Success in the manufacturing industry, especially in the B2B space, relies on solid customer relationships. Sales, marketing and customer support ideally work together seamlessly to provide a top-notch, end-to-end customer experience.
In this post, we’ll cover the reasons why HubSpot for manufacturing companies can help you optimize customer relationships and help your sales, marketing and customer service teams work smarter, not harder.
HubSpot is a cloud-based software platform designed to automate your maufacturing company’s sales, marketing and customer service tasks. By consolidating your data in one place, HubSpot gives companies “one version of truth” that people throughout the organization can use to better nurture leads and provide deeper business insights.
HubSpot is often categorized as a customer relationship management (CRM) system, but it’s so much more than that. By offering different “hubs” to serve various departments, each with their own set of tools, it’s a platform nearly everyone within the company can use. Plus, the integrations with social media, third-party apps and between hubs lets you see every interaction leads and customers have with you, all within a single platform.
HubSpot helps companies use this data well with robust reporting features that offer deep insights and customizable dashboards to see which tactics are working and which are not.
There are plenty of benefits to using HubSpot for manufacturing sales tasks, including an easy-to-use interface and well-designed contact management system. Here are other advantages:
Manufacturing often has a long sales cycle, making it difficult to predict future revenue and track deals. The HubSpot Deals tool aims to solve those challenges. Once a deal is created, you can document how much the potential sale will bring in, name all the contacts, link to quotes and contracts, and associate different actions with the deal record. Using the deal pipeline, you can customize the dashboard to match your specific needs.
Everyone hates the round-robin of printing and scanning quotes and contracts. The HubSpot Quotes tool simplifies collecting payments with options to turn on payment collection when generating a quote, allowing customers to pay with a credit card after receiving the quote. By designating signers and countersigns within the quote tool, you can collect legally binding electronic signatures–say good-bye to all that printing and scanning!
A good CRM keeps track of prospects, leads and customers, but a great CRM keeps track of employee tasks as well. Whether your manufacturing sales team has two people or 20, HubSpot's task function helps you stay organized. With it, you can assign tasks to yourself or the team, setting due dates, priorities, adding notes and more. The filtering options make it easy to toggle between due date, owner and priority views to quickly see what needs to be done next and who’s charged with doing it.
Beyond the contact management and sales pipeline capabilities, there are a number of tools within Sales Hub that will save your sales team considerable time. Email templates available in apps like Outlook save you countless hours writing lead nurturing emails. Automation functions like snippets provide shortcuts for reusing boilerplate style copy and common language and messages.
Whether your company uses a more traditional B2B sales style or has created its own manufacturing sales process, HubSpot offers enough customization to allow all kinds of manufacturing companies to make it their own.
“Manufacturing marketing” is a broad term, but for the purposes of this post, we’re referring to the promotion of B2B products, either components or products, that will be sold wholesale to retailers.
Companies that fully integrate marketing into the CRM and sales process gain deeper insights that ultimately give them a competitive advantage. (Read, Why Go HubSpot? 8 Reasons to Make the Switch.)
How so?
It’s all about connecting the dots. When marketing and sales data work together, it not only shows which marketing activities attract leads, companies can also connect specific marketing efforts to closed deals to calculate ROI. HubSpot helps make this data connection, as well as provide tools that make marketing efforts more efficient.
Marketing is about generating leads, so HubSpot created the Campaigns tool to help companies stay laser focused on these efforts. It can pull customer and contact data from multiple sources for more targeted campaigns. From there, marketing teams can build gated content, forms, CTAs, landing pages, email templates and workflows, all connected to the same campaign.
Going a step further, HubSpot offers “smart” lead gen options to further segment and better target leads, especially those who are returning for the third, fourth or fifth time. These smart CTAs and landing pages can customize the kind of content the lead sees based on number of previous visits, location, device, lifecycle stage and more.
Many manufacturing companies run lean. That means small marketing departments that are often very busy. Automation can be a game changer for manufacturing marketers, saving countless hours previously spent on rote tasks or triggering actions.Building beautiful emails is a breeze with drag-and-drop options, and using a pre-built or custom designed template will save even more time. You can use these templates to build out automated email workflows for a wide range of campaigns and lead nurturing efforts, from promoting specials to generating hype for events.
If your company is active on social media, you can also use the bulk upload for social media posts automation feature. Simply draft the social posts within a spreadsheet and upload to the bulk scheduling tool, saving hours of time spent cutting and pasting.
Creating SEO content on your website and blog is much easier with HubSpot’s blog and webpage builder. It comes with built-in integrations with scheduling apps for booking demos and calls. Your sales team will thank you for ending the vicious circle of emailing suggested dates and times back and forth!
In addition, integrating Google Search Console with HubSpot provides metrics from Google, including total impressions, average position, and click through rate so you know exactly where your content ranks in Google's search results.
HubSpot's advertising manager provides comprehensive flywheel reporting, giving you insights into the leads and ROI produced by each ad. And with attribution, you can learn how your advertising is performing and spend your budget on what's actually working.
Customer service is a key element of inbound marketing, helping you achieve that final cycle in the flywheel: delight. This is true for all industries, but particularly so in manufacturing marketing. It’s hard to build lasting relationships without delighting your customers with a positive, end-to-end experience.
Here’s how HubSpot Service Hub can help your company delight your customers.
When your customers need support, they want answers fast. To do this, your company must have enough customer service reps available and you need to get the call to a person with the right level of expertise. HubSpot’s automation helps you do that with automated ticket management, a streamlined support process that lets you quickly prioritize tickets and use automation for assigning tasks and escalation.
With the customer portal, customers can communicate with support personnel easily and securely. Support teams can automate repetitive tasks, build HubSpot workflows, and share knowledge base articles with customers, freeing up their time to focus on high-impact tasks–and customers’ time too.
HubSpot understands that many manufacturing companies have legacy software or have long used SaaS offerings that they’d like to continue using, at least for some sales, marketing and support activities. HubSpot makes it possible to integrate with common manufacturing and project management platforms like JIRA to increase accuracy and efficiency.
HubSpot helps companies not only delight customers but measure customer loyalty as well. It offers a built in net promoter score (NPS), customer effort score (CES), and customer satisfaction (CSAT) questionnaires to give you a better idea of what customers are thinking throughout the sales and customer support process. These data-driven tools will help your company make better decisions, improve retention, and strengthen relationships.
Reporting opens the door to truly optimizing your operations and truly realizing efficiencies. Without data on your sales, marketing and customer service operations, it’s difficult to truly quantify what tactics work best.
HubSpot’s customized reports support your data-driven decisions. Not only can you build dashboards to show progress toward reaching goals, you can also add data using custom objects or integrate valuable applications for more extensive reporting capabilities.
Clients we work with really love the dashboard builder, allowing them to tell a story about the company using data. Managers can build a dashboard to help employees reach goals or for showing executive leadership the effectiveness of a campaign.These reports and dashboards can be public or private, or restricted to specific individuals and teams, to gain more control over your data and adhere to best practices. You can also maintain your preferred dashboard view regardless of how many team members have access to it.
When your company adds a new piece of equipment, it helps to have a few people on call who know how to use it really well. Same goes for adopting a SaaS platform like HubSpot. Working with a HubSpot partner gives you a team of people skilled at setting up and using the HubSpot tools. They can look at your goals and create a HubSpot strategy that gets you there faster, utilizing the tools and automation within the platform.
Precision Marketing Group, a Diamond Certified Agency Partner, has worked with a number of manufacturing clients, making us a great agency for manufacturing and B2B marketing. If you’d like to learn more about how PMG has helped manufacturing companies excel, reach out!