Fair warning, my dear friends: This is a longer blog post. The reason? We are explaining how we've taken a series of sales tools insideHubSpot CRM and turned it into a support team powerhouse, driving our template and website support into profits we have never seen before. That being said... enjoy :)
Sales enablement is so easy to think of as a solution simply for closing deals and informing the sales team of potential clients to keep in close contact. However, we think of sales enablement as something completely different - especially when discussing the tools inside HubSpot, like Sales Pro and the CRM.
We are quite active in the HubSpot Marketplace, offering free templates and paid templates alike to the HubSpot family of users. We receive roughly a little over 500 template transactions every single month from the HubSpot Marketplace. Oftentimes, people will have support questions or requests to add, change, or remove various features from templates.
Our issue was that the support requests were coming in at large intervals once we started gaining traction. We literally had no way to track the requests that were coming in, because they were either just form responses or general emails. We had no formal approach to our process, and we could not see what was happening.
Sometimes our CEO would get the request for help; sometimes our developers would. Heck, even our marketers who sent out a marketing email would get a response asking for help with a specific template. The real kicker here - and why we decided it was time to look for another solution - was that we were getting a fair amount of up-sells from our templates into custom development work. We had no way to keep track of any of this. So let's recap:
These were the issues that were bugging us the most. Since we have turned support requests into new revenue (about $50,000 in 2016 thus far), we knew it was important for us to formalize this approach. Of course, there are tons of software options to choose from for this, like Zendesk. However, we didn't want to pay for any other 3rd parties, and we didn't want to take the time to learn a new software.
We started asking ourselves, "why pay thousands of dollars for another software? Can we 'hack' our way through it with our current solutions inside HubSpot?" And that's exactly what we set out to do.
We decided to tackle the CRM as our tool of choice, because we knew how robust the features were. It essentially had the core functionality of what we were looking for - a pipeline we could easily move tickets (deals) through, keeping track of every note and conversation, and easily monitoring whether or not we were up-selling into additional services.
Here's how our system works.
...And that's when the real magic starts to happen.
What happens after that form is submitted? We had quite a lot of questions internally to figure out what was crucial to solve without throwing tons of billable hours into processing. We also wanted to be mindful of getting an actual response time as low as possible.
We track all notes internally for each support item we receive, as well as the client's response. Each deal has an extensive log of correspondence.
Why is that helpful? Let's say support rep A is on vacation and has been working with an ongoing case. Now support rep B can easily get caught up in a matter of minutes and take over the case right away. The client loses no sleep.
And yes... The names were changed in the screenshots to protect the identities of our clients. So, we just chose Presidents and notable historical figures. Why not, right? Here's the deal details of the one and only Harold Truman, who apparently has been struggling with getting Symphony to cooperate :)
Our goal is to be a great resource for our clients and be as helpful as possible - however, we have to be mindful of being able to up-sell when the time is right. Whether we are up-selling to a different service or just additional development work; it's the job of our support team to make sure if the opportunity is there they strike while the iron is hot.
We categorize the deal stages as follows:
Not only have we created an entirely new use for the CRM, but we did it through the incorporation of several other HubSpot tools, like forms, workflows, landing pages, lists, and emails. To take it a step further, we wanted to solve yet another problem. How do we analyze this pipeline? It's quite simple, actually. The Reports Add-On.
We can now analyze our process down to the smallest details to help us improve our strategy. We can see:
Right out of the gate, we experienced something amazing. We were able to go from not knowing our average response time, to a day-time average of 15 minutes. Just kind of going with the flow of responding to support requests as they came in vs. knowing exactly when they come in and who should be notified has been critical for our team.
We've been able to track that about 15% of the support requests that come through end up purchasing something from us. What a great place to start! Next we have to learn and train our team to start increasing that number over time.