HubSpot CRM optimization for SaaS companies

In today's competitive landscape, B2B SaaS companies face the daunting task of effectively managing and nurturing leads while simultaneously driving growth. HubSpot is a powerful inbound marketing and sales platform that offers a wide range of tools and features to help businesses attract, engage, and delight their customers. As with any tool, it can only be as good as how the user engages with it. 

At Kalungi, we are committed to help you make the most of HubSpot and achieve optimal results, we know the importance of having a proper HubSpot set up specifically tailored for B2B SaaS companies. Moreover, a well-structured HubSpot CRM will help you gain comprehensive insights into your sales pipeline and customer journey. 

HubSpot's robust reporting and analytics capabilities provide real-time visibility into key performance metrics, enabling data-driven decision-making and empowering your marketing and sales teams to make more informed decisions. We have created a list of specific best practices, that we use for ourselves and our clients that will help you achieve this (you will not find anywhere on the internet).

In this post, we will focus on analyzing the benefits of optimizing the processes that are carried out within your CRM through automation.

What is optimization within HubSpot CRM?

By optimizing your HubSpot CRM, your team members can avoid repetitive tasks by properly configuring workflows that could resolve these requirements automatically. This can help your team in saving and reinvesting time that would otherwise be wasted by repeating manual tasks. There are various advantages of implementing an automated system, such as: 

1. These automated systems will function much faster than manually-driven ones and gives time back to those who would have been driving them
2. Using automation helps to avoid human error
3. There is always an expected result and will be far fewer inconsistencies
4. The volume of processes can be higher. The computer should repeat unnecessary tasks, not your team

When we talk about automation, most companies think only about email automation with services like Mailchimp, but automation within HubSpot CRM can cover many more things, such as:

1. Lead capture (forms, CTAs)
2. Contact segmentation and lead scoring
3. Messaging and nurturing
4. Assignment of properties such as lifecycle stages
5. Tracking changes and updates over time for specific properties to have more thorough and efficient reporting
6. Analyzing some metrics and KPIs to make decisions and plan accordingly

Specifically for this last point, while there are innumerable ways to quantify and measure your success, we recommend that fast-growing SaaS companies focus on paying close and consistent attention to just a few essential metrics. 

What is there to optimize within HubSpot’s CRM?

Let’s look at some of the main areas we can optimize:

1. Naming conventions
   
   • What does it mean?
     All of your Hubspot assets should have their names consistently assigned. 
     
     
   • What do we do at Kalungi?
     At Kalungi, we use prefixes depending on their function (like "Notification," "Internal Process"), and keep assets correctly organized in folders and grouped by their functionality.
     
     
   • Why it’s important
     This will help with faster access and utilization across campaigns, emails, workflows, and reports across multiple team members. It helps avoid unnecessary confusion that would hinder otherwise straightforward processes. Think also about including keywords in your asset names that will help people searching for them locate them.
     
     
2. Lifecycle stage back-filling
   
   • What does it mean?
     All of your contacts and companies should not skip any lifecycle stages. 
     
     
   • What do we do at Kalungi?
     At Kalungi, we backfill the time stamps for skipped lifecycle stages to artificially pass each contact and company through each stage of the funnel up to their current stage. No contact or company should be left out of the funnel.
     
     
   • Why it’s important
     A complete and accurate full funnel report will help you make more informed business decisions and to plan based on actual insights rather than gut feelings.
     
     
3. Cohort reporting vs. dynamic reporting
   
   • What does it mean?
     There are two types of reports based on time: 
     
     A cohort report is a static view based on the created date of a contact, company etc.
     
     A dynamic report is based on timestamps that track when a property changes over time, for example, when the lifecycle stage or deal stage of a specific contact or deal changes in the pipeline.
     
     
   • What do we do at Kalungi?
     At Kalungi, we combine cohort and dynamic reporting to get the full picture of how data behaves.
     
     
   • Why it’s important
     A cohort report can give you the full funnel data for a particular time range, and with this information, you can calculate lifecycle stage conversion rates. Meanwhile, dynamic reporting can give you a snapshot of the current data and how it evolves over time.

Key HubSpot CRM dos and don'ts

Lifecycle stages  

Is it OK to skip a lifecycle stage?

In order to maintain accurate lifecycle stage reports, it is essential to prevent contacts from bypassing intermediate lifecycle stages and directly jumping to advanced stages. At Kalungi, we prevent this by creating workflows that artificially pass each contact, company, or deal through each stage. Precisely because it is a funnel, and theoretically, they cannot jump from 1 to 7; everyone must go through 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

Can a contact go backward in the lifecycle stage?

Once a contact is set to a specific stage, it should never return to a previous one, even if it stops being qualified. There are multiple reasons why we never revert to a lifecycle stage: The most important one is that this data helps us determine what is and isn’t a good candidate for that stage. The more data we gather, the better the qualification at each stage, which in turn helps with the conversion rate. 

Another reason to never set them back is to get accurate data for sales. Once a contact from a company is set at a specific stage, all contacts in that company should be set to the same stage. This is because we service B2B companies, and we don’t sell to individuals but rather to the companies they belong to. This helps the sales reps know if they are putting efforts towards the right contacts since you can easily determine if this is a current customer, a past customer, or an opportunity that was previously dropped or is in the works.

Lifecycle stages dos & don'ts  

• Don't add or modify lifecycle stages from the subscriber to the customer stages.
• Add extra lifecycle stages after the customer stage that reflects your sales cycle.
• Don't add lifecycle stages for active and inactive clients.
• Use the active client property to determine if a client is active or inactive.
• Don't use pipeline stages as statuses.
• Create pipeline stages for actions that need to happen rather than in-between statuses.

Original source 

Is the HubSpot original source enough to know where the contacts came from?

The original source property shows you the first known source through which a contact interacted with your business. The problem with using the original source is that all the contacts coming from integrations, imports, ABM campaigns, API calls, or CRM_UI will be under “offline sources” without providing much additional source information. The limited granularity of the original source property does not provide detailed insights into the specific channels that contributed to a contact's initial interaction. This can hinder marketers' ability to optimize their efforts and accurately measure and analyze their attribution data.

Original source dos & don'ts

• Don't use the original source property to break down your reports.
• To have a more granular segmentation of the information, we recommend that you not only use the original source but also the original source drill-downs 1 and 2.
• Store the specific channel that contributed to a contact's initial interaction in a Custom property combining the original source and the accurate drill-down (we call this property custom source)
• Custom source based reports can be used to generate a more segmented and detailed distribution compared with the original source.

Naming conventions. 

Why do naming conventions matter?

• Improved organization: Establishing a clear and consistent naming system for your marketing assets helps keep your campaigns organized and easy to find. This enables team members to quickly locate and work on the appropriate assets without wasting time searching for the correct files. 
• Enhanced communication: A standardized naming convention promotes collaboration between team members by making understanding each asset's purpose, context, and status easier.
• Streamlined analysis and changes: Consistent naming conventions facilitate the tracking and analysis of campaign performance. When assets are named following a clear system, it becomes easier to identify patterns, trends, and areas for improvement.

Naming conventions dos & don'ts

• Avoid using generic names like “New Campaign” or “New Resource”. Ensure that your naming conventions are concise yet descriptive, providing enough information for your team to identify the purpose and context of each asset. 
• Maintain consistency across asset types: The names of related assets should match across asset types whenever possible. This ensures that your team can easily track and manage assets across different channels and platforms. 
• Follow alphabetical order: Combinations should follow alphabetical order, e.g., "Email+LinkedIn" vs. "LinkedIn+Email." 
• Differentiate geographic markets: Use region prefixes in brackets to differentiate between geo markets and countries/regions, e.g., [UK] 2023 Summer Sale.
• Keep names short and descriptive: Shorter names are better than longer names, as they are easier to read and understand. 

Sequences

Is it OK to enroll a contact in different nurture sequences at the same time?

Sending multiple nurture sequences simultaneously to a single contact can lead to an overwhelming and disjointed experience, diminishing the effectiveness of your communication. When bombarded with multiple nurture sequences, the recipient may become confused, lose track of the intended message, or feel inundated with information. Each nurture sequence is designed to guide contacts through a specific journey, providing them with carefully curated content that aligns with their needs and interests. By sending multiple sequences concurrently, the recipient may receive conflicting or repetitive information, creating a sense of dissonance and diluting the impact of your messaging. It is crucial to maintain a clear and focused approach in your communication strategy, ensuring that each contact receives a cohesive and personalized experience that nurtures their relationship with your brand.

Sequences dos & don'ts

• Do not enroll a contact in a sequence until they have finished a previous one.
• Make sure that contacts are associated with sequences with a specific purpose.
• Make sure your contact does not receive the same sequence or resource twice.
• You can enroll contacts in a new sequence for re-engagement before they go cold.
• Sending the resources requested by a contact via sequences is a good way to verify if the provided email is genuine or fake.

Setting yourself up for success with an automated, optimized HubSpot CRM

All of this will work flawlessly, assuming that your HubSpot CRM (your main automation tool) is correctly set up and configured. Setting up an advanced tool like a CRM is a very complex task that could take a very long time (sometimes even months) and would require a team of experts to complete.

If you are interested in how we set up and optimize HubSpot for our SaaS clients, let’s talk! We have built a proprietary software solution that optimizes your HubSpot automation to be:

1. Easy to deploy – It's not a complex task.
2. Blazingly fast – Takes weeks instead of months.
3. Accurate – Aligned to give complete visibility on your business performance.

The final result is an optimized HubSpot CRM instance with an organized structure of assets for easy access, automated data management, clear reporting, and more.