By Bradford Coffey, Chief Strategy Officer at HubSpot
Companies today have become more customer-focused than ever.
But, companies often think of the customer experience as the sum of interactions with their front-office teams (marketing, sales, and customer service). At HubSpot we’ve gotten tripped up on this as well. The reality is that customer experience covers every part of the business. No matter how seamless your front office operations are, it doesn’t matter if the experience becomes uninformed and counterintuitive once the customer gets into payments and billing. More consequently, your front office teams can’t run their functions effectively without knowing the actual revenue-impacting outcome of their actions.
Your front office and back office data need to be connected with one another to build a true flywheel model. You might think of your “front office” and “back office” as two entirely different things, but to your customers — it’s all one logo.
Marketers create remarkable content and engaging web experiences for visitors. They pass their leads to sales, who lead personalized calls and answer every question with full context. But what happens after that? Where does the deal go from there?
For far too many companies, the process for actually completing a purchase is a “record scratch” moment.
All that goodwill and remarkable customer engagement gets lost in a series of redlining legal agreements, complicated invoices, and a lack of payment options. Communication breaks down, visibility into the process is left to endless email chains, and the systems are riddled with red tape and inflexibility. It’s rough and all too common.
It actually used to be this way in the consumer world, too.
For the first generation of big consumer brands to move online, the checkout process was left with IT as a “back office” function. They’d create a great website, get products listed — but the actual checkout process was a mess and difficult to navigate.
Amazon pounced on that opportunity by making checkout simple and easy, gaining massive adoption 20 years ago. Today, Shopify enables marketers for any B2C merchant to create an amazing buying experience. It’s a remarkable evolution for the industry. Growth teams at consumer companies, and a growing number of software companies, obsess over conversion rates, abandonment, and crafting that perfect buying experience. They can use the data from those purchases to iterate and improve on their overall marketing and sales efforts.
For B2B — the actual buying process (literally paying for the goods, software, or service) is too often left in the back office.
This prevents marketers and revenue operations teams from creating a remarkable user experience, and using purchasing data to drive future marketing, sales, and customer success projects.
At HubSpot, we believe that it is time for B2B to take a page out of the B2C playbook and make the purchasing process a remarkable, front-office driven, experience.
CRM + Accounting
Companies are realizing that it makes sense to unify all aspects of the customer experience. The SaaS industry has seen the customer value that was created when we bridged the first big silo gap — fusing email and CMS into marketing automation.
We think CRM + Accounting is going to be the next big area of value-add for customers. This ties to the trends we’ve seen in more companies trying to create this “single view of the customer” and the front-office back-office divide is the next big gap to close.
At INBOUND 2020, HubSpot took a strategic step in creating a more frictionless customer experience by launching an all new accounting extension that powers the integration of your front and back office data.
The new accounting extension lays the foundation for a powerful and impactful connection between front office and back office data. With it, you can create invoices from your accounting system directly within HubSpot, or leverage revenue data to drive strategic decisions on what segments you’ll invest in marketing or targeting with sales next using HubSpot’s custom attribution reporting. Using new invoice deal properties, you can even set up workflow automation that nudges anyone with an invoice a day past-due, or send a celebratory Slack message to your sales team each time a payment is collected. And that’s just the beginning.
HubSpot’s new accounting extension API is designed specifically to integrate your CRM and accounting platforms and unlock incredible insights and capabilities. In fact, we feel so strongly about making this powerful connection possible that we started the work for you. You can get started today with our natively-built QuickBooks Online app, or join the open beta for our natively-built NetSuite app. In addition to our two native solutions, we’ve also partnered with Xero and Nubox to build integrations, too.
Customer choice is important to us. According to Blissfully, enterprise companies on average 288 SaaS tools to run their business. We’re making it as easy as possible to make HubSpot your center of gravity, while giving you the freedom and flexibility to build the rest of your tech stack however you want.
And, if you’re a developer or a company in need of a custom solution, the accounting extension API is open and ready for you to use it and build remarkable solutions for your company.
You can learn more about the all-new accounting extension here.
