Ops Hub Pro is a fantastic tool that offers many useful features to improve your Hubspot RevOps activities. However, you may be unsure if you really need it now or whether it’s best to wait until you are further along in your revenue traction journey. In working with our customers to support their RevOps activities, we have identified 3 key signs that a company is ready to adopt Operations Hub Pro and start streamlining their revenue operations.
1) You have poor data hygiene.
Even with a user-friendly CRM like Hubspot, your data quality can start to degrade quickly if you don't have the right safeguards in place. The most common root causes of poor data hygiene are improperly formatted imports, misconfigured lead capture forms, and a lack of validation rules on properties. Oftentimes, despite a strong set of data hygiene processes in place, prospects and internal team members can submit incorrect information through simple user error, impacting the integrity of your data. Ops Hub can be used to deploy "always on" data cleaning automations, helping prevent data hygiene issues from snowballing.
Here are some of our favorite data cleaning automations we deploy when using Operations Hub Pro:
Cleaning Key Personalization Tokens:
- Start with Title Casing names and removing leading and trailing whitespace. This prevents embarrassing formatting errors in your marketing email personalization like "Dear JOHN ,".
- Checking and scrubbing names for irrelevant meta-characters (like emojis). Often these characters are due to user error. Identifying and removing names containing these characters will prevent sending emails with “mistakes”.
Standardize Properties:
- Formatting Phone Numbers. Non-Standardized phone numbers can lead to issues when calling within Hubspot or syncing to other systems. In the case of Phone Numbers, you can even apply the correct country code based on the Country Property of the Contact.
- Maintain a uniform naming convention for key properties like location-based data. Standardizing how you store key properties will enable you to streamline downstream workflows that require this data. A good example is lead assignment automations where different sales reps are assigned leads by region. With Ops Hub you can “standardize” your State/Region property so that they are always stored as 2 letter codes (e.g. “ME” for “Maine”), so any future workflow that uses the State/Region property doesn’t need to check for edge cases. Your Ops Hub data standardization workflow does that for you.
- Assigning Time Zones to prioritize Calling Sequences. Calling a California-based contact at 9 AM NYC time is generally a poor prospecting strategy, but Hubspot won’t automatically assign a contact a Time Zone value until they convert on a form.. You can use Ops Hub to assign time zones to contacts by parsing their phone number’s area code, or using other data on their record (such as Cities, States, or even a dedicated, third-party tool like GeoNames.)
2) You have key business processes that can't be automated using Hubspot's other Pro Hub Tools.
Hubspot's standard workflows and Pro Hub tools, like lead rotation and calculated properties, provide most of the tools businesses need to perform their RevOps activities. However, your business may have a critical process that can't be automated using Hubspot's Standard workflows provided in its Marketing, Sales, or Service Pro tools. Operations Hub's Programmable Automation can support and automate the complex logic your business requires when you feel you've "hit a wall" using standard workflows.
You may be a good candidate for Ops Hub if any of your teams have these needs:
Marketing Use Cases for Ops Hub
- You want to accurately attribute the source of a new deal based on how the decision maker was sourced. If a deal has several associated contacts, you can use a Custom Code action to "attribute" the deal based on how you sourced the key contact. We've deployed Ops Hub to attribute the source of revenue based on which contact has the Buying Role of “Decision Maker” for example.
- You want to deploy a "drip campaign" where the content is personalized based on actions they have taken on your platform. A great example is an email nurture campaign sent to prospects after signing up for a free trial. You can use Ops Hub's Custom Code actions in conjunction with Scheduled Workflow Triggers to periodically "check" their engagement with your platform and/or usage of certain features by querying 3rd party tools like MixPanel or Segment. Based on prospect behaviors, you can deploy different content tailored to specific use cases.
Sales Use Cases for Ops Hub
- You need to "weight" the number of leads you assign to different teams or team members. For instance, your SDR team may be expected to cold call more leads than your Sales team, so you could deploy a Custom Code action to assign 70% of inbound leads to the SDRs and the remaining 30% to Sales.
- You want to calculate the commissions payment a rep would get if a given deal closes. Several of our customers incentivize their sales teams by offering higher commissions on specific products they sell. You can use Ops Hub to calculate the eligible commissions of each associated line item on deal, and store the aggregate projected commission in a custom field.
Customer Success Use Cases for Ops Hub
- You want to automate the creation of renewal deals. You can use standard workflows to "copy over" most data points from a new business deal to a renewal, but you can't calculate the start and end dates of the new term or copy over the line items of the deal (if your organization uses products). Custom Code actions can automate and calculate the additional fields, and even apply additional complex logic when creating a renewal (e.g. applying a % increase on specific products or removing "one-time" products like Onboarding services and implementation fees.)
- You want to track a customer's usage and/or utilization of your platform in the CRM. Ops Hub has Scheduled Workflow Triggers that allow you to set up automations that run on a schedule. These can be used to "ping" other services and keep information up to date in Hubspot. You can even use this data to trigger other workflows, like alerting your customer when they get close to using up their remaining credits and/or create an upsell deal for the assigned sales rep team to capture additional revenue from the customer.
3) You need to integrate Hubspot with other complex systems.
Building an effective RevOps strategy for your business means integrating your systems into an integrated revenue architecture. Tactically, this means you need to pass data between different platforms in real time, often based on complex business logic. Operations Hub Pro is an extremely effective tool to ensure all systems are talking to each other, preventing friction from functional silos.
Out of the box integrations with Data sync.
- Ops Hub’s Data sync feature enables Hubspot to be integrated with dozens of other systems without needing a developer. Data sync is real-time, supports bi-directional and unidirectional syncing, and lets you map both standard and custom Hubspot properties.
- You can also use active lists to filter down to a specific set of records to sync from Hubspot to another platform. This helps ensure each system only stores relevant information and all data remains up to date no matter where it is updated. Examples include limiting your Data sync to only pass MQLs to another CRM like PipeDrive or ZoHo if Hubspot is being used as a Marketing tool; or only passing contacts with a lead score above a certain threshold to a sales prospecting platform like Outreach.
Build your own integrations with minimal infrastructure.
If you need to integrate a platform that doesn't currently have a Data sync or 3rd party integration, you can build your own integration using Ops Hub’s Scheduled Workflows, Custom Code actions, and WebHooks tools.
- Scheduled Workflows, in combination with Custom Code actions, can be used to “pull” data from other tools to enrich Hubspot records. A recent use case we executed was getting the status of Maxio (formerly SaaSOptics) invoices to identify how much money a customer owes. Currently the Maxio/Hubspot integration only allows Maxio to “pull” deals from Hubspot to create new invoices, but you can use Scheduled Workflows to “pull” the payment status of any customer in Maxio.
- Webhooks, in contrast, allow you to “push” the latest changes in Hubspot to another system. This enables you to send timely RevOps data to a server managed by your technology team in real time. We’ve used this to “push” relevant user engagement information from a Hubspot Drip campaign to a customer’s backend to make changes in their user portal (like creating a demo account based on an Email CTA).
If you're interested in learning more about how Ops Hub could help your business scale its revenue activities, please feel free to contact us. Traction AI is a certified Hubspot partner that provides RevOps-as-a-Service to help companies grow faster, more efficiently, and with less execution risk.