HubSpot is a great resource for teams of all sizes because of its flexibility in features and price. Hubspot provides sales, marketing, and support tools, with many of the features and functionality included in the free tier. Yet, Hubspot, traditionally, has not been viewed as a user feedback tool. And that’s a shame.
Why You Should Be Using HubSpot For User Feedback
Before we dive into the how, it’s important to understand the why. Why would you use Hubspot to collect and analyze product feedback from your users? And why would you collect this information from people that may not even be users yet (prospects)?
Let’s start with your frontline—sales. This can be a sales team or it might be the CEO of the company. Those early sales conversations are a wealth of knowledge ready to be mined. Think about how a sales conversation goes:
- Identify a problem
- Drill down to the root of the problem
- Show how your product solves the problem
- Listen to feedback
- Move the deal forward (towards a lost sale or a win)
Each of these points has information that can help you better shape your product based on real-world feedback. Rather than guess what features might help your sales team close more deals and what features will help prospects solve more problems, an analysis of the information collected in each of the points above can provide you with concrete indicators that you can use with confidence. Let’s go through a hypothetical.
In the identify a problem or discovery stage, the sales person may be speaking with a prospect who has identified a general gap in logistics automation software. In the back of your mind, you remember that concept coming up a few times before. Your product doesn’t fully automate logistics, but it’s been something the team has considered building out. You continue the conversation and drive toward the root of the prospect’s problem. Turns out, it’s not just generalized logistics automation, it’s the tracking process across multiple shipping providers. Automating that would really help this person. You file that away in the old memory bank and carry on with your product demo. Throughout the demo, you take notes on the reactions the prospect has to the demo. You objection handle but you also listen. All of this information is captured. Finally, you end the call and move on to whatever is the next step in the sales process.
But how do you parse all the information you just received? And more importantly, how do you compare it to the dozens of other conversations you’ve had with other prospects? That’s where Pliik comes in.
Whether you are capturing user feedback in the form of notes on the Hubspot activity flow or if you’re sending and receiving emails through the built-in sales email functionality, all of this data can automatically be piped into Pliik. Once that happens, Pliik will use machine learning to auto-tag the messages at both a message level and a sentence level.
Pliik will also analyze the sentiment of each message and each sentence. This gives you a holistic view into the sales conversations you are having with prospects, and from there you can drill down into the common topics, themes, and issues. All without having to manually analyze this data.
Let’s face it—your sales team doesn’t want to or have time to manually analyze customer and prospect feedback.
You’re already getting a ton of great information from the sales front, but Hubspot serves marketing and support departments as well.
How to Leverage HubSpot Marketing Data For Better Product Decisions
One of the most potent tools available within the Hubspot marketing feature set is the social inbox. This feature allows you to monitor the social conversations about your product. Designed to ensure you can respond to comments and help spread brand awareness, this feature also makes it dead simple to collect user feedback and sentiment.
Social media is where many people go to express the extremes of their product feedback—anger and joy. While this can be a frustrating way to consume information, it also provides valuable data points that you’ll want to explore when making product decisions. But how can you do so in a structured way? After all, social media flood your senses like drinking from a fire hose.
The trick is not doing anything at all. If you’re doing manual work around the analysis of your social media interactions, there’s a significant opportunity cost being applied to your business elsewhere. Fortunately, Pliik takes care of all the social interaction analysis from Hubspot automatically.
The sentiment analysis of social media conversations alone might not be a good tool for making product decisions, but Pliik takes things so much deeper. Combining sentiment against automated topics, you can start to spot trends. Do you have a particular feature that constantly scores poorly on sentiment? Do you have a cluster of topics that bring your customers joy? These are the seeds that become the features and products of the future. But you have to first get the data.
How to Get Started
The first step is to sign up for a free HubSpot account if you don’t already have one. Of course, not having a HubSpot account would mean you don’t yet have HubSpot data. That’s OK. We’ll walk you through how to start capturing data as well and how that data can be fed into Pliik.
Once you have signed up for a HubSpot account, or if you already have a HubSpot account, you can now connect to Pliik. Sign up for a Pliik account here, then simply click Connect, and you’ll be on your way.
Depending on how many interactions you have in your HubSpot account, the import process could take a few seconds or many minutes. However, once you’re connected, Pliik will automatically fetch new data and bring it into Pliik for analysis.
When you’re up and running, you’ll surely want to invite your team. Just drop us a note letting us know you’d like team access, and we can help you out. Your teammates will have access immediately to all the analyzed data, and they will be able to receive weekly reports.
HubSpot is used by millions of people and thousands of business. If you’re one of them, isn’t it time you put all that HubSpot data to work for you? Try Pliik today.
