By Alison Elworthy, SVP of Customer Success at HubSpot
When I joined HubSpot’s Customer Success team back in 2017, I was focused on scaling the services that we offer to our customers. While we experienced growing pains in our pursuit of helping more customers faster, we did our best to provide an exceptional customer onboarding experience. But, internally, we understood that a one-size-fits-all Services model wouldn’t work for HubSpot’s long-term growth, and it wasn’t the right move to help our customers grow better.
Our onboarding and professional services needed to be tailored to our customers’ most important priorities.
For example, we could have two separate Marketing Hub customers purchase HubSpot with completely different goals. One customer might want to focus on improving quality lead generation, while the other might want to automate their entire marketing process. If each customer sees success differently, we should provide unique paths to their goals through onboarding.
Today, I’m excited to announce that we’ve changed our services model for our customers to an objectives-based, goal-oriented onboarding journey.
How are we doing this?
We’ve done away with the one-size-fits-all model and moved to a personalized, goal-oriented model to help our customers grow with HubSpot. Our customers’ priorities will become our priorities during onboarding, and the process of discovering what’s most important will start with the first interaction with our customer, which is typically the sales call.
Our team of HubSpot experts will use the insights gleaned from those first interactions to tailor the onboarding process to each customer’s unique needs. We’ve mirrored that shift in our own internal structure by, among other things, creating more collaboration opportunities between our sales and services teams.
Together, these changes will result in tangible improvements to the onboarding experience. Now, customers can expect:
- Personalized onboarding specific to their goals, skipping the unnecessary steps and going straight to what will help them reach their most important goals faster.
- Never feeling abandoned or lost in the software since they’ll be paired with a HubSpot expert who will make sure they see success on HubSpot as quickly as possible. Their HubSpot expert will not only provide a clear roadmap but also be there to answer any questions they may have along the way.
- Not worrying about missing out on important setup procedures, especially when they’re setting up integrations in HubSpot. The HubSpot expert gives customers access to deep knowledge in HubSpot so they can adapt the tools to their company’s processes.
We didn’t make this decision in a vacuum — we’ve seen first hand how much customers appreciate a personalized onboarding approach. Here are a few examples of the feedback that we’ve received so far:
“With any vendor, your fear is if it will actually work the way it is being presented to you. About two weeks into our onboarding process — from migrating our website over to learning all the other tools the system has to offer — we realized quickly that HubSpot Services met all our expectations. Coming from little website development experience, I was able to adapt and learn the system quickly. Looking back a few months later, we are managing the website in-house, directed those resources to other revenue-generating initiatives, and discovering all the other ways we can leverage the system efficiently.” — Michael Core, Director of Marketing and Practice Management, Bleakley Financial Group
“When Wai Yan came onboard, she was quick to pick up the internal challenges we were facing and gave recommendations on areas to focus on to get the sales reps to buy-in to HubSpot. She was attentive to the needs of our sales team and offered solutions to help them achieve their goals. The onboarding for reports were particularly challenging but Wai Yan was patient in helping us piece it together. Our colleagues now find that HubSpot is easy to use as it syncs with their emails. By using a proper CRM tool they discovered it helps them keep close tabs of their journey with their customers and understanding that by adopting sales best practices they can work more effectively.” — Sylvia Seah, Marketing Manager, Cyberlogitec Global
“James was amazing. He was one of the best partners I’ve ever worked with on a website migration/implementation and technical service delivery. His efforts to ensure we were completely taken care went above and beyond my expectations. He executed the technical requirements of our service request expertly and did an excellent job communicating with our team to ensure everything was published smoothly. I can’t thank him enough for all he did for us.” — Steven Cutbirth, Director of Marketing, The Karis Group
“We were anxious about getting started and worried that we wouldn’t see a return on our investment in HubSpot. Our HubSpot Implementation Specialist, Jimmy Wang, overcame our concerns through our regular onboarding meetings. Jimmy coached us through the onboarding process, answered our implementation questions through recorded, on-screen demonstrations, worked with our external marketing agency and gave us direct links to HubSpot material and helpdesk resources to help us on our journey…We’ve mastered the basics, we’re making more informed marketing decisions and we’re looking forward to finding more ways to reach new clients in the future using HubSpot.” — Andrea Taylor, Operations Manager, BusinessHub
We’re excited to roll out this new model to help more of our customers see value from HubSpot, faster. I personally can’t wait to see the impact of this implementation on our customers’ businesses, since our customers’ success is our success, too.
Learn more about HubSpot Services here.
