Marketing operations, sales operations, and service operations are siloed from one another. Oftentimes each department is left to navigate its own operational challenges without the necessary alignment or communication from other departments. Operations teams manage data to provide insights that their teams need in order to make critical business decisions at a moment’s notice. Without a comprehensive view of the company’s business health and one source of truth to see issues that may materialize, teams are constantly left to put out fires that push them to make hasty and uninformed business decisions.
Organizations can’t sustain growth using funnels anymore; they must think of growth as a flywheel. The flywheel accounts for an organization’s service team, marketing team, and sales team.
What happens when a wheel experiences friction? Naturally, it is unable to reach the full potential of how quickly and efficiently it spins. These “frictions,” as related to an organization, can be ineffective systems, tools, or processes. These inefficiencies can dramatically impact growth and can impede organizations from providing customers the seamless experience they expect and deserve.
How do you remove these frictions? By embracing the concept of Revenue Operations! Revenue operations work to reduce these frictions by integrating and aligning your business’ revenue goals with marketing, sales, and service operations and technologies. By combining revenue-generating teams under one operation, organizations can ensure constant cross-functional data flow, better cross-team communication, integrated systems, and aligned efforts to achieve holistic business goals.
Operations Hub
HubSpot recently released a product to address the challenges we’ve mentioned so far. Ops Hub isn’t just a bundle of features; it’s a new way of sharing information, aligning teams, and removing data silos throughout your organization. It combines three significant parts of an organization’s operations.
Information
PLATFORM
Provide every team the information they need to do their job.
PROCESS
Share information across teams consistently, efficiently, and automatically.
PERSPECTIVE
Understand information to drive business strategies.
Several platforms address one or two of these areas, but HubSpot has unified all of them into its CRM platform to provide the best experience for its users. HubSpot grouped Ops Hub features into three different buckets: Align, Adopt, and Adapt. These three things are critical to achieving success with any platform and especially when scaling business and operations.
Data Quality Tools
Making operations easy to align.
Data Sync
Making operations easy to adopt.
Programmable Automation
Making operations easy to adapt.
Data Sync
The tools organizations need to manage only increase as the organization scales. Without integrations, it’s not uncommon for these inefficiencies to cause poor customer experience. Organizations need a connected tech stack to have seamless communication between their teams and customers. Data Sync in Hubspot Ops Hub works as a custom-built connector with bidirectional sync, custom field mapping, historical filter thinking, all in a ready-made, code-free package. Data Sync makes it possible to share data between HubSpot and other applications without tedious data entry, imports, and exports. HubSpot automatically transfers data between different apps to ensure the information in both systems is up-to-date. Currently, HubSpot is only syncing contacts in Ops Hub, and the ability to sync companies and deals is already in the works.
Setting-Up
Once your organization has purchased Ops Hub, the set-up will need to be completed by your internal team or a knowledgeable HubSpot partner. To get started, first, you’ll select the app that you want to sync with HubSpot. Next, select objects you’d like to sync continually. Each object has field mappings that connect your data and records to your other app. Take your time ensuring these are aligned. Data Sync’s default field mappings are free for all HubSpot users. To avail of all the custom field mappings, your organization will need a subscription to Ops Hub Starter, at a minimum.
Once HubSpot is connected with another app, Data Sync will examine all the records in both systems to determine where it needs to create and update records. Data Sync updates records in a two-way direction, making your data consistent on both sides. You can also configure Data Sync to only update one-way, depending on your needs. It’s in your discretion whether you want to update the external app with information from HubSpot or vice versa, or both. Afterward, your databases will be continuously updated and synced every five minutes. Data Sync can integrate HubSpot with thirty of the most in-demand applications, and they are planning on expanding that number as time goes on. You’ll find the initial list of apps that can be integrated with HubSpot below.
- Google Contacts
- Mailchimp
- Outlook & Exchange
- Stripe
- Intercom
- NetSuite
- Xero
- Active Campaign
- Airtable
- Zoho CRM
- Outreach
- Square
- Zendesk
- Aircall
- Sendinblue
- Microsoft Dynamics 365
- RingCentral
- Constant Contact
- Salesloft
- Mindbody
- Bullhorn
- Nimble
- Keap
- Magento 2
- Freshdesk
- Drip
- Copper
- Pipedrive
- iCloud
- Sugar
Data Quality Automation
Data Quality Automation cleans data along while being transferred from HubSpot to your other applications and vice versa. Automate the time-consuming administrative tasks of cleaning properties. You don’t need any technical skills to set up data quality actions and workflows. Simply click ready-made automations, and provide your teams quality data as they pass through systems. Common data issues like capitalizing first name properties and deleting unnecessary information can now be automated in Ops Hub.
Programmable Automation
Programmable automation lets you create custom actions inside workflows. A trigger webhook action passes information from HubSpot to another app using an HTTP post request. This allows you to send data from HubSpot to an external system or trigger alert notifications in a third-party app. Custom code actions are also available, so you can program actions using JavaScript. Additionally, Node JS libraries are also available to make API calls, run SQL queries, format text, model objects, and so much more. You can now create custom workflow actions. Custom code actions also support adding API keys which are encrypted to be stored in HubSpot securely. Basically, you get the simplicity of standard workflow actions with all of the flexibility of a custom in-house build.
Your menu of automatable actions is predefined in standard HubSpot workflows like sending an email, triggering an ad, etc. But now, with custom workflow actions, you can build customized workflow actions using JavaScript. You can now also write code natively inside HubSpot workflows to perform advanced actions that leverage third-party systems. So, if you’re thinking about automating something within HubSpot, the answer now will most likely be “yes.”
Suppose you are unsure of using programmable automation; well, OBO is one of the top 10 partner agencies of HubSpot that provides professional services regarding programmable automation. It’s always beneficial to seek professional help if you are unconfident about navigating programmable automation on your own. So, it’s essential to keep that in mind when starting your automation journey.
Programmable Automation: Use Case Scenarios
Marketing
Let’s say that you have four variations of an email for a campaign, and you would like to send each variation out to 25% of your contacts. Using programmable automation, it can select a random number from one to four that you can use to direct contacts to receive specific email variants.
Sales
If you want to better automate lead rotation depending on specific operations criteria, you can now rotate leads with custom logic and third-party queries. This way, when a new lead comes in, Ops Hub can automatically query another system to determine sales rep capacity and then write that lead inside of HubSpot based on the information that it finds and the parameters set.
Services
Manage capacity based on ticket assignment. For example, when a new ticket is created within HubSpot, Ops Hub can trigger a call to the ticket’s API to fetch all open tickets and all agents assigned to them. Now, you can see which agents are currently logged on and assign the newly created tickets to the agent with the least number of tickets.
Pricing
I’m sure you’re wondering about the pricing, packaging, and services each HubSpot bundle includes. While prices are always subject to change, we’ve gone ahead and compiled the bundles for you below with the most up-to-date prices as of April 21, 2021.
FREE
Free
Includes:
HubSpot Sync
- Two-way data sync
- Default Field Mappings
Ecosystem Integrations
- All Third Party Integrations
Good fit for:
Companies that have more than one SaaS application integrated.
STARTER
$50/month
Includes:
Everything included in the free version
HubSpot Sync
- Custom Field Mappings
Good fit for:
Companies that have various tech stacks that require segmentation and custom properties.
PROFESSIONAL
$800/month
Includes:
Everything included in the starter pack
Programmable Automation
- Custom Coded Workflow Actions
- Custom Coded Bot Actions
- Webhooks
Data Quality Automation
Additional Portal Capacity
- 3000 Additional Reports
- 300 Additional Dashboards
- 100 Additional Lists
- 100 Additional Workflows
Good fit for:
Companies that have technical resources on staff and have extensive tech stacks that require custom processes.
Webhooks, workflows, custom-coded bots, and webhook actions are probably familiar to customers who have already purchased the enterprise subscription. An important thing to note is that these features will be available on enterprise subscriptions for legacy customers. Legacy customers are people who have purchased enterprise subscriptions before April 21. But, new customers will have to buy Operations Hub since these features are now housed in it.
We’ve also created a fantastic guidebook on how you can leverage Operations Hub to make your organization the well-oiled machine that you want it to be. Since HubSpot recently launched Ops Hub, we made it extra easy to understand how it works, and it’s available for you all!
We are incredibly excited about this new offering from HubSpot! If you’re as enthusiastic about this development as we are but don’t exactly know how to start, we’d love to connect! Our team is happy to guide you through the process of customizing your Ops Hub so your organizations can scale the way you want.
