Matt Bolian ⚡’s Post

One of my customers was about to rip out HubSpot for Salesforce but they chose not to. Why? First let’s highlight their frustrations: “It’s hard to keep track of our deals and forecast accurately” “We were a startup when we launched and have never had our sales & marketing process configured” “We have too many duplicate contacts clogging up the database hindering our marketing activities” “The quality of our data is terrible - every user is an admin and they input data differently” “We just don’t have the reports we need and have multiple pipelines” “We don’t know how much our reps are using it” But they purchased HubSpots premium tools 2 years ago so why are there problems today? A few reasons… 1. They activated HubSpot when they were a small startup company which meant they signed up without onboarding & implementation. 2. As they grew, their processes evolved and various colleagues tried adapting the CRM (lots of trial and error) 3. Despite having a powerful platform they didn’t configure it in a way that would let them scale and it got worse over time. 4. Every user being an admin meant there were no restrictions and a free reign to modify the system in any way they wanted. Sounds like an absolute nightmare. Luckily the CRO agreed to a call with us and we were able to highlight the root-causes and solutions to overcome. The CRO then changed their mind (thanks to the marketing team for resisting the switch). Some key learnings: 1. HubSpot is a modular and highly configurable platform, but it wasn’t optimized for the business. 2. Onboarding and implementation is critical especially if the company is scaling. As companies grow, the processes change and a CRM needs to adapt to those changes to keep things running smoothly. 3. Just because a software is easy to use, doesn’t always mean anyone can configure it properly. To optimize a CRM it has to revolve around your customers and employees, and someone needs to own it. 4. User permissions are an essential part of maintaining data quality. Data inputs need to be standardized to maintain accurate reporting. Data quality management can be done manually or automatically with our Operations Hub. 5. Sales Hub has heaps of standard reports and dashboard and are also highly configurable. Ultimately the CRO thought that HubSpot was just a marketing tool and lacked the sales capabilities. Little did they know our Sales Hub can do so much more and they were only scratching the surface. There’s always at least one or two things we hate about our CRM. What do you hate about yours?

You’re on borrowed time if all you do is HubSpot implementations. Why? Because HubSpot is relentless in its mission to simplify and accelerate “getting started fast” and “time to value.” This isn’t just a feature—it’s their competitive edge. They’ll build over “quick onboarding offers” and handle HubSpot-only onboarding better than anyone else. So what’s left for you? Plenty - Here are your options: 1) Vertical-Specific Expertise Stop being generic. Dive deep into the unique problems of a specific industry. Know their pain points better than they do. 2) Solve for a Role, Not a Tool What keeps a CRO awake at night? It’s not just CRM issues—it’s hiring sales teams, forecasting, training, and beyond. Same with CFOs, CEOs, or CMOs. Solve their problems, not just a software’s. 3) Go Upmarket Forget basic CRM implementation. Upmarket businesses need Digital Transformation. That’s deeper, more technical, and requires elite project management skills. 4) Expand Your Offerings Enablement, Adoption, Intent-based Outbound, AI Transformation—these are the services shaping the future. Go where the puck is headed, not where it’s been. 5) Deliver ROI Beyond CRM Build offerings that directly impact your clients’ bottom line—training programs, strategy consulting, or even operational enablement for scaling teams. 6) Own the Full Lifecycle Help clients move from onboarding to full adoption, from adoption to transformation, and from transformation to scaling. Own the process end-to-end. This is why Supered⚡ exists. We don’t just enhance your HubSpot offerings—we give you the tools to make this pivot. To expand. To evolve. To win. We exist to help partners make that transition. It’s what we think about it’s how we organize it’s how we build it’s who we are. it’s why we do month-to-month. It’s why we’re building training programs (announcement coming soon). And the good news? HubSpot is growing. Like REALLY Fast. And there has never been a better time to be part of this ecosystem. The best time to be building is now. Are the outcomes guaranteed? No. We’re going to have to make bets. Bets with real risk—and the potential for real rewards. The Hubolution is here. We got this. You got this. Let’s get to building stay awesome, And never, EVER stop believing -matt

💬 "I want to increase my conversion rate." Who doesn’t, right? But how do we pinpoint exactly which part of the sales process needs improvement? Here's a simplified approach: 1️⃣ Start with a CRM: Whether it's HubSpot, Pipedrive, Nutshell, or even Excel, you'll need a place to track everything. 2️⃣ Define your stages: Pro tip – your sales stages should align with the buyer’s journey. These are the steps your prospects take to become customers. 3️⃣ Capture key data: Think about details like New vs. Existing Customers, Product Type, Pain Points, or Source. 📊 With a tool like HubSpot, you'll be able to spot bottlenecks in your sales process at a glance. 🔍 But what if you need to dig deeper? Using the data captured throughout the sales process, you can diagnose issues more precisely. For example, let’s say stage 3 is where the bottleneck is. On further investigation, you realize it's happening only when selling to existing customers for a specific product type. Now, you know exactly what is needed to be fixed. 💡 In case you didn’t already know, RevPartners has a Guided Onboarding product to guide you on getting your HubSpot instance set up with best practices.

Setting up a CRM can seem like a daunting task. The process was a heck of a challenge the first time we did it for iCG Pay. Boy was it a long LONG LOOOONG 2 quarters when we were constantly iterating and learning about HubSpot systems from scratch. Luckily, HubSpot support was a delight to work with, and we learned a lot in the process. So much so that when we launched Market Me More, we considered offering HubSpot Setup and Optimization services to our clients as the first service. After several months of iteration and learning, we can now help others go live and make the most of a powerful system like HubSpot in no time. Check out these mistakes we made and make sure you avoid them https://hubs.ly/Q02SkP_l0

One thing about setting up a CRM the right way is you can predict a customer's need, even before they know it! Dive deep into the CRM mistakes we made when setting up HubSpot so that you don't have to. Yes, we get real and vulnerable here. Reach out and we'll ensure your CRM is fully optimized to drive seamless customer experiences, boost your sales efficiency, and anticipate your clients' needs with precision. Let us turn your CRM into a powerful tool for growth, so you can focus on what matters most—building lasting relationships.

Your HubSpot portal is not forever. Yes, as in life, nothing is forever. Yesterday a HubSpot customer told us that he wanted to throw away his portal and start all over again (yes, we hear that a lot). As in life nothing is forever and as in relationships that are built day by day, you have to keep taking care of your CRM. 📣𝙔𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙃𝙪𝙗𝙎𝙥𝙤𝙩 𝙥𝙤𝙧𝙩𝙖𝙡 𝙞𝙨 𝙣𝙤𝙩 𝙨𝙤𝙢𝙚𝙩𝙝𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙤𝙣𝙗𝙤𝙖𝙧𝙙 𝙤𝙣𝙚 𝙙𝙖𝙮 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙛𝙤𝙧𝙜𝙚𝙩, 𝙣𝙚𝙫𝙚𝙧 𝙪𝙥𝙙𝙖𝙩𝙚 𝙖𝙜𝙖𝙞𝙣. If I were to ask you: Are you the same person today as you were at 20 years old? or the same boss from 1st day you started your business? Surely the answer is no. Then your business is also not the same as it was 2, 5, 10 or 20 years ago. 𝘈𝘯𝘥 𝘸𝘩𝘺 𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘏𝘶𝘣𝘚𝘱𝘰𝘵 𝘱𝘰𝘳𝘵𝘢𝘭 𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘺 𝘦𝘹𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘭𝘺 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘢𝘮𝘦? Think about you car, every now and then you take it to the mechanic, don't you? 𝙔𝙤𝙪 𝙨𝙝𝙤𝙪𝙡𝙙 𝙙𝙤 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙨𝙖𝙢𝙚 𝙬𝙞𝙩𝙝 𝙮𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙃𝙪𝙗𝙎𝙥𝙤𝙩 𝙥𝙤𝙧𝙩𝙖𝙡. Your business evolves, your customers evolve, and thank God (and Dharmesh and Brian Halligan) HubSpot evolves too (in fact it releases over 200 updates a year). 🔥𝐊𝐞𝐞𝐩𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐟𝐥𝐚𝐦𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐂𝐑𝐌 𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐢𝐬 𝐮𝐩 𝐭𝐨 𝐲𝐨𝐮, 𝐨𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐇𝐮𝐛𝐒𝐩𝐨𝐭 𝐬𝐮𝐩𝐞𝐫 𝐚𝐝𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐚𝐧𝐲. 👉Your HubSpot portal, the technology you use, must adapt to your business, your processes, your people. And it takes expertise to set it up and make it happen, I'm not going to lie to you, its not easy but it is possible. 🤷🏼♀️But it is the responsibility of your company to keep its CRM up to date. 𝘿𝙤𝙣'𝙩 𝙩𝙚𝙡𝙡 𝙢𝙚 𝙩𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝘾𝙍𝙈 𝙞𝙨 𝙣𝙤 𝙡𝙤𝙣𝙜𝙚𝙧 𝙪𝙨𝙚𝙛𝙪𝙡, 𝙞𝙩'𝙨 𝙣𝙤𝙩 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝘾𝙍𝙈'𝙨 𝙛𝙖𝙪𝙡𝙩, 𝙞𝙩'𝙨 𝙮𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙛𝙖𝙪𝙡𝙩 𝙛𝙤𝙧 𝙣𝙤𝙩 𝙩𝙖𝙠𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙘𝙖𝙧𝙚 𝙤𝙛 𝙞𝙩. ↪So start thinking about having someone taking care of your CRM, putting up to date for what your business need. T̲h̲i̲s̲ ̲s̲h̲o̲u̲l̲d̲ ̲b̲e̲ ̲p̲a̲r̲t̲ ̲o̲f̲ ̲y̲o̲u̲r̲ ̲a̲n̲n̲u̲a̲l̲ ̲b̲u̲d̲g̲e̲t̲ ̲t̲o̲o̲!̲ Don't say I didn't warn you. If you don't want to get frustrated with your HubSpot portal and in a few years have to start from scratch again, start now. You are on time. If you don't know how, let me know. #hubspot #hubspotsuperadmins #hubspottipsandtricks

Controversial? The best CRM for an agency → Hubspot (ditch Pipedrive, SF and others). When it comes to Hubspot alternatives, there’s nothing inherently bad about them. I’ve spoken to 100s of agency & B2B founders - they've all had Pipedrive, Active Campaign, Salesforce, or other CRMs in place. But, what's the one common denominator for agencies that scaled like crazy? Hubspot. Unlike most other CRMs, it's relatively easy to have a single view of your customer, all in one place. This breeds scale. It can be a lot to set up but: - You’ll have a single source of truth across your whole business - Sales, AMs, and Marketers will know exactly how they’re faring vs KPIs - The whole business will be crystal clear on exactly what to focus on and what not to focus on - You’ll no longer be in the dark about how your sales, marketing and retention efforts are going Here are some things I suggest to make the most of it: 1. Get a 3rd party consultant or agency to assist with implementation ↪ Don’t do it yourself. 99% of agencies who try this fail miserably. ↪ And they need a painful amount of resources to fix it. 2. Use it in conjunction with other tools ↪ Use Clickup and Monday for your PM - use HS to guide retention efforts. ↪ Move as much data as possible from complex Excel sheets into Hubspot. ↪ HS isn’t a finance system, like Xero, but it can show you what is and isn’t working so you can delve deeper. 3. Integrate it with everything - sales, marketing and customer service ↪ Contract software like Docusign and Pandadoc ↪ Marketing platforms (Meta, Google etc) ↪ Payment providers like Stripe ↪ Finance systems like Xero It’s also worth using Hubspot CMS for your website - Your marketer will love this, and can launch campaigns much faster (and get better results in the process). But you should also keep in mind that: + Hubspot is only as good as what you put in there ↪ Without sales/AMs/marketing/finance entering the required data, it’ll be a wasted effort. + Adoption will be required from the top down ↪ Founders & leaders have to use Hubspot too, so others will follow. + Appoint a guardian for Hubspot ↪ When Hubspot becomes used heavily, appoint an administrator. It’s not a coincidence that agencies that scale use Hubspot. Having everything (sales, marketing, am, finance) all in one place enables smart decisions, faster. Which in turn, empowers scale. What CRM does your agency use? Want specific advice to make Hubspot work for your agency? Send me a DM and I’ll show you how I’ve used it to scale agencies like yours from $1.5M to $5M+ ARR.

“I'm on a mission to kind of automate all of the boring stuff and help people work on the stuff that matters." Romi Dexter In Ep. 10 of Fast and Tierious Romi chronicles how Hype & Dexter | 5x APAC HubSpot Partner of the Year | Part of the Avidly Group won 5x APAC Partner of the Year 🤯 🤯 🤯 She shares much about her journey - including lessons about: 1) Origin Story and Motivation: Hype and Dexter was birthed from a Salesforce marketing cloud implementation failure. This challenging experience highlighted the need for a better way to deliver projects on time and on budget. The response = Hype and Dexter. 2) From Agnostic to HubSpot: Romi and team found themselves consistently recommending HubSpot due to its superiority over other platforms. This realization led them to specialize in HubSpot, allowing their team to deepen their expertise without spreading too thin across multiple platforms. 3) Scaling People: Romi emphasizes the difficulty of scaling a team, highlighting the importance of a solid onboarding process and continuous upskilling. Hype and Dexter developed a structured growth path for employees, ensuring a deep understanding of HubSpot's capabilities. 4) Launching New Services: Introducing new services poses challenges, especially in aligning them with the existing quality of services. Romi suggests piloting new services with friendlies first and having a solid plan for scaling, including sales and marketing strategies. 5) Addressing HubSpot Gaps: A regret Romi mentions is not focusing sooner on technical services to address HubSpot's limitations. Establishing partnerships and developing technical capabilities in-house allowed them to extend HubSpot's functionality without overly customizing solutions. What he would never do again: Be CRM Agnostic -> She said that she would likely not start as CRM agnostic. There is so much value in focusing on 1 platform and developing deep expertise that transcends to sales, marketing, and delivery. What he would do earlier: Build technical consulting -> She would have built technical services and HubSpot product components earlier. This early investment allowed them to better address gaps in HubSpot's offerings and provide more tailored and comprehensive solutions to their client Their Big Bet: Be Global - Hype and Dexter + Avidly -> Their big bet for the future revolves around leveraging the global scale and footprint provided by joining forces with Avidly. She is excited about the potential to work with hundreds of people globally, which will allow Hype and Dexter to extend their reach and capabilities significantly. --------------- Fast and Tierious provides: Real, practical advice learned from building a HubSpot solution partner. It's a tale heard over and over again about the pains of growth, some take it and soar. Stay awesome. And Stay Supered -Matt

As Rasayel continues to integrate with more CRMs this year (currently integrated with HubSpot, Pipedrive and Zoho, with many more integrations in the pipeline 😉) It became a core part of my job to deeply understand the inner workings of these CRMs and I wanted to share my CRM explainer with you 🙂 - An account or a company (both are work fine, I prefer company) → this represents an entity or an organization that you sell to your product or service. - A contact → this can be a visitor, or a lead or a person depending on how they are looked at / upon by the sales personnel (account manager, or SDR, or whatever). A contact is usually part of a company, and also part of a deal / opportunity. A contact can also be owned or managed by a sales personnel directly, and/or through a deal. It is super important to understand the contact stage by inferring their type or by looking at which stage their deal is in the pipeline. (when I say deal, I don't always mean that they must have a deal because some CRMs are lightweight enough that just remove the concept of a deal altogether) - An event or activity → this is any touch point with the contact. It can be a call, a follow up, an email exchange, a group of whatsapp messages, etc. This can also apply for non-CRM use cases of course, like a purchase, or whatever. But we can use it for the CRM / Sales use case too. A contact can have many events. A timeline of events. - A conversation → this can be any conversation that you have with a contact. It belongs or involves one or more contacts depending on the communication channel. WhatsApp API, for example, only allows for 1-1 conversations therefore it will below to one contact. A contact can have many conversations. - A sales personnel → this can be an SDR, account manager, or whatever. This entity always own either a deal, or a contact, or both. - A deal or opportunity → this represents an on-going sales transaction that a contact from a company is involved in with a certain sales personnel. A deal or opportunity usually moves across a pipeline which is usually customizable but also there is a standard few milestones. A deal or opportunity can be won or lost. If you are using WhatsApp as a main communication channel with your customers and you're interested in exploring the advantages of integrating WhatsApp with your CRM, or why specialized WhatsApp communication management platforms like Rasayel outperform native CRM WhatsApp integrations, feel free to DM me for a quick chat 😉.

There are two ways to use HubSpot - passively and strategically If you use it passively, and plenty of people do, you are mostly using it as a productivity tool and a system of record - somewhere to store your notes on clients etc. We prefer to teach clients to use it strategically or actively if you like. The difference is game changing for you and your teams. And the value you get from HubSpot increases exponentially. What does it mean to use HubSpot strategically? Well, for a start, ensure that your strategic objectives for your company are baked into HubSpot! Use Dashboards to report on performance trends Use journey reports to fine tune your 'go to market' strategy Use Goals to keep track of individual and team performance for the day, week, month, quarter and even year. Use segmentations and lists to create your ICP Use Personas to reflect your buyers HubSpots enablement tools to support teams when doing their job and keep them on brand and on message: Use HubSpot Academy to teach the team how to use your tools and the latest in sales, marketing, email, social, and even customer service skills Use Coaching playlists to teach best practise calls Use Playbooks to keep teams on process and methodologies We use Supered⚡ to further enforce those processes through process rules and create in app tutorials and guides to teach people 'inline' - when they are doing their job. In the sales area: Use Pipelines to create reliable revenue forecasting and tracking Use Call recording for coaching Use the Prospecting space to ensure your leads are properly qualified Use Documents to keep communications on brand Use Quotes to keep comms on brand and accurately track sales performance In marketing: Use the new Content Hub to transform the way you run your content strategy by utilising the latest HubSpot AI tools in the planning, construction and distribution of your content. (Blogs, Social Posts, Podcasts etc) Use Landing Pages, Forms and CTA's to ensure a complete analytical picture. Use UTMs to track ads performance and the Ads tool to create a full journey view. Use the awesome power of the Campaigns tool to understand exactly what marketing is working and what isn't. In customer service: Use the combined help desk with AI support to bring calls, emails, tickets and chats for reps into one screen in once place with one tool set. Use the knowledge base to teach your customers to self serve. Use the customer portal to allow them to track their own enquiries. Use Surveys to understand what your customers are trying to tell you and create powerful feedback loops. Again, all controlled and centrally directed by the various commercial strategy strands that apply. #HubSpotIsNotAStrategy but its way more than productivity software. Its an Operating System for your business. I'm speaking on this subject next week in the South Wales HUG. If you'd like to join me, see the l*nk in the comments to sign up for free!