Revenue operations (RevOps) relies on strategic alignment between teams to streamline processes, improve efficiency, and drive predictable revenue. Even though most organizations acknowledge the need for RevOps, a new study reveals that poor processes & alignment, along with data quality, still remain an issue for RevOps practitioners. 

Enter HubSpot. With its wide variety of automation tools, including all-in-one CRM, marketing, sales, and CS tools, HubSpot can completely transform your RevOps journey. In this article, we look at how you can successfully implement RevOps on HubSpot to unify teams, revolutionize workflows, and supercharge revenue growth. 

Let’s get started. 

TL;DR: Getting Started With RevOps On HubSpot: A Step-By-Step Guide

1. Assess existing revenue generation processes

• Define roles and responsibilities

• Establish common goals and KPIs

• Create buyer persona and customer profiles

2. Build an internal RevOps framework

• Identify metrics

• Define lifecycle stages and lead status

• Define sales stages

3. Implementing RevOps on the HubSpot CRM

• Create and edit properties

• Customize lifecycle stages and lead status

• Connect HubSpot to your website and third-party platforms

• Build reports and dashboards

4. Design and implement automation

• Implement automation across sales, marketing, and customer service teams

• Create workflows to automate processes

1. Assess existing revenue generation processes

Building a RevOps strategy means bringing your sales, marketing, and customer service teams together. Each department has a different working process, and aligning them under shared objectives and goals can eliminate silos and friction, resulting in a seamless customer experience. 

Start by auditing the sales, marketing, and customer service processes to identify gaps in the existing workflows, software redundancies, and opportunities for integration between the teams. Look at the key roles involved in the process, how the handovers take place, and the unnecessary touchpoints that cause friction between the teams. 

Based on this, you can start to:

1. Define key roles and responsibilities: Clearly outline each team member's roles and responsibilities and how they’re tied to the larger organizational goals.
   
   

2. Establish shared goals and KPIs: Setting individual and shared goals ensures the teams are aligned and working together to improve lead generation, close more deals, and create a unified customer experience.

   
   

3. Create buyer personas and ideal customer profiles: Based on the inputs from the sales and marketing teams, create buyer profiles to understand who to target, common pain points, and the best outreach channels.

2. Build an internal RevOps framework

Map your entire customer journey—from the first point of interaction to the last. This includes asking your go-to-market (GTM) teams, including sales, marketing, and customer success, how they currently interact with the customers. 

Based on their inputs, list all the touchpoints and channels. Identify and consider the buyer’s multiple paths since no one person’s journey is similar to another. During this process, you’ll also spot overlaps, redundancies, and workflow gaps. Note these, and update and revise the strategy as needed.

• Identify metrics 

Once your customer journey map is ready, identify the core metrics you will measure across sales, marketing, and CS teams. Metrics such as monthly or annual recurring revenue (MRR and ARR), customer lifetime value, conversion rate, and sale cycle length are essential to track across businesses regardless of their size, industry, and key objectives.

• Define lifecycle stages and lead status

It’s crucial that everyone understands how a lead flows within the organization. To do this, you can define the lifecycle stages and lead status. 

The lifecycle stage refers to the different stages a lead goes through before becoming a customer. HubSpot defines lifecycle stages as follows:

• Subscriber

• Lead

• MQL

• SQL

• Opportunity 

• Customer

• Evangelist

Lead status tells you where a lead is in the sales process. You can choose to stick to the default options or edit and create your own status. Creating lead status is essential for marketing and sales teams to understand where a prospect is in the buyer’s journey and develop targeted strategies to nurture and convert those leads.

• Define sales stages

Sales stages represent the various stages in the sales process during the buyer’s journey.

This comes into play once your lead shows an interest and becomes an opportunity for sale. HubSpot enables you to define the sales stages, customize the deal pipeline, set entry and exit criteria, and a lot more.

Typically, this is how sales pipeline stages look like:

• Lead Generation

• Qualification of Leads

• Nurturing Leads

• Proposal

• Negotiation & Commitment

• Opportunity Won

• Follow up

• Retention

• 
  

Setting up sales stages is important to standardize sales processes, improve visibility and transparency in sales reporting, and predict revenue growth across business operations.

3.  Implement RevOps on the HubSpot CRM

Once you’ve defined your processes and stages, it’s time to set up your RevOps process in HubSpot.

• Create and edit property

Start by setting up the properties that are essentially fields that store information in HubSpot records. HubSpot offers default objects, such as contacts, deals, companies, tickets, and products, that you can use to collect and store records. These objects include property attributes such as name, email, phone number, etc. 

If you want, you can also create custom properties in HubSpot that are specific to your business needs.

(Source: HubSpot)

• Customize lifecycle stages and lead status

  
  

You don’t have to use every lifecycle stage HubSpot offers by default. For example: If you don’t need Subscriber and MQL as the default stages, you have the option to remove them.

Though you can create custom lifecycle stages in HubSpot, the process isn’t as straightforward, and you’ll need super admin permissions to create new categories.

How can you customize lifecycle stages in HubSpot?

• Log into your HubSpot account.

• Go to settings

• Click on the objects on the left sidebar and select contacts

• Hit the lifecycle stage tab and click on add stages

• Enter your stage name and hit create lifecycle stage

(Source: HubSpot)

On the contrary, lead statuses can be easily customized and altered depending on your sales team and processes. Essentially, lead status tracks where a lead is in the sales process and keeps everyone on the same page. 

HubSpot offers the following as the default lead statuses:

• New

• Open

• In Progress

• Open Deal

• Qualified

• Attempted to Connect

• Connected

• Bad Timing

  
  

You can either manually update the lead status property or import and then update the properties from the contact lists. 

How to customize lead status in HubSpot?

• Log in to your HubSpot account and click on the settings

• Select Properties from the left sidebar and then click on lead status to update the property

• Scroll to the radio select option and add new property or update the existing ones

• Hit save when you’re done

(Source: HubSpot)

• Connect HubSpot to your website and third-party platforms

  
  

The next step is to connect your website domain to HubSpot to publish your content on the HubSpot-hosted landing pages, blog posts, knowledge base, and more. You can also add the HubSpot tracking code to your website to track how your CRM contacts are interacting with your website.

To integrate your website with HubSpot CRM:

• Login to HubSpot > click on Settings > and then click on Domains & URLs

• Click ‘Connect a Domain’. Select the option that best fits your needs.

• Choose the ‘content type’ to host via the checkboxes

• Select root domain

• Set up a subdomain, brand domain, top-level domain, and primary language

• Complete the website hosting with a DNS provider

• 
  

HubSpot also enables you to integrate third-party platforms to streamline processes, improve efficiency, and enhance data-driven decision-making. You can directly transfer data from these platforms, creating a single source of truth for all activities. 

To plug third-party apps within HubSpot CRM:

• Search and install the tools from HubSpot App Marketplace

• Review app details, including product features & compatibility requirements

• Choose the pricing model

• Review the data privacy and other permissions

• Scroll back to the top and press ‘Connect App’

• To learn more about setting up a particular app, click on ‘View setup guide’
  
  

• Build reports & dashboards

  
  

The advantage of using the HubSpot CRM platform is that you can create comprehensive reports to gain visibility across business operations. Tools such as Sequence for the Sales Hub, Traffic or Social Analytics for the Marketing Hub, and Customer Service Software for the Service Hub enable you to create specific reports based on your needs. 

How to create reports in HubSpot?

• Select the type of HubSpot data the reports should include

• Add fields to the report

• Customize report filters

• Choose how you want the data to be displayed

• Save or export your report

(Source: HubSpot)

Dashboards in HubSpot organize related reports under a single view. You can create several dashboards for different purposes, share dashboards with other users, and also clone or delete existing dashboards.

How to create dashboards on HubSpot?

• Log into your HubSpot account

• Navigate to Reporting > Dashboards

• Click on ‘Create Dashboard’. 

• You can either create a new dashboard or select a pre-made template for the dashboard

• Enter the dashboard name

• Configure the user access settings

• Then hit ‘Create dashboard’

  
  

(Source: HubSpot)

4. Design and implement automation

   
   

The last step in successfully completing the RevOps setup in HubSpot is to automate processes. Depending on your HubSpot’s subscription, you can leverage the following types of automation:

1. Forms or marketing emails

2. Deal stage validation

3. Sequences

4. Workflows

The most popular type of automation in HubSpot is Workflows, which enable you to automate complex processes across the sales, marketing, and customer service teams. 

Workflows are based on triggers and automatically capture records after you set up the enrollment criteria. Once a user takes a desired action, the workflow plays out automatically as designed. HubSpot allows you to edit your workflows and workflow actions, prevent certain records from enrolling, and schedule when to unenroll specific records. 

(Source: HubSpot)

How to create workflows in HubSpot?

• Log in to your HubSpot account

• Navigate to Automation > Workflows

• To create a workflow from scratch, choose Create workflow > From scratch

• To create a workflow from templates, choose Create workflow > From template

• In the workflow editor, click ‘Set up Triggers’

• When you’re done, click save

Harness The Power of HubSpot to Create a RevOps Engine

At its core, RevOps relies on seamless collaboration between the sales, marketing, and customer service teams. HubSpot helps you achieve that by unifying the data and creating a single source of truth that streamlines communication, improves efficiency, and improves the overall customer experience. 

Sidekick’s HubSpot Slack integration takes it one step further. It allows you to get snapshots of deals, new lead assignments, meeting updates, deal workflows, and a lot more on Slack without even opening HubSpot. You can update contact properties and other details on Slack itself and send the data to HubSpot in a few seconds. 

In addition, Sidekick monitors your target accounts and notifies you of an event or activity, eliminating the need to sift through lists and filters on HubSpot. You can also get a snapshot of the most important metrics on Slack, which can help your team make faster decisions and enhance customer experience. 

If you’re looking to integrate HubSpot to streamline your RevOps process, consider giving Sidekick a try. Book a demo here.