With HubSpot’s expanding capabilities and advanced feature set, the tools are becoming more and more powerful. However, if you don’t have the expertise to leverage the new capabilities, your company isn’t going to see the full value that HubSpot delivers.
This also means your marketing, sales and customer service initiatives could be underperforming because you’re not leveraging the tools to their potential.
This calls for making some changes, and one of those changes could be to start using a HubSpot admin person to take full advantage of your investment in HubSpot.
This type of person already exists in the Salesforce world. In fact, most companies running Salesforce employ an in-house admin or contract with a company like Square 2 for an outside resource.
Here’s why you should consider a similar setup if you’re on HubSpot.
There are 20 solid reasons a HubSpot admin could add significant value to your company and contribute to greater lead generation, improved sales execution and a better customer service experience.
- Cost Savings: It’s going to be cheaper to hire a HubSpot admin from an agency than to make a direct hire. Through the agency, you won’t have to pay for taxes, benefits and office space or need to provide them with equipment. In addition, you can have a partial person with an agency as opposed to having someone partially dedicated to HubSpot but working on competing priorities.
- Expertise: HubSpot experts who work for agencies have extensive experience with companies in varying industries. They’ve seen many issues, use cases and situations that can help them develop creative and efficient solutions to your HubSpot needs. Instead of figuring it out for the first time, they use past experiences to quickly diagnose and solve your challenges.
- Scalability: Agencies can easily scale up or down based on your needs, making them flexible for growth or cost-cutting. If you need a resource for 20 hours a month, no worries. If you need to increase that for a month or two while you tackle a lead-scoring project, no worries. If you need to reduce the time because you have other priorities or don’t need any help, agencies should be able to scale up and down to support you.
- Diverse Skillsets: While hiring in-house gives you control, it also limits your capabilities to the skill sets of the person you hire. Agencies typically have a team of people with diverse skill sets who can come in and out of your project team. If you want to add an SMS integration to your HubSpot, no need to worry about it, because someone at the agency likely did this before and can help get your integration done quickly, affordably and efficiently.
- Faster Deployment: Agencies can onboard quickly, reducing downtime compared to hiring and training an in-house resource. One of the reasons for this is process, documentation and ongoing optimization. Agencies that regularly deploy, configure and train companies on HubSpot bring their own process to the table. They bring their own documentation, and they’ve been optimizing this process over time. While you’d be doing it for the first time or maybe the second time, the team you’d hire from an agency could be doing this for the 100th time.
- No Recruitment Hassles: Hiring HubSpot expertise is challenging today. While there are more HubSpot specialists on the market, they are in demand. More importantly, with an agency you gain access to your HubSpot team quickly, instead of the time it takes to run your standard hiring process. You get someone working in days instead of months.
- Reduced Turnover Risk: Hiring in-house has its own risks. Yes, you control the resource, but that resource can leave whenever and for whatever reason. Agencies won’t leave your company, ensuring continuity of service. Even if you are assigned a new team member, the tribal knowledge of your company, plans and HubSpot instance remain with the agency, not the person.
- Access to Tools: The top-tier agencies often have access to premium HubSpot tools and other software. They are often involved in betas, both public and private, so they have knowledge of HubSpot features that the general public might not have. This means they can do things in the tool that you might not be able to do. They can also work with HubSpot to gain access to features and tools that your company might need to solve a specific use case or issue.
- Focus on Core Competencies: This is a common comment from our clients: “I don’t want to be a HubSpot expert, I want to be an expert at my company’s marketing programs.” Using an agency allows you to focus on what you do well and let the agency deliver what they do well. The combination of focus and expertise can be very powerful.
- Industry Insights: Agencies often have insights into industry trends and best practices from working with various clients. Better yet, some agencies have industry-specific solutions related to HubSpot. At Square 2, we have a lot of manufacturing and professional services clients, and we offer them advanced configuration expertise that helps us get their HubSpot portals spun up and working faster than agencies without this industry expertise.
- Competitive Advantage: HubSpot can be a competitive advantage if used correctly. By using an agency to help you with HubSpot, you can lean into this advantage and even stay ahead of competitors that also use HubSpot.
- Customization: HubSpot is different for every single company we work with. Customizing it to how you want it to work is key to getting full value. Agencies can do almost anything you want (within the technical architecture of the product) and, in a lot of cases, have already done significant customization work. What might take your team six months could take an agency with the right experience six weeks or even six days.
- 24/7 Support: HubSpot isn’t the kind of system that often produces an emergency at 10 p.m. However, things can break and require emergency attention. If you have the right type of service with your agency, they can have people on call to make fixes or even add important configurations that need to get done quickly.
- Help To Uncover Insights: HubSpot produces a ton of data, but that data is worthless if you can’t use it to uncover insights that then inform your action plans. Uncovering these insights takes a lot of experience, and a HubSpot partner can leverage that experience to help you find these nuggets and turn them into improved results.
- Objectivity: External agencies provide an unbiased perspective on your HubSpot strategies. It’s easy to get caught up in your own paradigms, and it’s hard to look at challenges through different lenses. HubSpot partners bring the experiences of working with other companies to help creatively, efficiently and affordably solve your unique challenges. Sometimes just asking a partner to talk about your issues is enough to get you thinking differently.
- Performance Tracking: Not everyone wants to be held accountable for metrics. However, agencies often provide detailed reports and analytics to measure the success of your HubSpot efforts. The best agencies are comfortable setting goals and working toward them with you. Look for this when you talk with prospective agency partners.
- Compliance Expertise: Today, marketing comes with more regulations and privacy concerns. You don’t have to be a compliance expert when you work with an agency. Agencies stay up to date with data privacy regulations to help ensure compliance.
- Integration Specialists: Many HubSpot companies need some form of integration. Instead of figuring this out on your own, using an agency with integration experience can make this part of the configuration faster and more efficient.
- A/B Testing: So much of marketing today is testing, experimenting and trying new approaches. Agencies bring a standardized process and framework to the A/B testing needed and can offer guidance around how to run experiments that produce results you can use. The faster and more efficiently you cycle around these tests, the faster you’ll get to optimized program performance.
- Results Focused: Internal team members aren’t usually worried about being fired if their recommendations don’t pan out. But agencies live and die on the success of their work. Agencies are measured based on results, and many of the best agencies are designed to deliver results quickly.
A lot goes into picking an agency. You have many to choose from, and many of them look and sound similar. Pay close attention to the sales process. Who are you working with? Who did you get to meet? How good are they at listening to your challenges and recommending specific solutions?
Before choosing an agency, be sure to evaluate their track record, client testimonials and understanding of your industry. This will help ensure a successful partnership.