HEY THERE, HONEYBADGERS!

CRMs are nothing more than organized libraries of data. Most of the things you'll want to do with a CRM depend on the type (and cleanliness) of the data you put in it. Having clean data in your CRM will make the following initiatives significantly easier for you:

• List segmentation
• Personalized, contextual marketing
• Effective workflow automation
• Reporting and analytics
• Demonstrating your value as a marketing department

While we want this presentation to address the aforementioned objectives, focusing on data cleanliness is a smart first step. 

We would consider the topic of property mapping as part of the broader "CRM cleanliness" category but its worth calling specific attention to it here. Property mapping is the act of:

• Mapping properties and their values between different platforms (i.e., HubSpot and iSolved)
• Mapping properties and their values between different objects within HubSpot (i.e., contacts, companies and deals).

We help all of our clients implement effective property mapping, whether it be a manual or automated process (or often a combination between the two). For payroll and HCM companies, we recommend a couple best practices:

1. Regularly import client company data from iSolved to HubSpot. This will ensure HubSpot always has the most up-to-date information about account status, employee count, product subscriptions and more.
2. Build workflows to automatically copy the values from your client companies to the contacts associated with those companies for list segmentation purposes.
3. Prioritize the deal pipeline as a tool for requiring your sales team to collect valuable information about prospects.
4. When a deal is closed won, use that data to update properties on the company and contacts associated with the deal and automate a smooth handoff to the implementation team.
5. Build valuable reports that provide insights into marketing and sales activities by analyzing deals by source of business, employee count, previous method, product interest and more.

Once you can implement reliable systems for getting clean data in your CRM and using the power of HubSpot to map properties and automate communication and maintenance, you'll be able to spend more of your time on activities that generate visitors, subscribers and leads.

This is so important and something that we as marketers will never be able to escape - whether we're on the agency side or have in-house roles. 

For years this felt like a daunting task... How do I prove my value? What if the numbers don't make me look good? How is my CEO going to react to this information?

Here are a few pieces of advice:

1. Don't run from the data. Embrace it. "Whatever you resist will persist." 
2. In fact, you can really set yourself and/or your department apart from the rest by sharing real-time data and leveraging it to make decisions. 
3. Build systems that will reliably and "automatically" collect the data you need to report on. More on this in a second.
4. Spend a lot of time learning and playing around with HubSpot's reporting tools.

To put critical data capture on autopilot, start by listing out all the data points you want to report on. If possible, create each data point as a contact, company and deal property. Then, use workflows that automatically populate those properties when specific actions occur, like form submissions. These data points can include:

• Source of Business
• Number of Employees
• Product(s) Interest
• State or Location
• Pay Frequency
• Current Provider/Method
• And much more!

This could be a really long discussion, but here are some critical workflows that (probably) everyone should have:

1. A master lead assigning workflow that creates a deal and copies information from the form submission over to the deal for the sales team to use. This can also be used to assign the leads to team members based on territories and other variables.
2. Copy any data that was captured by the sales team in the deal pipeline over to the associated company and contact(s).
3. Copy any relevant data from a company and/or contact any time a new deal is created. This will make sure as many data points as possible exist on the deal record for your reports. And you'll prevent your sales team from having to input data twice.
4. When updates are made to current client company records, copy those values over to the contacts associated with those companies.
5. When an update is made to a contact record and the corresponding property on the company record is blank, copy that over to the company record.
6. When a contact subscribes to the newsletter, send them a confirmation/welcome email and set their Lifecycle Stage to Subscriber if they are a new contact.
7. When a contact that's associated with a live deal visits the website, send a notification to the deal owner.
8. When a live deal hasn't been updated for XX days, create a task for the deal owner to update the deal.
9. For every content offer conversion, notify any contact owners, subscribe contacts to newsletter distribution lists and update a contact property to indicate which topic(s) the contact is interested in.

Obviously there are way more, but this should help get you started.

I'll try to keep this as simple as possible:

1. Start with basic/default reports from the HubSpot report library. Marketing, Sales and Website Analytics.
2. Put your deal pipeline(s) at the center of your reporting. Make sure your pipeline(s) capture as much data as possible. Accomplish this by (a) copying properties to deal records through workflows and (b) requiring your sales team to update deals with new property values in order to advance deals to new stages. (This can only be done in Sales Pro or Enterprise.)

Once you do that, it will be very easy to build out deal-based reports on the following data examples:

• Deals by source of business
• Average close rate
• Close rate by rep, source or product(s)
• Average time to close
• Deals by previous method replaced
• Deals by employer size categories
• Deals by industry

You can create SO many more reports. And you don't always have to report on deals. Contact and company reports really do come in handy. As do activity-based reports to show website traffic, chatbot engagement, email engagement, tasks and more. But the vast majority of the reports your company's leaders likely want to see can be configured through deal-based reports.

This is undoubtedly the greatest challenge. It's possible, and we're proving that with Ahola, but until an iSolved <> HubSpot integration is created, this is mostly a manual process that requires a lot of up-front work (but then ideally just a few minutes each week to maintain).

1. Do a sample export of your active companies from iSolved.
2. List out all the properties/columns you'd like to see in HubSpot.
3. Create those property values for companies and contacts (and deals as well for many of those properties).
4. Import your client list into HubSpot.
5. Export that list out of HubSpot.
6. Then you have to find a way to manually had the "HubSpot Company ID" into each company record in iSolved and then import that back into HubSpot.
7. Anytime a deal is closed, send an automated notification to a member of your setup/implementation team with the company's "HubSpot ID" and instruct them to enter that value in iSolved. This will insure all property values map to that company.
8. Create a schedule to import all active companies from iSolved into HubSpot. By making sure the "HubSpot Company ID" is the same in both iSolved and HubSpot, we will ensure that any new data is updated on the correct company records in HubSpot and no duplicate records will be created.
9. Use workflows to push any updates on company records to the contact records associated with those companies.
10. Keep pestering iSolved to allow an integration with HubSpot to be built. "WITH OUR POWERS COMBINED..."