To begin, let’s look at the professional services industry as a whole. The accounting sub sector alone generates around $180 billion a year and over $2 trillion is the combined revenue of all professional service firms in the United States (2018). And, approximately 9.3 million people are employed in the industry. This shows us that there is a lot of opportunity for growth.
The professional services industry has been faced with a number of disruptors including a diminishing talent pool, a technological revolution, and certainly new business models that include services that are personalized but maybe not ‘in person.’ Those firms that have pivoted and rolled with the punches have held on and maybe even flourished; those that sat stagnantly, likely haven’t survived. While the road has been long and dark, the profitability of the industry is looking up. With careful planning, professional service providers can get back to doing what they do best, serving others. Digitalization is essential to almost every industry, and it is certainly key in the professional services industry. What are the challenges you have been facing?
More and more consumers are using software to complete many professional services like accounting. Firms in a multitude of vectors in the professional services industry will need to use sophisticated technologies in unique ways in order to compete and help their clients.
With more and more consumers and businesses using accounting software programs, firms will need to use sophisticated technology in different ways to help their clients.
Other challenges facing the professional services industry is creating awareness of who they are and what they have to offer. Additionally, they struggle to align teams across departments as well as logistically connect remote workers with real-time customer information. Communicating internally as well as sharing expertise have also traditionally been a challenge for many professional services companies. Likewise, segmentation and targeting key accounts and high priority prospects needs to be a focus of growth for many in the industry.
Professional services companies are struggling to garner enough awareness around their brands to generate the leads they need to grow their practice. Part of that struggle is being able to impart their expertise to a buyer that has lees understanding of what they need to succeed. Also, professional service companies struggle to build authentic relationships with buyers, and when they do, they don’t know how to convert them into sales opportunities.
Alignment is a primary challenge for professional services companies. Being able to meet the needs of a variety of stakeholders has been challenging. Also, many companies struggle to make sure that remote workers and departments are aligned with real-time customer information, and they lack the tools to coordinate tasks and meeting schedules across teams.
Communicating their expertise and thought-leadership is often challenging for professional service companies because they are busy providing services not writing or sharing that expertise on their website, internally, and/or across their social media networks.
Targeting is essential for professional service companies to grow. They need to foster relationships with key accounts and segment their prospects so they can prioritize and nurture those leads. They also need to target their messaging for various key audiences and stakeholders.
As with most industries, professional services has been hit with customers who have developed exceptionally high expectations. To put it bluntly, they are spoiled, and they want things, the way they want them; in fact, 69% of customers expect new ways to get professional services, for example remotely. The good news is that 84% of customers reward excellent service with future purchases and loyalty. Another important statistic to consider is the cost per lead which is on average $132.
What else do consumers want? They want things to be easy to use, whether it is your website, video content, booking appointments, and so on. They also want things to be customizable and personalized, and most of all, they want individualized treatment.
Now, let’s think about how HubSpot can help you overcome the challenges facing your industry and meet the needs and wants of your buyers.
HubSpot’s tools allow you to confront many of the disruptors in the industry from the diminishing talent pool to the technological revolution to new business models that include services that are personalized (but not necessarily in person). Nearly 50% of CFO’s plan to speed up plans to digitize, automate, and make everything doable, remotely. Firms have to cast nets for talent further and wider than before, and they have to adopt new business models, like subscription-pay and lay old ones to rest.
HubSpot’s CRM platform has all the tools and integrations you need to solve for the many challenges mentioned above. HubSpot was created so that never again do you have multiple platforms you’re trying to force to work together, and instead everyone is operating from one single source of truth. Likewise, each one is intuitive and easy to use for the ultimate customer experience. Each product in the HubSpot CRM platform is powerful alone, but the real magic happens when you use them together.
HubSpot helps you to create a connected customer experience for individuals and companies seeking your services. It allows you to automate and unify your sales, marketing, and service teams so everyone is on the same page. It allows you to create workflows that make communication more efficient, while at the same time tracking them to ensure all leads are followed-through and buyer’s needs are met.
Sales Hub, Marketing Hub, Service Hub, CMS Hub, and Operations Hub are each part of HubSpot’s connected CRM platform to help you grow better. When you use two or more hubs together, your data is automatically connected on the platform, enabling you to easily (and powerfully) track your entire customer journey from first website visit, to closed deal, to happy customer.
Sales Hub
HubSpot Sales Hub is a time-saving sales CRM that provides you with an in-depth 360 degree view of your prospects, while minimizing busy work and giving your sales team time to close deals. Sales Hub can also help you leverage documents, and track bids and proposals, ensuring the right follow-up communications occur. Sales Hub helps you track revenue by deal stage across various pipelines. Create email onboarding sequences to automate deal stage communications and reduce manual follow-up for recurring communications. And, that is just the tip of the iceberg.
Rather than using multiple tools to accomplish each of these tasks separately, HubSpot’s sales software enables teams to do all their work under one roof. Save time and energy by using a single tool, rather than splitting up your team’s energy (and information) across multiple platforms..
Marketing Hub
HubSpot Marketing Hub is a CRM-powered marketing platform that allows you to create, manage, and track your marketing campaigns. It provides everything you need to get found, connect with new prospects, and nurture them into buyers.
With Marketing Hub, all your marketing tools and data are in one place, so you don’t have to juggle multiple solutions and waste time stitching together reporting. It’s deeply powerful and easy to use. Last but not least, you can easily sync Marketing Hub with more than 1,250 custom integrations so your marketing team has all its favorite tools on one platform.
Popular features in HubSpot’s marketing software include the ability to:
- Build personalized, automated email campaigns
- Track marketing performance with built-in analytics and custom reporting
- Manage all your social media accounts in one place
- Design and host SEO optimized blog posts and web pages
- Get your whole team speaking with one voice with campaign management tools
Service Hub
Service Hub allows you to provide superior customer service. Among other things, it allows you to manage the onboarding of new customers, collect, organize, and respond to customer support requests, and ensure the growth and satisfaction of your customers.
While most customer service software solutions solve for a specific use case, Service Hub is unique in its connection to the HubSpot CRM platform. With features that make it easy to deliver authentic, personalized service, Service Hub empowers you to prioritize the customer experience.
CMS Hub
CMS Hub is a content management system (CMS) that facilitates creating, managing, and modifying information on a website. With a CMS, your developers can build flexible, beautiful website themes that your marketing team can use to make website updates on their own, creating and personalizing your website for every visitor.
HubSpot’s CMS Hub allows marketers to take ownership over their website. You won’t have to worry about security concerns or broken pages, freeing you up to focus on the experience you’re providing customers instead. And with flexible themes, you can ensure your brand and design stay consistent across pages.
Operations Hub
The Operations Hub seamlessly integrates with all the tools above, and allows you to connect data and automate processes for a friction-free experience between your teams. You are essentially aligning large amounts of data around a secure, single source of truth and presenting it in a clean, consistent, and easily accessible manner. Likewise, the Operations Hub helps you streamline processes that allow you to reduce manual work while at the same time personalizing your messaging and improving customer experience.
Wondering if HubSpot is right for you? Schedule a call with Carrie Gallagher at Lovable Marketing and learn how to start generating and nurturing the right leads for your business.
Let’s Discuss Your HubSpot Consulting Needs!
Now, let’s dig into how HubSpot has helped other professional services companies like yourselves.
As you can see, HubSpot has worked with many companies in the professional services space to solve challenges with awareness, alignment, communication, targeting and much more. Let’s take a look at a couple.
Townsend Security in Olympia, Washington is a small company specializing in helping enterprises meet compliance and mitigate risk of data breaches. They were struggling to create content that was converting into leads. With HubSpot’s help, they were able to increase their lead generation by 80%.
The competition in their sector is fierce which meant they had to find a way to build awareness without the same budget as larger competitors. Their organic traffic was down by 38% and leads down by 23% until they doubled-down on website optimization and content creation. The insights and metrics provided by HubSpot helped them to strategize and make changes. The Sales Hub Pro and CRM also helped their sales and marketing teams to align and fight the competition. They were able to increase their traffic by 55%, increase leads 12 times what they were producing before and generated 600 leads.
Ignite is a leadership community that provides mid-level leaders with an engaging learning platform and curriculum to help them thrive. With a cobbled tech stack, they were unable to prevent non-members from attending free events; they were unable to produce them efficiently; and they needed to switch from a consumer model to a corporate model. With Hubspot Payments, they increased free trial sign-up by 300%, and 50% less time was spent on payment management. They were also able to establish workflows that helped them automate event processes, and therefore, they were able to cut their their time spent on training production by 30%. Finally, they used HubSpot’s marketing tools to get in front of corporate clients more easily and demonstrate their value to their new target audience.
Eastridge provides global contingent workforce solutions for a broad range of clients here in the United States. Before Hubspot, they were struggling to standardize operations and systems as well as centralize campaigns. With HubSpot’s help they were able to increase their customer growth by 10%.
Eastridge had a lack of connectivity, no automation, and no standardized operations between sales and marketing. Likewise, they didn’t have access to reliable data to track leads and guide marketing. With HubSpot, they established workflows and automated processes, and with reliable data, they were able to group leads and track engagement. Likewise, they executed strategic marketing campaigns that aligned with sales processes and core services, then measure and evaluate their successes.
As you can see, HubSpot can solve the sales, marketing, and operations challenges facing professional services companies today. HubSpot continues to be recognized for being world class in this space and was awarded for fastest implementation and most implementable in 2021. Who wouldn’t want that?
