HubSpot can be a strategic growth engine for companies aiming to streamline operations and enhance customer experiences. But any significant investment comes with pressure to prove the financial upside. This guide provides a framework to help you measure, communicate, and increase the return on your HubSpot investment.
Defining Your HubSpot ROI Framework
Measuring real ROI depends on metrics that point to tangible business impact. This means looking beyond "vanity metrics," like social media likes, that may not translate to your bottom line. Instead, prioritize KPIs based on efficiency, customer retention, and revenue. Once you have a measurement framework that reflects your overarching business objectives, you can track the results that resonate with leadership to justify your marketing software investment.
Connecting HubSpot CRM Investment Value Metrics to Business Goals
To measure HubSpot's value to your business, there must be a clear alignment between its capabilities and your company's top-level objectives. Whether your primary goals include increasing market share, reducing customer churn, or improving sales efficiency, HubSpot can be a powerful enabler.
The opportunity lies in translating these broad objectives into specific, measurable KPIs directly within the platform. For example, if a goal is to reduce churn, relevant HubSpot KPIs might include Net Promoter Score (NPS), customer lifetime value (CLV), or the average time to resolution for support tickets. HubSpot has notable strengths in these areas, with 72% of service leaders seeing increased CLV.
Establishing Your Baseline
Establishing a baseline for ROI measurement involves documenting key metrics before the full HubSpot implementation or optimization. This data provides the essential benchmark you will use to measure all future improvements and show objective progress. Consider metrics like your pre-HubSpot customer acquisition cost (CAC), the average lead-to-customer conversion rate, the typical sales cycle length, and any KPIs related to current priority areas in your overarching business objectives.
Benchmarking these figures can help justify the investment in HubSpot and show its positive influence on your company's financial health over time. But if you want to maximize that positive impact, you need a strategy to take advantage of the customer relationship management solution's most valuable capabilities.
4 Levers for Increasing HubSpot ROI
Maximizing your HubSpot ROI and proving the value of your CRM investment depends on an implementation strategy that delivers tangible financial returns. Here are four ways your company can get the most out of HubSpot.
1. Driving Sales Efficiency and Revenue
The Sales Hub within HubSpot offers capabilities designed to shorten the sales cycle and boost representative productivity:
- Automating lead rotation ensures new leads are promptly assigned to the right sales professionals, preventing delays and missed opportunities.
- Using sequences allows for personalized, automated follow-ups, seamlessly maintaining engagement.
- Implementing lead scoring helps sales teams prioritize prospects who are most likely to convert, focusing their time and effort on high-potential opportunities.
These features translate into financial metrics like increased sales velocity — closing more deals in less time — and a lower CAC as sales efforts become more targeted and efficient.
2. Improving Marketing Effectiveness and Attribution
The Marketing Hub lets you prove marketing's contribution to closed-won deals through attribution reporting. Multi-touch revenue attribution shows every touch point a customer had with your company before making a purchase, revealing which marketing efforts are driving revenue.
Beyond attribution, the Marketing Hub features automated lead nurturing workflows that guide prospects through the buyer's journey with personalized content and timely interactions. This increases the lead-to-marketing-qualified-lead conversion rate, ensuring sales teams receive higher-quality prospects ready for engagement.
3. Enhancing CLV
Customer retention is necessary for sustainable growth, and the Service Hub provides purpose-built tools to enhance CLV. Features like ticketing systems increase efficiency in managing and resolving customer inquiries, leading to improved satisfaction. Implementing customer feedback surveys, like NPS questionnaires, helps you identify areas for improvement and gauge customer sentiment.
Enhanced customer satisfaction correlates with a higher CLV and increased revenue. Happy customers are more likely to remain loyal, make repeat purchases, and even become advocates for your brand.
4. Leveraging Integrations for a Single Source of Truth
HubSpot integrates seamlessly with NetSuite and other enterprise resource planning platforms. This eliminates data silos by creating a unified, 360-degree perspective and consolidating all customer data into a single source of truth.
This comprehensive picture of customer relationships — from initial marketing interactions to sales history and support tickets — enhances decision-making and provides more accurate and consistent company-wide reporting. It also delivers the insights you need to improve operations and reliably demonstrate ROI.
How to Show Your HubSpot ROI
When your goal is to secure ongoing financial support from leadership, how you communicate the business value of your HubSpot investment can be as important as achieving the results themselves. A compelling, data-driven narrative is important when conveying your HubSpot CRM ROI.
Create Your HubSpot ROI Dashboard
Build a custom ROI dashboard within HubSpot to provide a clear and consistent view of your performance with the platform. Use this dashboard to visualize your key financial metrics, like CAC, CLV, average sales cycle length, and marketing-sourced revenue. This dashboard is your single source of truth for your ROI story, helping stakeholders grasp HubSpot's impact on your company's bottom line and guiding data-driven decision-making for sustained progress.
Tell the Story With Data
When presenting your case for ongoing investment in HubSpot, follow these three simple steps:
- Start by establishing the baseline metrics from before your optimization efforts.
- Show the improvements from your HubSpot strategies, highlighting efficiency and revenue gains.
- Project the future value and potential for continued growth.
This creates a persuasive narrative — investing X dollars into HubSpot led to these improvements, generating Y new revenue, and here's how much more we could generate with further investment.
Maximize Your HubSpot ROI With GSI and Flawless Inbound
Proving and improving HubSpot ROI requires a blend of technical execution, deep platform knowledge, and strategic business insights. While HubSpot offers powerful tools, expert guidance can be pivotal to unlocking the platform's full potential. For strategic support customizing HubSpot to maximize ROI, choose Flawless Inbound, powered by GSI.
Flawless is a Diamond HubSpot partner and implementation specialist. Customizing HubSpot to your business needs and objectives is our area of expertise. From optimizing implementation and automation strategies that leverage the platform's built-in capabilities to creating custom integrations unique to your company, our team has the skills to maximize your HubSpot ROI. Flawless is also a leading provider of HubSpot-to-NetSuite integration services for 360-degree insights.
Ready to prove and improve the value of your CRM? Contact us today to discover how we can help your company achieve operational excellence with HubSpot.
FAQs
How do I calculate HubSpot ROI?
Once you know how much new revenue you can attribute to HubSpot implementation or optimization, you can calculate your ROI as a percentage with this formula: ROI = (Total revenue from HubSpot - Total investment in HubSpot) / Total investment in HubSpot * 100%.
You can also use the Flawless Inbound HubSpot ROI calculator to find your ROI, as well as other metrics like percentage change in marketing leads, deals created, and revenue. This tool shows the average outcomes customers see in these KPIs when investing in HubSpot, so you can benchmark your company's results.
How often should I measure HubSpot CRM ROI?
ROI measurement is an ongoing process. While some metrics, like leads generated, are worth checking monthly or weekly via a custom HubSpot dashboard, reviewing your overall ROI calculations quarterly is ideal to keep up with internal financial reports and adapt implementation strategies for maximal returns.
Will my company get a positive ROI from HubSpot?
While most HubSpot users see revenue gains, simply implementing HubSpot does not guarantee a positive ROI. Consult an expert HubSpot implementation partner like Flawless Inbound to get the most from your HubSpot investment.