Tweaking Hubspot for the collaborative PLG SaaS

How to leverage product data in CRM to increase GTM revenue efficiency

A year ago, SpatialChat transitioned from Close CRM to Hubspot CRM. We believed we had outgrown Close with over 6 GTM team members and wanted to leverage Hubspot's advanced experience, particularly in reporting. At that time, I faced the harsh reality of transferring data from one CRM to another. We attempted to delegate it first but could not find the partner we liked, so I decided to get my hands dirty and perform the transition myself.

For a few days, I found myself even more interested in the inner workings of the CRM than our product. Later I became inspired by the daunting task of obtaining data about self-service usage and integrating it into the CRM to better align the GTM and product teams. This is how the article came to be.

Hope the following issue will help you to mitigate the complexity of the top of the funnel, which is led by self-service users, and remove the silos between product and GTM teams.

What do I mean by Product-led growth?

The PLG (Product Led Growth) strategy had a lot of hype in the past few years, but when it comes to implementing it in operations, there are still many gaps in the operational and analytics stack.

The PLG approach has become increasingly popular since potential customers can immediately access the free product, and their usage becomes the primary way to educate and evaluate them and nurture leads. Thus, the product itself becomes responsible for fulfilling the pipeline and trying to turn individual self-serve usage into a sales pipeline for enterprise value.

While PLG has quickly become the buzzword in the industry, it's essential to distinguish the dynamics that can describe the motion. I like the following sales motion classification proposed by Emily Kramer from MKT1.

• Pure self-serve motion. Users can purchase only the product on a self-service basis without room for the high-touch sales motion.

• Self-serve + sales assist: Prospects can sign up for the product and upgrade to other plans independently. But, based on product usage, sales come in and sell to the most promising prospects. These larger transactions require support from a human being to help the buyer understand the plan benefits and overcome objections to purchase

• Sales-led + self-serve option: Prospects primarily buy through sales, but there’s a secondary path for individuals or smaller businesses to self-serve into a free or low-cost plan or trial.

• True hybrid: All of the above. Prospects can self-serve or talk to sales for the initial trial or purchase. Upgrades can either be initiated by the customer or by the sales team. As an early-stage company, this is hard to pull off, but many late-stage products, like Figma, Asana, etc., have all these motions.

• Sales-led motion. Prospects can only talk to sales for initial purchases. No option for the self-serve or free-trials

Within this spectrum, I would define self-serve + sales assist as a PLG motion that we will be using in the following text. In its purest form, a company that is product-led or implements product-led growth means that the product itself acquires, activates, engages, monetizes, and retains users, funneling them through a payment flow, most commonly without human touch. That helps the company to fill the top of the funnel with customers that have high product usage, along with traditional leads (MQL or SQL)

So let’s get to the practical part. To minimize the references to SpatialChat, let’s create a bit more general productivity software. Imagine you're building chat-based software for work collaboration that aims to be the next Slack or MS Teams. The main difference is that a specific chat is linked to the task, mind maps, or structured notes, and chat with your team in one unified space. Let’s call it TaskChat.

TaskChat offers three plans – Starter, Business, and Organization – each targeting different segments. However, we also anticipate that each plan will drive adoption of the other plans. For example, a team may start with the Starter plan and upgrade to a paid plan because they want more chats, messaging objects to share, or seamless integration with other software. As teams become advocates for the product, they encourage enterprise-wide adoption.

After successfully launching the product, the team is eager to expand and capture more customers. The marketing team still focuses on driving top-of-funnel leads. However, usage becomes the primary way to educate and evaluate them and nurture leads. The sales team secures initial enterprise deals with high ACV for customers switching from Slack and Teams. Although many already use the product on a self-service basis, the goal is to convert them into sales leads for the pipeline.

TaskChat utilizes Stripe for billing and subscription services and a lean data team responsible for data consolidation, including creating ETL flows and pipelines. But the GTM needs help to obtain a comprehensive view of product usage, and the CRM data only includes only sales-qualified accounts

Below I will go over establishing the Revenue Ops fundamentals to keep the selling process going by delivering actionable data to the CRM. For the article's sake, I will use Hubspot as the system I am most familiar with. However, most core ideas can be adapted to other CRMs such as SFDC or Pipedrive.

Hubspot

HubSpot is a cloud-based CRM offering various features to help businesses grow and scale. Some of the key benefits of using HubSpot for a PLG startup include:

• Best-of-suite is a package of software or modules tailored to run multiple functions relevant to your business. Depending on the plan, Hubspot provides lead management, marketing automation, sales automation, account-based marketing, support ticketing, customer success, CMS, survey tools, and analytics.

• All popular reverse-ETL providers and workflow automation providers support integration with Hubspot. This means that regardless of which reverse-ETL provider you choose, you can be confident that it will be able to integrate with Hubspot. So you can be sure you can sync your data between Hubspot and your DWH.

• Integration with other tools: HubSpot can integrate with many other tools, including enrichment platforms and product analytics tools. This can help you create a more seamless customer experience and gain deeper insights into your customers' behavior.

• HubSpot's integration with Snowflake allows you to access all your HubSpot data in Snowflake in real time.

In PLG the primary distinctions of a conservative B2B model are the number of users and the proportion of free customers. Every B2B company uses CRM can help you track and manage interactions with your customers and gain insights into their behavior and preferences.

Please note that neither Hubspot nor Salesforce meets the definition of a CDP (Customer Data Platform). However, for PLG SaaS, the realms of CRM, product analytics, and CDP are converging. As I see it, the distinction lies in the aspect of work. We should rely on something other than Hubspot when designing marketing attribution or integrating event streams from various sources. Instead, I consider CRM a vital and influential part of the modern data stack for B2B SaaS.

I won't go into detail on how to set up the data engineering part (but you can learn more about that here). Generally, I think some of the steps can be used without a data warehouse, so the sophistication level depends on the company’s stage's maturity.

Entities in Hubspot

By default, HubSpot's CRM has several standard objects, like Contacts, Companies, Deals, and Tickets. These get the job done for simple sales and marketing use cases, but every business is unique; that’s how Custom Objects can be helpful here – they can structure your entities to the way the company view the business. For example, in TaskChat, we have the Workspace – the smallest collaboration unit in the application. And we aim to include it in the CRM as well.

Another powerful function of Hubspot are associations between entities, that create links between distinct entities. These associations can be different types, such as a Contact being the "Champion" of a company or responsible for procurement.

Deals

Since the product is sold via subscription, syncing CRM with Stripe is essential. Hubspot suggests analyzing and tracking the projected value of a deal amount over time with the revenue analytics report. However, the Deals Hubspot is designed with a sales-led approach in mind, while for the self-service business, you're likely dealing with a recurrent payment.

I haven’t yet found the tool to match the Stripe payment statuses with custom deals stages in Hubspot. I've seen two approaches here

1. Create a new Deal entity for every subscription lifecycle update. So for the new payment, you can create the deal with the stage "First Payment". You can create the "Updated" deals for every further recurrent one. Ultimately, you will see the following disadvantage of the approach: it doesn't allow you to navigate easily through the subscriber status.

2. Create the Deal entity for the subscription and update the deal properties based on the subscription lifecycle updates. This includes adjusting the deal stages, amount, the parameters such as team size and retention, etc. The downside is that it may be more challenging to determine the MRR for a specific month, as the closure date for each subscription update may need to be adjusted.

You can add the additional entity Subscription in Hubspot and associate with Contact. Source

Getting data into the Hubspot

There are four ways you can get the data into the Hubspot:

1. First-class integrations can be found on the Hubspot marketplace, but they may need to be fully customizable or tailored to abovementioned use cases.

2. Workflow automation tools such as Zapier or Make.com are simple to set up but need the engineering approaches necessary for effectively debugging sample data. Additionally, regular updates may prove costly for the end user.

3. Reverse ETL synchronizes data from a data warehouse to a CRM. This process is facilitated by tools such as Census and Hightouch, which offer flexibility in the integration process. However, the setup of these tools can be challenging and costly.

4. Consider opting for in-house integrations only if the previous three approaches do not meet your requirements. This approach demands additional internal resources but can be the most cost-effective solution in the long run.

I recommend starting with the second option. However, excitement is felt about the beta product that has been launched. Regarding the workflow automation, here’s the nice template to start in Make.

After you have created the deal, you need to associate it with other properties. Users can purchase the product either in a low-touch or high-touch manner. A salesperson can qualify the lead and guide them to the self-service checkout, making it a sales-assisted deal. Thus users can specify a different billing address than the one they used to communicate with. Usually, the company uses something like saas@comp.com. In that case, I suggest implementing the reconciliation phase through sales assistance. In your case, all default leads were assigned on the SDR, which she later adjusted if needed.

Contacts

I have seen two approaches when syncing the contact entity: syncing all application users or only qualified accounts. Both approaches are acceptable, depending on the internal operational setup.

1. Having all necessary data in the CRM, regardless of whether the customer is free or on self-service, makes sense if you want to track down the registration and all other lifecycle marketing activities. This approach ensures that all prospects are accounted for and that the sales team is equipped with the information they need to close deals effectively. In this setup, you have to perform the product qualification with Hubspot.

2. The second approach can help keep the CRM less cluttered and easier to navigate. Your GTM team won't be distracted by irrelevant leads that have nothing to do with deal closure. However, using an external system to qualify leads is necessary. You can also rely on A PLG CRMm (Product-Led Growth Customer Relationship Management) like Correlated, Endgame, Pocus, Calixa, Breadcrumbs, HeadsUp, Variance or Breyta. This type of CRM focuses on the customer's product journey rather than the sales journey. However, those platforms can fulfill the revenue ops stack; they can't replace the primary CRM

For PLG products, it’s vital to enrich the static product data with product behavior, ICP (ideal customer profile) data (company size, segment, etc.), and marketing data.

Companies and Workspaces

I have added Companies and Workspaces under the same umbrella since these two entities are strongly connected. For example, in the case of TaskChat, It's difficult to determine whether this option interferes with the Workspace entity. There can be multiple workspaces under the same company, which sometimes need to be clarified. To better understand the challenges, consider the example of Slack and the difficulty of assigning multiple community workplaces to a specific company. Some applications assign specific logic based on the team's domain, but most applications do that on the backend, as there is a chance that large enterprises work independently.

Hubspot's superpower is its ability to create company entities based on contact input. Hubspot creates the Company entity for every contact with a non-public email account (such as Gmail, Yahoo, Baidu, Yandex, MSN, etc.). Another advantage of using Hubspot is that it comes equipped with an enrichment engine, which allows you to create the entity using the domain, and Hubspot will take care of the rest. You can use Clearbit or Apollo to automate your workflow and increase efficiency. The minimal necessary fields include Company Name, website, and country.

Power your CRM with behavioral event data

To define the meaning of a contract lifecycle stage, essential to define the trigger or signal (taking action on a particular page, requesting a demo, or starting a trial and taking specific product actions). Each condition likely touches product data, so the GTM team aligns with the data team to ensure the signals are present.

In such cases, the GTM team should focus on the Product-Qualified Accounts and try to nurture the person responsible for purchasing the product (read as Head of Department in the graph above). And with that definition, we can better define Product-Qualified Leads (PQLs) as individual users/workspaces within an ICP account that signal buying intent and authority. You can have a PQA with no identified PQLs but you’ll need to join the dots by leaning on exploratory sales exploration to find a buyer within the account. It’s a good practice to classify the accounts and leads based on which goal they qualify for, so you can have the Expansion PQA, Churned PQA, Enterprise PQA or Mid-market PQA clients.

Some possible combinations have been plotted, but you may only need to select a few. The triggers should support your plans and experiments, transitioning users to more advanced use cases over time — from team to enterprise.

• New free plan user: This is the first stage of the customer journey. Users who sign up for the app are considered a new users.

• Activated user: An activated user/workspace has completed the onboarding process and experienced the core value proposition for the first time. The user has performed the necessary actions to set up the core value proposition.

• Passed aha-moment: The user/workspace has experienced the core value proposition for the first time.

• Passed the habit moment: The habit metric measures how frequently a user engages with the app and how long they stay engaged. This metric determines whether a user has reached the habit moment. The user has established habits around the core value proposition.

• User with active trial . The self-service customer has initiated the trial.

• Self-service customer: A self-service customer has purchased the product on a self-service basis without room for the high-touch sales motion.

• Product-qualified account: A product-qualified account indicated the workspace that has reached a certain level of engagement with the app and has demonstrated a need for the paid version of the product.

• Product-qualified lead: A product-qualified account within an ICP account that signal buying intent and authority.

• Churned customer: A churned user has stopped using the app and is no longer active.

These stages can be reflected at the Contact Lead Stage level along with sales-led lifecycle stages.

• Sales-qualified lead

• Marketing qualified lead

• Nurture

• Negotiations

• Quote signed

• Customer

When dealing with a product such as TaskChat, shifting the focus from the individual user to their workspace is essential. The activation and retention of the workspace is of greater significance than that of the individual user.

However when creating sales and marketing communications, we still need to address the individual user. In the case of TaskChat, different teams within a single company may adopt the tool for collaboration purposes. Even if a team has excellent usage rates for the product, it can be challenging to influence other departments as they don’t have any buying authority.

So it’s essential to label the customers according to their influence in the workspace.

1. The one responsible for workspace setup. Usually, the person can be classified as the champion, but they do not necessarily mean to be responsible for billing.

2. Billing manager. The one is responsible for the payment and billing management. Can be the workspace creator.

3. The workspace admin. The person who has the purchasing power in the workspace. Please feel free to address this person if the workplace has been qualified as an active one.

4. Visitors or team members. Again, that depends on the dynamic, but I feel having the user in CRM is better.

Scoring

PQA is ultimately about timing and knowing when sales should reach out based on a combination of product signals, including

• Usage volume

• The breadth of feature usage

• The velocity of usage

• Sales intents (i.e. visiting ToS pages, asked sales-driven questions during the public demo)

• Integrations

• Firmographics

Starting with a regression analysis of past monetization events is a common practice. Still, it requires a lot of iteration to reach a point of high confidence and repeatability, which can be time-consuming. I feel that at the beginning, you can rely on heuristics derived from customer research interviews.

Hubspot provides a convenient post to create the scorings for the leads, but it can be utilized to change the user life cycle based on the product behavior data we have piped into HubSpot. Check this article for the details.

Storing the events in Hubspot

Storing the event is a bit more complicated, but I've noticed some updates in this direction. Firstly, major product analytics tools allow you to stream selected events to Hubspot. Secondly, you can leverage tools like PLG CRMs here. In fact, that's their core value proposition – aggregating data from different sources.

Don’t overwhelm the the CRM with the behavioural events here. The main job of a Revenue Operations team is to provide useful data to the selling team in order to keep the selling process going.

Can we make it easier?

We could delve further into the lifecycle messaging using MarketingHub in Hubspot, or explore how to use the dashboard to map sales reporting and BI experience. However, for now, I'll leave it at that. If you're interested, let me know and I can cover these topics in a later series. Remember that PLG isn’t a quick fix and requires a long-term commitment with top-down support and resources for the long haul.

Along the way in SpatialChat, I've seen some attempts to address the cumbersome CRM space for PLG. Although implementing CRM for a PLG startup seems exciting, creating products from the incubation stage can be challenging. Additionally, larger players are likely to adapt to the changing dynamics.

I rather see an opportunity to make the entire stack easier. To accomplish specific tasks, you need at least one data professional, which can cost around $150k per year, plus some software. Some companies, mentioned above, like Pocus or Topline, are trying to shift gears in this area to to build out this new operating model to help rearchitecting the go-to-market strategy. However, the recent announcement of Calixa shutting down implies that using existing tools along with Reverse ETL is often sufficient.

If you’re the founder, innovating that space – would be happy to chat with you.