Customer data is one of your business’s most valuable assets. Being able to see when and how a customer interacts with your company provides valuable insights on operations and improving customer experience. Visibility into the customer’s journey, from prospect to lead to closed sale, optimizes those efforts, showing where leads fall out of the pipeline and what messages resonate the best.
At many companies, however, these operations and the customer data each department collects, remain in siloes, limiting the benefits this data can provide. This is the problem RevOps seeks to remedy. Simply put, RevOps unifies the customer-facing income-generating aspects of the business: the marketing, sales and customer service departments.
In late 2021, HubSpot unveiled a RevOps tool, Operations Hub, another service offering in its customer relationship management (CRM) platform. Operations Hub, sometimes referred to as Ops Hub, seeks to align customer data into a single user interface for endless integration and automation possibilities. This post will cover the core features of HubSpot Operations Hub, how it works, and examples of how it can help your day-to-day business operations. Let’s dive in!
What is the Operations Hub?
HubSpot Operations Hub is a data management tool designed to optimize the use of your customer’s data by providing a centralized platform where you clean, curate and sync data for better integrations and easier automation. Its objective is to create a unified view of every customer interaction, a “single source of truth” for all your customer data, opening the door for greater efficiency and deeper business insights.
Here’s the official word from HubSpot:
“Operations Hub gives you a unified toolset that connects apps, cleans and curates customer data, and automates business processes under one central CRM platform. The result? An efficient, aligned, and adaptable business that delivers a friction-free customer experience.”
Like HubSpot’s other customer relationship management CRM Hub offerings–Marketing, Sales, Customer Services hubs–companies pay a monthly subscription fee based on usage and can opt for one of four tiers, Free, Starter, Professional or Enterprise.
Operations Hub is part of HubSpot’s efforts to bring everything within the business-customer relationship under one roof. Marketing, sales, customer service, and now data, can be managed within a single platform, helping eliminate the silos that form between departments, different platforms and applications.
What does Operations Hub do?
The Operations Hub has three main functions:
- Integration - To align customer data across applications.
- Automation - For creating new automation processes.
- Data quality - For cleaning data with greater speed and accuracy.
Seamless integrations
HubSpot has always been an evangelist for connecting data, whether it’s across Hubs within Hubspot or via APIs connecting third-party apps. When HubSpot bought PieSync in 2019, the addition of this powerful and dedicated integrations platform gave users the power to connect not just apps but also various elements of their tech stack.
Operations Hub takes this approach to the next level by including 25 application integrations that connect out-of-the-box to your HubSpot account, including MailChimp and Google Contacts. In addition, Operations Hub brings external APIs into HubSpot, which allows businesses to create their own customized integrations with minimal coding. The integrations are created and managed through a user-friendly interface and with HubSpot’s logic-based and efficient workflows.
Read related article, Should My Business Integrate HubSpot and SalesForce?
Operations Hub Data Sync
Operations Hub’s integration functionality also includes a tool called Data Sync, which lets you create bidirectional integrations to connect data and apps to your HubSpot CRM. The tool’s advanced customization and flexibility creates a host of possibilities that weren’t available before. For example, if you want to share customer names, emails and phone numbers collected from customer service with your Salesforce app, you can build an integration that syncs the two databases; what’s new is that it also lets you limit what data is shared. The result is higher efficiency, a greater level of security, and overall better data management.
How else is Data Sync different from an API or traditional integration?
First, Data Sync allows companies to create data integrations that share data back and forth between databases in real time. Gone are triggers or manually running syncs. Data sharing goes on continuously in the background for up-to-date data when you need it.
It’s also designed for ease of use. Typically, integrations and APIs are built by development teams and require coding skills, but Data Sync lets you build integrations with low to no code.
Streamlining automation
Up until the launch of Ops Hub, HubSpot automation was limited to a menu of predefined actions. But with Operations Hub, companies can now create custom code actions in workflows, webhook actions in workflows and custom-coded bot actions in chatflows. HubSot still provides the standard workflows, and now you can add new configurations and custom actions.
This could include automatically pulling customer data from a third-party app, merging contacts or even triggering a sales rep reward for a closed deal.
Ensuring consistent data quality
As companies move toward more personalized content, from marketing emails, to sales interactions to customer service chatbots, it becomes increasingly important to ensure your company has accurate data on all customers across all channels. Operations Hub’s data quality automation keeps data accurate without having to manually update everywhere.
Data quality also directly connects to data security and privacy. Operations Hub helps companies manage who gets access to what data through data management and permission tools that organize team permissions by location, company size, and type of content, as well as enable ownership rights to specific contacts and deals.
What are the benefits of Operations Hub?
That’s why you’re here right? Here are some of the advantages Ops Hub offers your CRM.
- Makes suites more powerful – Operations Hub is another layer to the already powerful platform, more efficiently aligning the sales, marketing and customer data you have into a unified view.
- Brings everything “under one roof” – Anyone who’s ever tried to troubleshoot why an API to a third-party application has stopped working knows that connecting various SaaS tools to your CRM can sometimes come with challenges. Operations Hub aims to simplify and debug this step by bringing integrations within the HubSpot universe.
- Enables more powerful automation – The previous HubSpot CRM capabilities limited automation to a menu of predefined actions. Offering custom JavaScript coding to create actions within workflows, there is essentially no limit to the automations your company can build.
- Easy to implement – If you’re already a HubSpot customer, the time and effort it takes to onboard this tool can begin as soon as you sign on. When you work with a HubSpot Agency Partner, the work gets even easier as you have a resource on call to help advise and troubleshoot any issue.
Not a HubSpot customer and considering making the switch?Here are some unique ways HubSpot can help your business.
How much does Operations Hub cost?
When you invest in Operations Hub, you enter the HubSpot CRM suite with its package of benefits. From individuals to enterprises, the cost of HubSpot varies largely on how much you plan to use it. Here’s the break down:
Free Tools
Just as the name suggests, this free option can be a good entry point for individuals and small businesses that want to give HubSpot a try. Free Tools for Operations Hub include:
- Content management
- Data sync
- Historical sync
- 5 active lists
- 10 custom properties
- Ticketing
- Deals
- Company insights
There are limitations, however. The Free Tools do not include some key customization and automation features, like webhooks and scheduled workflow triggers.
Starter
Starting at $18 per month, the Starter option offers small businesses all the free features with greater limits, plus more options, including:
- Default field mappings
- Email reply tracking
- Payments (U.S. only)
- Email health reporting
Again, with the Starter package, you do not get some of the key automation features that make it a powerful tool.
Professional
Starting at $720 per month, it’s a sizable price jump, but also significantly increases in capabilities and functionality. It includes everything the Starter package offers, plus:
- Scheduled workflow triggers
- Programmable automation
- AI-powered data formatting recommendations
- Data quality command center
- Data health trends
- Bulk duplicate management
Enterprise
At $2,000 per month to start, this package is for larger companies that want to power up their data with features like Salesforce custom object sync and advanced data calculations. Enterprise includes everything in Professional, plus:
- Snowflake data share
- Advanced data calculations and prep
- Sandboxes
- Datasets
- Custom objects
- Advanced permissions
What HubSpot Operations Hub Is NOT
Operations Hub helps your company manage data from a RevOps perspective, but it is NOT a full data management system that you might find in enterprise solutions like Microsoft 365 or IBM’s Cloud Pak for Data. When implementing Operations Hub, it is essential to have conversations with your IT Department about how this will fit into your company’s larger data processing, storage and security programs.
You should think of Operations Hub as a tool for integrating data, adding automation capabilities and incorporating best data practices into your CRM. While it does have advanced capabilities you might find in more robust data management systems, it won’t do it all (nor does it claim to).
Implementing Operations Hub with a HubSpot Partner
HubSpot is known for its user-friendly interface and logical workflows that empower sales and marketing teams to create and innovate new ways to delight customers. That said, your internal teams will need to invest time into learning the platform and its features to get the most from the tool. Having a certified HubSpot Partner agency is one way companies maximize their investment.
Working with a HubSpot Partner provides significant expertise. At PMG, for example, our team members have been using HubSpot every day for the past 10 years! (To say the least, we’ve got a few HubSpot success stories up our sleeves.)
When you need someone to walk you through a process or how to create a workflow, the agency not only knows how to do it, but can take the work of setting it up off your plate. Agency partners also know a thing or two about marketing and can help connect messaging, digital assets and the HubSpot tech to supercharge your marketing efforts.
Want to know more? We’d love to chat!
