How to Craft Your HubSpot Environment: Strategic Approaches to Help You Plan

Planning and designing a HubSpot environment requires a thoughtful, strategic approach. You need to tackle it from two angles. One: what is your ultimate dream state with all the bells and whistles? And two: what are your first priorities?
With this information in hand, you can start using HubSpot for quick wins, while you build the bigger picture. Before you dive headfirst into HubSpot, it’s crucial to evaluate where you stand.

Set the Stage: Designing Your Digital Ecosystem to Harness Data

What is a Digital Ecosystem

It's the interconnected web of your website, social media, customer databases, and software tools – all working together to nurture your online presence. Just like a garden needs care, your Digital Ecosystem thrives with thoughtful management in the dynamic world of the internet.

4 Steps to Design Your Digital Ecosystem

• Assess Current Systems

  What tools and platforms are you currently using? How do they need to interplay with your HubSpot environment?

• Define Key Objectives and Team Commitment

  Whatever your goals, define them clearly with your team. Include stakeholders from different areas of the business and create a project team. Early involvement will lead to faster adoption and smoother change management. Whether you are focused on lead generation, customer management, sales optimisation or automating business processes, having clarity across teams is paramount to success, as a system is only as good as the people using it. Whether software is free, or costs $100,000 a year, if your team isn’t on board then the human factor can impede your success.

• Quiz Yourself
  • When it comes to your environment and operations what are the non-negotiables?
  • How do these fit into your plan?
  • What solutions are workable?
  • How realistic is your budget?
  • What parameters need to be worked within to deliver results?
• Take Time to Consider Your Requirements

  When diving into the vast landscape of HubSpot, it’s vital to discern between business challenges and mere technical necessities. At its core, the goal isn’t to simply shuffle data around but to genuinely address and solve pressing business concerns using HubSpot’s robust features.

  Often, there’s a temptation to view things through a narrow, tech-centric lens. But that approach can inadvertently box you in, limiting the expansive potential HubSpot can offer. Remember, data isn’t just about sharing or moving figures from one point to another. It’s about harnessing that data, analysing it, and transforming it into actionable insights that can propel your business forward.

  Think of HubSpot as more than a tool; envision it as a collaborative partner, ready to offer solutions tailor-made for your business. So, shed the conventional hat for a moment. Dive deep, brainstorm, and sculpt innovative solutions. You’re not just configuring a platform; you’re crafting a dynamic, data-driven ecosystem designed to elevate every facet of your business.

  Embrace the challenge, get imaginative, and let HubSpot amplify your business aspirations.

Crafting your Digital Blueprint

What is a Digital Blueprint?

Also called Digital Marketing Blueprint, is your roadmap for progress. It outlines the strategy moving forward, pinpointing the elements that wield the most influence on marketing, branding, and communication planning, including all the digital platforms that might interact with your brand, audiences and customers.

How to Adapt HubSpot to Your Business Uniqueness?

Charting the vast waters of HubSpot requires more than just data. It demands vision, strategy, and precision. Break down the process of sculpting a successful HubSpot environment, so you can be sure it will deliver your unique business needs.

• Map Out Processes: visualise your current workflows. Which ones will transfer to HubSpot, and which ones will evolve? Use tools like Miro to make it easy.
• Customise to Fit: define the key contact properties *link to the blog post 1 - The Crisis of Disconnection*. Design them to align with your needs. Also, adapt default settings to make the environment feel like home.
• Think User Experience: consider the journey of every team member who will interface with HubSpot. Listen to your team and consider all possibilities, consolidating them into a cohesive solution. Communicating and agreeing on the solution with the project team and stakeholders will allow them to own the solution too.

When Crafting Your Blueprint, Ensure You Cover the Following Points:

• Which materials and techniques will achieve your vision?
• What limitations exist that need to be considered?
• How will changing one element impact others?
• What are the pros and cons of each option?

Draft and Ideate Your HubSpot Blueprint

With the accumulated insights and goals in hand, start building your Data-Verse story. Remember, every piece of data and every process has a role to play in this grand design.

• Clarifying Vision: reframe your understanding of the bigger picture - your overarching objectives, essential processes, and desired data insights.
• HubSpot Objects Deciphered: dive into the available HubSpot objects. Will they suffice, or will your narrative require some tailored characters (custom objects)?

Best Practice for Crafting Your Data-Verse

A documenting mindset begins with clarity and in your HubSpot environment, the vision is your documentation. The well-documented architecture will assist with seamless execution and ongoing knowledge as team members grow or change over time.

Strike a balance between depth and brevity and include:

• All Relevant Details: from system architecture to user flows, ensure all critical aspects are covered.
• Avoid Jargon Overload: technical terms will be inevitable, but they can also alienate non-tech-savvy readers. Provide explanations or glossaries where necessary.
• Flowcharts and Diagrams: complex tech concepts can often be better explained visually. Using visual aids to demonstrate processes, hierarchies and systems can make it simpler.
• Screenshots and Annotations: visuals of the UI with clear annotations also help users to adopt quickly.
• Regular Updates: ensure your documentation always mirrors the current state of play, and updates are made with each significant change.
• Archive System: keep and maintain older visions of your documentation, as they serve as a history and valuable reference points during the project’s evolution.

As you inch closer to the build stage of your HubSpot project, your documentation will be your guiding star as it will outline your complete data-verse, ensuring every stakeholder sails smoothly, with clarity and purpose.

You can then embark with confidence as your well-documented journey awaits.

If you want to learn more about how to leverage your data to drive growth, download our Playbook for useful tools and recommendations to get the most out of your HubSpot to maximise sales outcomes and keep your team working on customer solutions rather than collating data across platforms.