In the summer of 2018, I made a decision I did not think I would ever make – I decided that ATAK Interactive needed to become a HubSpot agency. For years, I railed against HubSpot’s Inbound Methodology, which I found, and still find, misleading and ineffective. But once I looked under the hood, I recognized that “Inbound” was a marketing ploy the company used to get more users and agencies to adopt the system and that beneath the “if you blog, they will come” nonsense was an incredible piece of software.
A year and a half later, I couldn’t be a bigger HubSpot evangelist.
As I wrote a few weeks back, the biggest benefit of HubSpot is its ability to combine sales and marketing. I couldn’t recommend a better tool for merging these two impactful growth areas (marketing and sales) that will see each department transform into a single entity over the next decade. And after spreading this message to prospects and customers over the past 20 months, we are entering a new chapter in our relationship with the company.
This spring, ATAK Interactive is being named a HubSpot Gold Partner, after successfully implementing the system with our clients and proving to be a valuable agency partner that helps businesses implement and optimize the tool. We are grateful to the HubSpot team and their support in helping us learn the best practices for agencies, teaching us new ways to use the product, and being there to answer all of our “rookie” questions.
To celebrate what we have achieved with the tool, we wanted to share a couple of features and capabilities that our clients have loved most about the HubSpot…
Enterprise sales teams typically use Salesforce. As one of my friends in the SaaS world likes to joke, when someone asks her “what CRM do you use?” she replies, “is there more than one?” nodding to Salesforce. The experience sales teams have with the tool was the driver in helping them grow to a billion-dollar company. Unfortunately, the marketing tools they have in their Marketing Cloud and Pardot do not typically have the same positive reception. This is what makes the Salesforce and HubSpot integration so powerful. It’s combining two amazing pieces of technology, so sales teams can utilize the workflows, customer behavior monitoring, and automation tools that marketers have loved for years. While the integration can be tedious depending on contacts, properties, and historical data, the two platforms play nice together and the integration is fairly seamless.
ATAK always aims to be a sales team’s best friend. Whether it’s constructing clear messages, designing attractive collateral, or generating qualified leads, we try to give our partners all the ammo they need to grow their business. The latest is how we can develop sequences and workflows for their sales teams to automate – but still personalize – their outreach emails to prospects and leads. Beyond the simple construction of workflows, sales teams can be notified when prospects open an email, click a link, or visit one of their website pages, giving them valuable insight as to what matters most to that particular lead. It’s easy to build, easy to customize, and helps save time for our “best friends.”
While I won’t keep harping on just how much HubSpot streamlines sales and marketing (even if it TOTALLY does!), I’ll illustrate that streamlining different areas of your business can go far beyond these two arms of a business. For starters, HubSpot’s Service Hub houses customer service tools like a ticketing system, ticketing pipeline, live chat, conversational bots, and more. Having Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service all on the same page, seeing what’s going on with important customers and prospects, is incredibly value. However, some clients take it even further. Whether they’re integrating HubSpot with project management tools like Asana, finance tools like Quickbooks, or communication tools like Slack, companies can make sure their systems are working together. One client of ours even built a 12-step development process they use for their clients into HubSpot so every person in their company can see where each customer is in their journey.
If you’re interested in learning more about how HubSpot can benefit your business, and you want to talk to a GOLD Partner (high fives all around #TeamATAK), feel free to shoot me an email at austin@atakinteractive.com and I can help you carve a vision of how your company can get the most out of the tool.
Thanks for reading, and thanks to everyone on our team that has helped our customers grow with HubSpot. 👊