Connecting Go-to-Market Strategies with HubSpot: Insights from the Happy Customers Festival

At Arrows, we believe in the power of connected tools to transform customer experiences. That's why we hosted the Happy Customers Festival, bringing together HubSpot experts and best-in-class apps to explore how businesses can create seamless, effective go-to-market processes using HubSpot's ecosystem.

In this half-day event, we dove into how integrating marketing, sales, and customer success within a single platform can drive better outcomes and create truly delightful customer experiences.

HubSpot's Connected Platform

Yamini Rangan, CEO of HubSpot, opened the event by discussing the company's strategic evolution. She emphasized how HubSpot has transformed from a single-purpose marketing tool back in 2006 to a comprehensive ecosystem that supports businesses throughout the entire customer lifecycle.

In SaaS, a "platform" refers to a foundational system that allows other applications to be built on top of it and integrate seamlessly. This approach creates a network effect, where each additional app or integration makes the entire ecosystem more valuable for its users. For businesses, this means having a central hub that can adapt and scale with their needs, rather than juggling multiple disconnected tools.

Yamini explained where they're at now in the platform transformation:

"In HubSpot's journey, we've gone from an app to a suite to a platform, and I would say that we're still early innings of the full platform."

HubSpot's shift to a platform ecosystem is significant because it allows businesses to:

• Centralize their data and operations in one place
• Choose from a wide range of specialized tools that work together seamlessly
• Avoid the inefficiencies and data silos that come with using multiple disconnected tools

HubSpot's platform consists of three key components:

• Engagement Hubs: These include Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, and Service Hub, all the tools you're probably already familiar with. They allow teams to interact with customers across various touchpoints in the lifecycle.
• Smart CRM: This serves as the central nervous system of HubSpot, unifying customer data from all interactions and tools.
• Ecosystem: A network of solution partners, app partners, and community resources that extend HubSpot's native capabilities.

HubSpot's evolution into a platform has really transformed it into the foundation of many businesses' tech stacks. This shift enables companies to build their entire customer-facing operations around a single, integrated system, rather than piecing together dozens of disparate tools.

Benefits of HubSpot's Platform Approach

HubSpot's connected platform addresses several critical challenges faced by many B2B SaaS teams. By integrating all the aspects of customer interaction into one single platform, HubSpot offers significant advantages:

Data Centralization

HubSpot serves as a single source of truth for customer data. This centralization eliminates the need for multiple databases and reduces the risk of inconsistent or outdated information. For example, when a prospect attends a webinar, their engagement data automatically updates their contact record, informing both marketing and sales teams simultaneously.

Cross-Functional Visibility

All teams - marketing, sales, support, and customer success - access the same customer information. This shared view ensures consistent messaging and seamless handoffs between departments. When a sales rep closes a deal, the customer success team can immediately see the entire history of the account, including past interactions and specific pain points addressed during the sales process.

Automation at Scale

HubSpot's workflow tools allow businesses to automate repetitive tasks across the entire customer journey. This automation isn't limited to simple tasks; it can orchestrate complex, multi-step processes. For instance, a single customer action could trigger a series of events: updating their lead status, notifying relevant team members, and initiating a personalized email sequence.

Integrated Analytics

With data from all customer interactions in one place, businesses can gain deeper insights into their overall performance. This holistic view allows companies to identify trends and opportunities that might be missed when analyzing data from separate systems. For example, you could correlate customer support tickets with specific marketing campaigns or product features, providing invaluable feedback for product development and marketing strategies.

Extensibility

HubSpot's app marketplace allows businesses to add specialized functionality while maintaining a single source of truth for customer data. This means companies can choose best-in-class tools for specific functions (like Arrows for customer onboarding) without sacrificing the benefits of an integrated system. These apps can read from and write to the central HubSpot database, ensuring that all customer interactions are captured and accessible across the platform.

Scalability

As businesses grow, their needs evolve. HubSpot's platform approach allows companies to start with basic functionality and gradually add more sophisticated tools and processes as they scale. This flexibility means businesses don't have to rip and replace their entire system as they grow; instead, they can continually enhance their existing setup.

Customer Experience

Perhaps the most significant benefit is the impact on customer experience. When all customer-facing teams have access to the same, up-to-date information in one platform, they can provide more personalized, relevant interactions. This consistency builds trust and satisfaction, leading to stronger customer relationships and increased loyalty.

HubSpot Throughout the Customer Journey

The festival showed how HubSpot and its partner integrations enhance each stage of the customer journey:

Marketing in HubSpot

The marketing session focused on leveraging partner data and webinar engagement to create more targeted, effective campaigns within the HubSpot ecosystem.

Reveal covered how their integration allows marketers to identify overlapping customer bases with partners. This enables more effective co-marketing efforts by pinpointing shared audiences and potential collaboration opportunities. Marketers can use this data to create targeted campaigns that leverage the combined reach and credibility of multiple brands.

Wistia showcased their webinar and video engagement tracking capabilities within HubSpot. Their integration provides detailed insights into how viewers interact with video content, including which sections are most engaging and where viewers drop off. This data syncs to HubSpot, allowing for highly targeted follow-up campaigns based on viewing behavior. Marketers can use this information to create more effective video content and nurture leads based on demonstrated interests.

This session highlighted how integrating these tools with HubSpot allows marketers to:

• Identify high-intent leads based on partner relationships and video engagement
• Create more targeted, collaborative marketing campaigns
• Provide sales teams with detailed engagement data for better conversations

These integrations demonstrate how HubSpot's platform approach enables marketers to gain deeper insights into customer behavior and preferences, leading to more personalized and effective marketing strategies.

Sales in HubSpot

The sales session demonstrated how integrating call data, conversation intelligence, and document management within HubSpot creates a more efficient sales process.

Aircall showed how their integration allows sales reps to make calls directly from HubSpot. The tool automatically logs call data and uses tags to trigger HubSpot workflows. This automation reduces manual data entry and ensures critical information is captured, streamlining the sales process and improving data accuracy.

Grain presented their AI-powered call analysis and meeting recording tool that integrates with HubSpot. Grain transcribes and analyzes sales calls in real-time, identifying key moments such as pain points or buying intent. These insights are automatically logged in HubSpot, allowing sales reps to quickly review important call details. The integration also enables sales managers to more effectively coach their teams by providing easy access to call recordings and transcripts within HubSpot.

PandaDoc demonstrated their document creation and e-signature tool. With PandaDoc, sales reps can create proposals and contracts using HubSpot data, then automatically update deal information when documents are signed. This streamlines the document creation process and ensures that deal information in HubSpot remains current throughout the sales cycle.

This session highlighted how integrating these tools with HubSpot allows sales teams to:

• Automate call logging and follow-up tasks
• Collect AI-powered insights from sales conversations
• Streamline document creation and signing processes
• Maintain a more accurate and up-to-date CRM with less manual input

These integrations showcase how HubSpot's app ecosystem empowers sales teams to work more efficiently, make data-driven decisions, and provide a more seamless experience for potential customers throughout the sales process.

Customer Success in HubSpot

The customer success session highlighted HubSpot's significant strides in supporting the entire customer lifecycle, showcasing their newly launched tools within Service Hub that cater specifically to customer success teams.

HubSpot unveiled their new customer health score feature, allowing teams to create customized health scores based on almost any data points within the platform (remember how powerful it is to have all your customer data in one place? 😉). They also introduced a new customer success workspace, giving CS teams a centralized view of their book of business with key customer data, health scores, and actionable insights in one place.

Complementing HubSpot's new offerings, the Arrows team shared how our customer onboarding tool integrates seamlessly with HubSpot. With Arrows, teams can create customized onboarding plans for each of their new customers directly within HubSpot. With our best-in-class integration, everyone in HubSpot has access to track customer progress and engagement throughout the onboarding process.

This session highlighted how HubSpot's new CS tools, along with integrated apps like Arrows, allow customer success teams to:

• Create personalized onboarding experiences that set the stage for long-term success
• Proactively identify at-risk customers using customizable health scores
• Automate follow-ups and interventions based on customer health
• Streamline CS workflows with a dedicated customer success workspace

The combination of HubSpot's native CS tools and integrated partner apps like Arrows demonstrates HubSpot growing capability to support the entire customer lifecycle.

What Makes a Best-in-Class HubSpot App

The Happy Customers Festival also highlighted what distinguishes top-tier apps within HubSpot's ecosystem, reinforcing the theme of seamless integration and enhanced customer experience.

Key characteristics of these standout apps include:

Deep Integration

Best-in-class apps don't just extract data from HubSpot; they contribute valuable information back into the platform. This two-way data flow enriches the overall customer view and enhances the utility of HubSpot as the source of truth.

Workflow Automation

Top apps in the ecosystem leverage HubSpot's automation capabilities, allowing users to create powerful, cross-tool workflows that save time and reduce manual errors.

Contextual Insights

Leading apps provide actionable insights directly within the HubSpot UI, allowing team members to make informed decisions without switching between multiple tools.

Daniel Zarick, CEO of Arrows, emphasized the importance of meeting customers where they are:

"At Arrows, we aim to meet our customers where they already work—in their CRM. Our goal is to connect all the necessary tools and processes to make their experience successful."

This philosophy of seamless integration and CRM-centric design is at the heart of what makes an app truly stand out in HubSpot's ecosystem.

Looking Ahead

As hosts of the Happy Customers Festival, we're excited about the future of HubSpot as a connected platform. The event showcased how HubSpot's ecosystem, including integrated tools like Arrows, can drive better outcomes for businesses and their customers. By providing a unified view of the customer journey and enabling more personalized interactions at every stage, companies leveraging HubSpot and its partner integrations are well-positioned to create seamless, effective go-to-market processes.

As we continue to develop Arrows within the HubSpot ecosystem, we always aim to contribute to this vision of a truly connected customer experience.

You can find each of the session recordings from the Happy Customers Festival at ilovehappycustomers.com 💘