HubSpot for Professional Services
In the world of professional services, establishing and nurturing direct relationships with customers and clients is the name of the game. These businesses thrive on effective communication, personalized interactions, and seamless collaboration, making their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) an indispensable tool.
Enter: HubSpot's all-in-one platform.
Its intuitive interface, advanced features, and emphasis on customer-centricity make it the go-to choice for professional services businesses seeking to optimize their interactions, deepen client relationships, and drive sustainable success.
Customizing HubSpot for your Business
While HubSpot's default objects offer a solid foundation, they might not cater to all of your specific requirements. The true power of HubSpot can be seen in how you can customize it to make it work for you.
We're talking HubSpot's custom objects.
In this blog, we will delve into the process of customizing HubSpot CRM using HubSpot's Custom Objects to suit the unique needs of your professional services company. With HubSpot's tailored features, you can elevate your business operations and enhance client satisfaction, all within a single integrated platform.
HubSpot's Custom Objects
Custom objects are an invaluable feature offered exclusively to Enterprise-level customers, providing them with the ability to efficiently store and organize diverse sets of data.
With custom objects, users have the freedom to define and structure data according to their specific requirements. They also allow you to create properties within each custom object that you can use to manage your pipelines and create associations between objects.
This flexibility enables businesses of all shapes and sizes to capture and manage a wide range of information, tailoring the system to their unique needs.
You can read more in depth on HubSpot's custom objects in our blog, Custom Objects Just Keep Getting Better.
4 Custom Objects for your Professional Services Business
As mentioned above, custom objects are an extremely powerful tool for professional services teams that allow them to customize their HubSpot instance, tailoring it to their specific needs.
Let's walk through four different custom objects that could benefit your professional services team.
01 Projects Custom Object
The Project Custom Object enables organizations to track and manage projects from start to finish. These objects act as a centralized repository for information such as Kickoff Date, Target Completion Date, Actual Completion Date, and Project Budget.
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Custom pipelines enable visualizing project stages, ensuring smooth project delivery. Additionally, associating Projects with Deals and Companies provides a holistic view of the sales and delivery process.
A few use cases include:
➢ Professional services firms can leverage Projects to efficiently manage multiple engagements, monitor project timelines, and track budgets.
➢ Project Managers gain valuable insights into project progress, identify bottlenecks, and proactively address issues.
➢ Reporting and analytics on Projects facilitate performance evaluation, optimize resource allocation, and enable accurate forecasting.
By establishing associations between Projects, related entities, and customer satisfaction, teams foster collaboration, ensuring successful project outcomes.
02 Retainers Custom Object
Retainer Custom Objects in HubSpot offer a dedicated solution for effectively managing ongoing service agreements with clients. With essential properties like Renewal Date, Monthly Hours Budget, and Overage, Retainer objects empower you to efficiently track and monitor retainer engagements.
By establishing associations between Retainers, Deals, Companies, and other custom objects such as Delivery Teams, you can gain a comprehensive view of the client's entire journey, from the initial sales process to the successful delivery of services.
It also enables efficient management of recurring service contracts, allowing you to easily handle and track ongoing engagements. By closely monitoring retainer metrics, such as comparing hours consumed versus allocated, you can identify trends and take proactive measures when it comes to resource allocation and capacity.
Reporting and analytics capabilities provide valuable insights for performance evaluation, measuring client satisfaction, and making informed decisions when it comes to contract renewals. Leveraging the association with Delivery Teams ensures that each Retainer is assigned to the most suitable team, ultimately enhancing efficiency and improving the overall client experience.
03 Delivery Team Members Custom Object
The Delivery Team Members Custom Object provides professional services teams with a dedicated space to manage crucial information about their service employees.
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This includes capturing essential details like Hourly Rate for accurate project margin calculations and incorporating properties such as Technology Experience to assess competency with specific tools. By utilizing this object, teams can build a comprehensive database of service employees, tracking their skill profiles and maintaining up-to-date information.
This valuable information plays a vital role in resource planning, project staffing, and ensuring a well-rounded team composition.
In addition, by associating Delivery Team Members with relevant entities such as Projects, Retainers, and Companies, teams establish clear connections between individual team members and the projects they are involved in. This fosters efficient collaboration and maximizes productivity by ensuring the right team members are assigned based on their skill sets.
04 Delivery Teams Custom Object
Delivery Teams Custom Objects in professional services organizations empower efficient project assignments and resource management by organizing service employees into distinct groups.
By including properties such as Active Project Count and Client NPS Score, Delivery Teams provide a comprehensive view of team performance and productivity. These objects enable the creation of predefined teams based on expertise or specialization, streamlining project assignments and improving overall project efficiency.
A few use cases for Delivery Teams Custom Objects would include resource allocation by analyzing team capacity to assign projects.
By associating Delivery Teams with Projects, Retainers, and Companies, organizations establish strong connections between team performance, project outcomes, and client satisfaction.
Additionally, reporting and analytics on Delivery Teams facilitate performance evaluation, benchmarking, and data-driven decisions for team optimization and growth.
Associating your Custom Objects
Once you have your objects, you can leverage automation to associate these custom objects to each other. This can be done in a number of ways including utilizing hapily's app, Associ8 and Custom Coded Actions.
Associ8
In HubSpot's app marketplace, you can find an app called Associ8. Made by app studio, hapily, this app allows you to use workflows to associate records without using a single line of code.
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Click here to watch a demo of Associ8 and read more on how this app can automate associations at scale.
Custom Coded Actions
This option does require a little bit of dev support, but is a very powerful option for associating your objects.
Let's look at an example.
In the video below, we've created some custom code to automatically associate Project Team Members to a company, when a Project Team is assigned. Check it out below:
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Ready to get started?
The best part about HubSpot's custom objects is that you can design them to fit your team and business. We've just provided a few examples of how a professional services team might benefit from custom objects, but the possibilities are endless.
If you're looking to get started with using HubSpot for your Professional Services Business, feel free to reach out to us. We specialize in helping clients of all designs, make their instance work the best for them.
