As a business owner you will be keenly aware of the inventory of stock that you are holding at any one time and where this poses risks and opportunities for your business. This can be a real point of stress with supply chain issues and constantly changing demand in these uncertain times. We understand that you rely on your marketing, service and sales leads and teams to help you unlock stock opportunities and mitigate the risks of not holding enough stock or holding too much.
But do your front-end teams have access to your ERP data? Do they know how much stock is being held at any one time? If the answer is no, is it any wonder that they can’t be as nimble as you would like in opening up growth opportunities and reducing risks.
Key benefits of inventory-focused front-end teams
By adding product stock data into your Hubspot account you can transform the way your front end teams use inventory data to drive revenue for your business. Here are 3 of the key benefits we have seen in implementing this approach for our Hubspot clients:
1. Smart marketing and sales planning = revenue success
By having product inventory data available in Hubspot as well as access to data on key revenue-driving products and demand, marketing and sales teams can more effectively plan and react to changing stock levels to ensure they are pushing the right products at the right time. They won’t waste effort on low stock areas but concentrate budget and time where revenue-driving products are available.
For example, phased product pushes can be planned where new stock is coming in to ensure product demand is effectively reaped and that each team has enough products to sell so customer enquiries are fulfilled. Sales teams can also more confidently and quickly cross-sell and upsell if they know stock levels are healthy.
Where product stock is low, spend can be pulled back and sales and marketing teams can utilise urgency messaging to drive last-minute sales. When stock is gone these pages can be utilised for lead capture and nurture which can be converted to revenue further down the line.
2. Better managed stock holding
Surplus stock can become a problem for the business and can become unprofitable to hold. If marketing and sales teams can easily see where there is surplus stock they can employ strategies to support the business in shifting it quickly while also driving new leads or revenue. For example, product bundles could be created to increase average order value (AOV) while also giving away surplus items. Or marketing teams could use surplus stock in customer competitions to encourage lead capture or sales (e.g. free gift with every sale).
Conversely, marketing and sales teams will be better placed to feed into buying decisions more quickly if real-time stock data is available to them. If certain products are working surprisingly well but they can see the next shipment is small that is something they can raise to the buying team ahead of time.
3. Brand engagement & improved customer service
By reassuring the customer that an out-of-stock product is coming back and that they will be the first to know when it is back in, with an automated and engaging ‘Notify me when in stock process’, you can set yourself up to be the customer’s seller of choice. If you can effectively do this with lots of personalised follow-ups they are going to be much more likely to choose you over a competitor.
Customer service teams will also have real-time data in front of them when dealing with customer enquiries which means they can provide customers with up-to-date data on when new stock is expected for example.
The benefits of giving front-end teams this data are huge and could completely transform the way those teams operate for your business. Using Hubspot it is very easy to surface this data for front-end teams.
Utilising Hubspot to give front-end teams inventory data
The way we bring stock data into Hubspot for your business can be adapted depending on how much data you want to provide to your teams, how your data is held currently and which teams will be using the data. We work with businesses to analyse the current situation and scope the most cost-efficient solution for them and their teams. Here are a few examples of implementations we have done.
Simple marketing implementation
We have a client who only wanted to utilise product stock data to improve their stock-based marketing strategies. In this example we mapped their product stock data into their Hubspot product library so that the number of items for each product was clearly visible to the marketing team, as well as when the next shipment was due for that product and how many products are in the next shipment. These fields were useful to the marketing team as they could trigger automated marketing workflows based on number of items as well as plan campaigns based on shipments of new products coming in.
Implementations for customer service & sales
We have also worked with a business who wanted customer service and sales teams to be able to use the stock data and for teams to have access to more stock data points, for example where stock is on hold already.
In this case we created a custom object to essentially replicate the stock management software database in the Hubspot CRM for those teams to use. As well as allowing us to give these teams more data points it also meant that we could help them create more tailored automated workflows for various use cases that triggered other business processes apart from just marketing and using multiple stock data points. It also allows for more detailed and custom reporting on stock within the CRM.
If you just wanted your customer service and sales teams to be able to easily see stock data but all business processes to remain within your stock management system an alternative option would be a CRM extension. This would allow sales and service teams to access stock information from the stock management system but they feel as if they are not leaving the Hubspot CRM. In this case no stock data is stored in Hubspot and you can’t run automations or reporting in Hubspot but the teams can assess stock data from the stock management system. It can be a view-only set-up or you can code it to execute certain actions in the stock management system – hold stock item for example.
No matter what your current set-up, we are confident that we can help you use Hubspot to transform the performance of your front-end teams and the success of your business using your inventory data. Interested in learning more about how we might help you? We’d love to hear from you – book a meeting now!
