Manufacturing is a crucial component of the global economy — recently, the industry represented nearly 16% of the global GDP. Today, manufacturing is more critical than ever but faces a host of new challenges.
Supply chains are continually being disrupted while skilled labor is becoming harder to find and keep. Consumers are becoming more challenging to reach and engage. Technology is changing, competitions are getting more fierce, and growing a manufacturing business is extremely difficult with the number of challenges locally and globally. Innovation to meet customer demands and needs are essential.
One way manufacturers are evolving is the shift toward virtual sales which can lower the cost per visit, extend your reach, and significantly improve sales effectiveness, and in the end delight customers who are likely to reward suppliers that do it well.
Manufacturers are faced with a number of challenges as mentioned above. More specifically, they are challenged with content creation and production, technology that is outdated, targeting leads based on buyer persona, and having limited skilled personnel for handling sales and marketing needs.
Content Challenges
When we look closer at the content challenges facing manufacturers, we see they’re struggling to create content that connects to their buyers in human ways. Often times, manufacturers struggle to create all the product and technical documentation they need and struggle to ensure that the stakeholders in their ecosystem have the right information when they need it.
Outdated Technology Challenges
Outdated technologies are also a big challenge for manufacturers. They have historically been tech-light and now are scrambling to adopt cloud-based solutions. Until now, customer data and account information has been stored in disorganized files like spreadsheets, and sales and customer service have different views of customer account information.
Targeting Challenges
Sales managers in manufacturing have struggled to assign territories based on geographic locations, and reps have struggled to prioritize sales leads and opportunities, while the marketing department struggles to create campaigns that truly target buyers based on their preferences.
Limited Resource Challenges
Limited resources is something hitting many industries. In manufacturing specifically, the average sales rep is 3-5 years from retirement and finding and hiring new sales reps is difficult. Marketing departments in manufacturing are often underfunded and most of their time is spent on product brochures and event prep. Like most industries, many staff members wear a number of hats as it is and struggle to accomplish their daily tasks, let alone take on any extra sales and marketing task overflows.
Digital Impact on Manufacturing
Let’s look at how digitization has impacted manufacturing: 70% of manufacturers are attending webinars to grow their business. It is important to note that the customers of manufacturers prefer to learn about products and installation via video, and 84% of customers use search engines like Google to find products. How can you use this information to grow and improve your business model?
https://biteable.com/blog/video-marketing-statistics/
https://www.addsearch.com/blog/site-search-statistics/
Top Four Buyer Expectations
What are buyers’ expectations? They want current product information and technical specifications. They also want the content to be personalized and relevant to them. Equally important is transparency about product availability and delivery.
Manufacturing Companies Grow Better with HubSpot
Manufacturers utilizing HubSpot are seeing a 40% increase in website visitors, 163% increase in inbound leads, and 196% in deal closed-WON, and 65% improvement in deal close rates. Impressive.
Here’s another graph that clearly demonstrates the positive effects HubSpot can have on your manufacturing business.
The HubSpot Customer Platform
HubSpot is an AI-powered customer platform that connects your marketing, sales, customer service, content, data, and revenue processes around one shared CRM.
Instead of forcing separate systems and disconnected data to work together, HubSpot gives your teams a shared view of your prospects and customers. Marketing can see what’s happening in sales. Sales can see the marketing activity that led to a conversation. Service teams have the context of the entire customer relationship. And automation can connect processes across all of them.
At the center of the platform is HubSpot Smart CRM, which connects your customer data across HubSpot’s products. HubSpot’s Breeze AI tools are also integrated throughout the platform to help teams automate work, create and analyze content, research prospects and customers, and use CRM data more effectively.
HubSpot’s six core products are Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, Content Hub, Data Hub, and Revenue Hub. Each can be used on its own, but the real power comes from using them together because they share the same CRM and customer data.
Sales Hub
Sales Hub is HubSpot’s AI-powered sales software for building pipeline and closing deals.
Sales teams can manage contacts and companies, build deal pipelines, automate follow-up with sequences and workflows, track sales activity, forecast revenue, score leads, create playbooks, and manage prospecting from one connected workspace.
Because Sales Hub is built on HubSpot Smart CRM, your sales team can also see the marketing, service, and other customer activity surrounding each relationship instead of working from an isolated sales database.
Marketing Hub
Marketing Hub brings your marketing data, campaigns, automation, and lead generation tools together with your CRM.
You can use Marketing Hub to create and automate email campaigns, build forms and landing pages, manage campaigns and social media, segment audiences, score leads, personalize communications, and measure how marketing activity contributes to leads and revenue.
HubSpot is also increasingly incorporating AI into Marketing Hub, including AI-powered lead generation, campaign creation, automation, and tools that help marketers understand how buyers are discovering their brands through both traditional search and AI-generated answers.
Service Hub
Service Hub connects customer service and customer success with the rest of the customer journey.
Teams can manage support through HubSpot’s help desk and ticketing tools, create a knowledge base, collect customer feedback, route requests, track service performance, and manage customer success and retention.
Service Hub also includes AI-powered tools such as Customer Agent, which can answer customer questions and take actions using your business and CRM data. Because service activity lives alongside marketing and sales data, your team has a much more complete picture of each customer relationship.
Content Hub
Content Hub replaced what was previously known as CMS Hub and expands HubSpot’s website tools into a broader AI-powered content marketing platform.
In addition to building and managing websites, landing pages, and blogs, Content Hub includes tools for content creation, personalization, repurposing, podcasts, video, reporting, and content management.
HubSpot is also bringing answer engine optimization into Content Hub with HubSpot AEO, which helps businesses understand how their brands appear when buyers ask questions in AI tools and identify opportunities to improve that visibility.
Data Hub
Data Hub is the evolution of what was previously Operations Hub. It’s designed to help businesses connect, clean, organize, and activate data across HubSpot and the rest of their technology stack.
Data Hub includes data syncing, data quality tools, automation, reporting, and tools for combining first- and third-party data. It can also help connect HubSpot with external data sources and maintain cleaner, more consistent CRM data.
This becomes increasingly important as businesses use more AI because the quality of the results you get from AI depends heavily on the quality and completeness of the underlying data.
Revenue Hub
Revenue Hub is HubSpot’s connected system for managing the revenue process, including quoting, contracts, billing, and payments.
Revenue Hub is the evolution of Commerce Hub, expanding HubSpot’s commerce tools beyond payments and billing into a broader quote-to-cash process.
Because this information lives alongside your CRM data, sales, service, and finance processes can stay connected to the customer relationship instead of operating from separate systems.
What about HubSpot’s AI tools?
AI isn’t really a separate Hub. Breeze, HubSpot’s collection of AI tools, is integrated throughout the customer platform.
Depending on the HubSpot products and features you’re using, AI can help with everything from prospecting and customer service to content creation, data analysis, automation, research, and CRM work.
HubSpot is also expanding its AI agent capabilities so businesses can use agents to perform work using the context and data already stored in HubSpot.
Wondering if HubSpot is right for your business?
Choosing the right HubSpot products and figuring out how they should work together depends on your business, your existing technology, and what you’re trying to accomplish.
If you’re considering HubSpot, I can help you determine what you actually need and provide hands-on HubSpot onboarding to configure the platform around your business.
If you’re already using HubSpot and need help with automation, integrations, CRM cleanup, custom objects, reporting, training, or another specific challenge, take a look at my one-off HubSpot projects.
And if you’re not quite sure what kind of help you need, schedule a 15-minute HubSpot consultation and tell me what you’re working on.