Too Many Cooks: Why You Should Consolidate Your Business Tools

As a business, you need the perfect recipe of sales, marketing, service, and tech to build strong relationships with your customers.

Problems arise when all of these elements live on separate platforms, creating a case of too many cooks in the kitchen. Bust out the pink slips, boys and girls--it’s time to trim down.

Many eCommerce businesses suffer from a case of fragmentation--maybe even you. There’s the email service provider for email marketing, a social media planning and scheduling tool, a sales platform, CRM software, a helpdesk system...and that only covers the most basic needs of a successful business. 

Eesh.

To make matters even more complicated, most of these platforms don’t seamlessly “talk” with one another, leading to pain points in the customer experience and gaps in customer data. It’s painful, pointless, and…(relatively) easily solved.

Why Fragmentation Is Dangerous for Your Business

Inefficiency 

You sacrifice a lot of time and effort by running between seven (or eight, or nine…) different programs to keep daily operations afloat. Plus, how frustrating is it having to enter different logins, pull up multiple screens, jump from window to window, and manually triage information just to create a report or accomplish a single task?

Having everything in one place centralizes important data and significantly cuts down the time it takes to track and extrapolate it.

High Cost

Many merchants opt to buy software piecemeal because it seems cheaper upfront. Problem is, many of them spend more money in the long run on patchwork fixes and employee time spent gathering data from all their platforms--not to mention the cost of the programs themselves. 

Buying more software to fix gaps in the software you already have isn’t just more expensive; it’s also kind of illogical, tbh. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Low Visibility and Steep Learning Curve

Having one place where everything lives and then granting access to the employees who need to see it ensures that everyone stays on the same page--because they’re all looking at exactly the same data. 

This is especially useful if you have remote teams who don’t see each other’s work daily. Having consolidated data makes teamwork a heckuva lot easier. 

Program consolidation also makes life easier for business owners because they don’t have to teach their employees to use twelve different programs. 

At this point, we’re betting “fragmentation” is starting to sound highly chaotic, and all the time, data, and money probably got you like:

 Remain calm. We’re here to help.

The All-In-One Solution: HubSpot

Many people first heard of HubSpot as a pure CRM tool, but over the years, they’ve built out their toolkit and grown into a robust, comprehensive superplatform that allows you to manage everything from sales and inbound marketing to customer service and communication--all in one place. 

If you’re serious about leveling up as a business and investing in an all-in-one platform that consolidates valuable customer data and efficiency-ifies daily operations--for the love of all that is holy--let it be HubSpot.

“Why?” you ask, side-eyeing what is clearly becoming a sales-y post*.

So glad you asked.

*Yup, this post is all about HubSpot. We’re partners with them for one reason, and one reason only: shitcanning all our previous systems and moving over to HubSpot was one of the BEST choices we ever made at Tako. It transformed our business operations and eliminated such a huge amount of stress and disorganization that we can’t help but sing it (or, okay, screech it) from the rooftops. It might not be the perfect solution for everyone, but we see the benefits every day and think you might too.

OK, where were we? Ah yes. Reasons HubSpot rocks.

CRM, a.k.a The Customer Contact Record 

HubSpot’s secret sauce lies in its roots as a CRM tool: the customer contact record. 

The customer contact record is essentially a visual map of each customer’s journey as they interact with your business, from the moment they start as a wee little email lead, through their life cycle. Every purchase they make, every page they view on your website, every call they have with a sales rep, and every help ticket they submit is meticulously documented in one place. 

This insight is incredibly valuable because it helps you identify opportunities to nurture relationships with your customers, as well as pinpoint what’s working (what closes a sale) and what’s not (where they drop off). 

It also allows for a smoother handoff between teams. Your marketing team knows that Chris from Utah has purchased multiple products from your business, so they send him a 20% loyalty discount email. Your customer support team sees a Note on Chris’s contact record that he reached out for help troubleshooting an issue with a product, so they send a follow up email to make sure he was able to resolve the problem.

All these moments of personalization give Chris the impression that you are paying attention to him (and you are, thanks to HubSpot)--and that’s important because customers are more likely to interact with (and buy from) businesses that make them feel special.

Inbound Marketing

It’s impossible to talk about HubSpot without mentioning one of its key tenets: inbound marketing. There’s a reason they’ve won awards for it.

Inbound marketing is a promotional technique focused on attracting customers through valuable content and experiences using channels like social media, blogs, and SEO. 

(Tako believes in a 100% inbound approach to marketing as well, which is a big reason we felt in line with HubSpot’s values from the beginning. It is, as they say, our spe-ci-al-ity. **chef’s kiss)

Through HubSpot’s acclaimed Marketing Hub, you can manage, track, and automate all of your marketing campaigns and workflows using their comprehensive dashboard. There are too many features to name in one article, but here are some of our favorite Marketing Hub ingredients:

• • Marketing Automation - HubSpot offers a dizzying array of customizable workflows, allowing you to automate repetitive tasks like emails, content posting, offers, and sales outreach at scale. Choose from dozens of triggers, conditions, and actions to ensure you make the right moves at the right time, and all workflows integrate with your sacred contacts database--meaning you can breezily tailor each interaction to individual customers.
    
    
  • Lead Generation and Management - HubSpot gives you all the tools you need to generate leads and nurture them down your funnel. One such tool is the form builder, which you can embed right into your Shopify site to turn visitors into leads, segment contact lists to create targeted email campaigns, and assign lead scores to customers so your sales team can prioritize outreach.
    
    
  • Content Management and Optimization - Team Tako is real into content marketing, and we love HubSpot’s Marketing Hub because it allows businesses to oversee all areas of content strategy. 
    
    You can write, edit, and publish blog posts straight from their dashboard (this article was drafted and posted using HubSpot!), use their SEO tools to generate relevant content that’ll get you ranked, and even optimize your landing pages with customizable templates.
    
    
  • Social Media Management - Connect your social accounts to HubSpot and you can monitor all your social activity directly from the dashboard - every like, every comment, and every mention feeds into your Social Media Inboxes. You can also schedule posts so the right content gets published at the right time. (Nearly all of the social posts you see from Tako are scheduled and posted using HubSpot. Have we mentioned that we use [and love] HubSpot yet?)
    
    
  • Analytics and Reporting - The best part about having all your marketing streams connected to one platform is the one-stop-shop for all your analytics data. No more toggling between Google Analytics and Instagram Analytics and forgetting which graph you’re looking at, resulting in reporting the very wrong number. 😅 That has definitely never happened before, no sirree. 

All your traffic, engagement, and performance data is organized in HubSpot, so you and your teams can easily share reports and make smarter business decisions. 

Sales and Service

Once you’ve enticed customers with your sexy marketing dance (seen above), HubSpot offers a robust network of features that’ll help you convert those leads into sales--and then keep them coming back for more. 

• • Meeting Scheduling - Connect your calendars to the dashboard and share meeting links with partners, teammates, and colleagues.  
    
    
  • Documents - Maintain a shared database of marketing content, so everyone has assets on hand to send to prospects. 
    
    
  • Notes, Sequences, and Task Reminders - Use automated features to personalize your sales funnel. Leave Notes about prospects in their contact record, use Sequences to send email drip campaigns, automatically un-enroll them when they take specific actions, and use Task Reminders to ensure no follow-up action is forgotten.
    
    
  • Live Chat and Video - Customers respond well to humanized content. Create more personal one-to-one videos to embed in your emails or use the live chat feature to communicate in real-time.
    
    
  • Feedback Surveys - Collect feedback from your customers on everything, from your sales calls to your help support, so that you can always make data-driven improvements.
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Flexible Packages 

OK, truth time: some business owners do suffer an initial bout of sticker shock with HubSpot. Thankfully, you don’t have to buy the whole cow to get the milk.

For those who want to take things slow in the beginning, HubSpot is so confident in their platform that they offer key tools like contact management, email marketing, live chat, and meeting scheduling for free.

Test drive all these features in exchange for zero dollars to see how effective it is for your business before making any commitments. You’ll have up to 1,000,000 contacts, unlimited users, and no time limit on free access.

When you scale to need more advanced features, HubSpot offers three premium plans:

• • Starter - $45 per month
  • Professional - $800 per month
  • Enterprise - $3200 per month

For the more a la carte types, HubSpot allows you to pick and choose just the tools you want (just marketing and not sales/CRM, for example) or scoop up a bundle.

Can’t Wait to Get Started?

Hit them up here. (Just tell ’em Tako sentchya.) 

If you want to learn a little more before jumping in, drop us a line and we’ll happily help you figure out how HubSpot can help your business grow!