HubSpot adds Operations Hub to drive revenue ops shift

HubSpot Wednesday kicked off an ambitious effort to unify sales, marketing, and service processes with the launch of Operations Hub.

The offering is directed at companies that are beginning to unify various operations teams within sales, marketing, and services groups in order to create a single revenue operations (Revenue Ops) organization, HubSpot VP Andy Pitre said.

Operations Hub is an extension of the HubSpot customer relationship management (CRM) application through which those cross-functional teams can manage business workflows on an end-to-end basis for each customer, Pitre added. It’s available in Free, Starter, and Professional versions. In addition, the platform bi-directionally synchronizes data across applications such as Microsoft Dynamics and NetSuite.

Citizen developers and power users can also extend those processes using low-code tools based on a JavaScript framework that HubSpot makes available. It also supports a Lambda serverless computing framework from Amazon Web Services (AWS) to orchestrate event-driven workflows.

As those processes evolve, however, professional developers will have the option of working with their preferred development tool to further customize them, Pitre said.

In effect, Operations Hub makes it possible to unify a flywheel of processes that all tie into the same content management system, Pitre added. “We’re opening up the hood of HubSpot,” he said.

HubSpot is also working toward adding additional analytics and data management capabilities within each of the marketing, sales, and service hubs it provides. In the longer term, it may open up AI models it has created to end users that might wish to extend them, Pitre noted.

Historically, sales, marketing, and customer service have been managed by organizations in isolated silos. But that is changing. Now it has become more common for customer service representatives to upsell customers. Sales representatives are also increasingly crafting their own content marketing campaigns to drive leads. Meanwhile, marketing teams are running ecommerce sites that enable end customers to acquire products and services without ever engaging a sales representative. Revenue operations break down the silos to work with a single pipeline.

The HubSpot CRM application provides a system of record that enables all those customers to be engaged in a consistent fashion, Pitre said.

Organizations see shifts

Just about every provider of a CRM platform is now trying to drive some level of unification across sales, marketing, and service functions. As a provider of a CRM platform that many organizations already rely on to drive marketing automation, Hubspot sees an opportunity to expand its reach.

Many organizations are just coming to terms with Revenue Ops as a concept, and it’s not always clear who is in charge of the area. However, the title chief revenue officer is starting to supplant more mundane titles, such as vice president of sales.

Regardless of how or even to what degree organizations embrace Revenue Ops, the whole sales and marketing motion within organizations is being transformed. Much of the impetus for that shift is being driven by the need to either launch or accelerate digital business transformation initiatives in the wake of the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.

It wasn’t always easy to get an appointment with customers prior to the pandemic. These days, it’s often next to impossible.

The HubSpot operations effort comes as enterprises continue moving to online channels. Organizations of all sizes now depend on online engagements with customers in place of sales teams that travel to visit a customer. Not only are many of the individuals sales teams used to regularly visit in person now working from home, visits are discouraged due to the pandemic.

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