This article highlights the five most frequent mistakes businesses make when implementing HubSpot and how partnering with an expert agency can help avoid them. From lacking a clear strategy to skipping vital team training, these missteps can undermine your success. We'll also show how agencies like ScaleStation provide the expertise and support needed for a smooth and effective HubSpot rollout, ensuring your business thrives in the long run.
Jumping Into Setup Without a Strategy
It’s tempting to dive right into HubSpot’s powerful tools and start setting up your CRM system, especially when you’re excited to see results. However, jumping into setup without a solid strategy can quickly turn a promising tool into a source of frustration. "Plug and play" doesn’t work when it comes to businesses with complex sales and marketing funnels.
Why “Plug and Play” Doesn’t Work for Complex Sales/Marketing Funnels
For Australian businesses managing complex B2B sales cycles or multifaceted customer journeys, diving into HubSpot setup without a clear strategy is a recipe for chaos, not success. HubSpot’s robust features require thoughtful configuration to ensure they align with your specific business needs. If you don’t carefully plan out your processes beforehand, it can result in scattered data, poor customer experiences, and ultimately, wasted resources.
Common Signs
- Random workflows: Without a strategy, workflows often lack coherence, leading to irrelevant emails, confusion in follow up tasks, and lost opportunities.
- No defined lifecycle stages: If your lifecycle stages aren’t defined, it’s impossible to track where prospects are in their journey, which means you could be sending new leads the same emails as long term customers, creating a disjointed experience.
- Messy CRM: Without a structured CRM setup, you’ll end up with messy contact records. Missing details, incomplete information, and duplicated contacts will make it hard for your team to serve customers and manage leads effectively.
How an Agency Helps
A skilled agency doesn’t just set up HubSpot; they work alongside your team to understand your unique business model, target audience, and processes. Here's how they help:
- Establishes goals & personas: An experienced agency takes the time to define clear business goals and create detailed buyer personas. By doing so, they ensure your HubSpot setup is aligned with your objectives, ensuring you track the right metrics and engage the right customers at the right time.
- Maps out use cases before setup: Instead of rushing to set up workflows and email sequences, the agency maps out the key use cases and customer journeys. This careful planning ensures your system supports your sales and marketing teams and helps them work more efficiently.
Poor Data Migration
Good data is the backbone of any CRM system, and how you migrate it can make or break your HubSpot experience. For Australian businesses, bringing over incomplete or inaccurate data can wreak havoc on the CRM setup, causing issues down the line that could cost time and money.
Importing Duplicate, Outdated, or Incomplete Contact Data
One of the most common mistakes businesses make is importing old, incomplete, or duplicate contact data. This can muddy your sales pipeline and create unnecessary confusion, leading to missed opportunities. Additionally, inaccurate data prevents you from tracking prospects effectively and may lead to irrelevant content being sent to leads.
Issues from Legacy Systems or Spreadsheets
Many Australian businesses still rely on outdated systems or spreadsheets for tracking customer data. Migrating data from these legacy systems into HubSpot can introduce errors, such as missing fields, incorrect formatting, and duplication. These inconsistencies are difficult to clean up and can result in a CRM that isn’t fully optimised for your needs.
How an Agency Helps
An experienced agency ensures your data migration process is flawless.
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Cleans and prepares data before import: Your contact list is checked for duplicates, outdated records, and missing details. This ensures your CRM starts with only accurate, up to date information.
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Maps data fields correctly: Every piece of information is properly aligned with HubSpot’s fields, so nothing is misplaced or lost during migration.
Overusing (or Misusing) Automation
Automation is one of HubSpot’s most powerful features, but it’s easy to go overboard. Many businesses mistakenly automate processes without properly considering their audience, resulting in over saturation or, worse, alienating potential leads.
Overwhelming Leads with Emails
Bombarding leads with irrelevant emails or too many messages can quickly alienate them. In the fast paced Australian market, where competition is fierce, staying relevant is key. To cut through the noise, you need a smart, user focused approach that doesn’t overwhelm leads with repetitive, irrelevant messages.
Lack of Testing or Logic Loops
Another common mistake is setting up automation without testing it first. Whether it’s email workflows, lead nurturing sequences, or task reminders, without proper testing, there’s a high chance that leads will be sent the wrong content or follow ups at the wrong time. Furthermore, without logic loops (if/then branches), your workflows can quickly become ineffective.
How an Agency Helps
An experienced agency can help your business harness the true power of automation:
- Creates user-centric workflows: Rather than overwhelming leads with generic messages, the agency designs automation that’s aligned with where leads are in their journey. This means customers receive relevant content that aligns with their interests, ultimately driving more conversions.
- Tests sequences thoroughly: Agencies don’t just set automation and walk away. They test workflows, ensuring that leads receive timely, relevant communication. They also monitor and tweak sequences to optimise performance over time.
- Aligns automation with real-world journeys: A good agency aligns automation to real-world customer journeys, ensuring that workflows evolve with the customer’s needs. Whether it’s re-engagement after a long period of silence or upsell opportunities, automation will be as personalised as possible.
Underutilising Reporting and Dashboards
Many businesses fail to take full advantage of HubSpot’s powerful reporting tools. Instead, they rely on default dashboards that provide limited insights, or worse, they don’t set up any reporting at all. For Australian businesses, understanding how your marketing and sales efforts are performing is crucial for success.
Relying on Default Dashboards
HubSpot comes with several preconfigured dashboards, but these are often too generic to provide actionable insights specific to your business. Default dashboards may not reflect your key performance indicators (KPIs) or align with your business goals, leaving your team in the dark about the real performance of their efforts.
No Alignment with Business Goals or KPIs
Tracking generic data is not enough. If you aren’t measuring the right KPIs, you risk missing important trends and data points that can help you optimise your strategy.
How an Agency Helps
A professional agency ensures that HubSpot’s reporting features are fully leveraged:
- Builds custom reports: Agencies will work with you to create custom dashboards that track the KPIs that matter most to your business. Whether it’s lead conversion rates, revenue from closed deals, or the effectiveness of email campaigns, custom reports give you a deeper understanding of performance.
- Tracks KPIs: Instead of focusing on vanity metrics, agencies help you focus on KPIs that tie back to your overall business objectives, ensuring every marketing or sales effort is measurable.
- Connects reporting to real performance metrics: Agencies don’t just stop at creating reports, they connect them to your business's real time performance, giving you actionable insights to refine your strategies and drive growth.
Neglecting Ongoing Optimisation and Training
A successful HubSpot setup is not a one-off event; it’s an ongoing process. Businesses often fail to evolve their HubSpot usage as their needs grow or neglect to keep teams trained on the latest features and strategies.
Teams Don’t Evolve Their Use of HubSpot as Their Business Grows
As your business expands, so should your use of HubSpot. What worked during the initial setup may not be effective months or years later as your company’s sales and marketing strategies evolve.
Lack of Internal Buy In or Proper Training
Without ongoing training, your team may struggle to unlock HubSpot’s full potential. Worse, if they don’t fully embrace the CRM, they may fall back into old habits, rendering the investment in HubSpot almost pointless.
How an Agency Helps
A good agency doesn’t just implement and leave, it ensures that your HubSpot system evolves with your business.
- Offers enablement support: Agencies provide ongoing training to ensure your team is always up to speed on the latest features and best practices, helping them work more efficiently.
- Regular reviews: A good agency will conduct regular reviews of your HubSpot setup to ensure that it still aligns with your business goals, making adjustments as needed to keep things running smoothly.
- Refinement over time: As your business grows and changes, an agency helps refine your HubSpot setup, ensuring it continues to meet your evolving needs.
Conclusion
HubSpot is a powerful tool that can transform how your business handles marketing, sales, and customer service, but only if it’s set up correctly. As we’ve seen, the most common mistakes businesses make during implementation can significantly hinder your success. From jumping into setup without a strategy to neglecting ongoing training, these pitfalls can result in wasted resources, lost opportunities, and missed growth potential.
The good news? You don’t have to navigate these challenges alone. Partnering with an experienced agency like ScaleStation ensures that your HubSpot implementation is tailored to your unique business needs. We’ll help you avoid common mistakes, streamline your processes, and unlock the full potential of HubSpot to drive real results.
Don’t let your HubSpot setup become a source of frustration. Contact ScaleStation today, and let’s work together to create a seamless, efficient, and successful HubSpot experience for your business.
