Announcing Hull Playbooks: How SaaS teams use Hull

One of the most common questions our customers ask is "how are other teams using Hull?"

Whilst everyone has the same problem - the data you need in one tool is usually in another - each team's tools, data & business are unique.

To help guide teams towards getting started with customer data integration & picking their first project, we've pulled together a library of common playbooks we see teams using Hull for.

In this post, we want to share a little more about the five most common setups teams have in Hull & what they're looking to use them for.

How do SaaS teams use Hull?

Looking for data-driven marketing ideas? See our complete library of common use cases from all these companies.

Explore Hull Playbooks

Use Case #5: Account Based Marketing Orchestration

Successful ABM is about "joining the dots" around your target list of ideal customers, and seeing how they move through the buying journey.

But since this involves many different types of data & channels, and engaging accounts is often complex too, the toolset often becomes a pain to organize.

Instead of complicating tools like Salesforce, teams are aggregating & processing their data in Hull and then syncing & updating Salesforce in real-time with only the relevant updates.

Hull simplifies account-based orchestration.

Unified User profiles capture all known data about a person (including anonymous website visitors). Unified account profiles capture all known data about a company (including their associated people).

The segmentation tool makes it simple to instantly query your entire customer database, filter what data flows to what tools, and create & update lists, segments & audiences in your end tools.

By updating in real-time, your entire system of tools, teams & data can react in harmony to your accounts as they move through the buying journey.

Explore the Account-Based Marketing Orchestration playbook

Use case #4: Smarter data enrichment

Most B2B teams we see are using some level of data enrichment to append known public data about leads or accounts to profiles.

Data enrichment is key to lead qualification, personalizing lead nurturing, tailoring sales outreach, and more.

There are two common challenges we usually see.

The first challenge is most data enrichment dumps into a CRM instead of across all your tools (particularly marketing tools). This becomes clunky to map & sync to elsewhere.

The second challenge is data enrichment providers often provide many competing versions of the same data source. You might end up with 5 versions of company_name, job_title or location from 5 different sources, potentially saying five different things.

Hull makes it simple to unify all your data in any format in Hull and append unlimited volumes of data to each profile. You can then apply fallback strategies to determine which version of the same data you want to map to your end tools, so you always have just the most complete, accurate, reliable version to sync out to your tools like Salesforce.

Explore the data enrichment playbook

Use case #3: CRM integration

"The data you need in one tool is usually in another" - nowhere is this heard more than with CRM integration.

Ever heard your sales team say "If it's not in Salesforce, it didn't happen" ?

CRMs of all levels from Salesforce to HubSpot to Close.io all struggle to integrate neatly & natively with your entire customer stack, particularly with events tracking the buying journey.

  • Website data, including companies on your website
  • Product usage data, like free trial leads
  • Third party review sites
  • Your backend database & data warehouse

Without a CRM integration strategy, your sales team is blind to all this context & opportunity to reach out.

Teams use Hull to fill-in-the-blanks in their CRMs & progressively profile target leads & accounts so their sales teams don't have to bounce between dozens of different tools.

By consolidating & controlling their CRM integration through Hull, teams can radically reduce the number of API calls & data storage (which tools like Salesforce charge substantially for). Mention saved over $15,000 on their Salesforce subscription within two months of using Hull's Salesforce integration.

Explore the CRM integration playbook

How do SaaS teams use Hull?

Looking for data-driven marketing ideas? See our complete library of common use cases from all these companies.

Explore Hull Playbooks

Use case #2: Lead qualification

The second most common use case we see is lead qualification.

Whilst closely related to CRM integration, this is strictly related to making sure sales reps talk to the right people.

Instead of leads landing with sales without any useful context, use data enrichment to build segments & pre-qualify leads before syncing them to sales. There are no limits to how you can combine data in the segmentation tool, so you can qualify leads with anything from:

  • Form submits
  • Website page views
  • Data enrichment
  • Actions in your product

Even if you don't yet have an SLA in place between your sales & marketing teams, pre-qualified leads for marketing (based on your ideal customer profile) are one fast track method we've seen repeatedly for driving sales & marketing alignment.

Sales reps no longer have to depend on their gut instincts or other rules-of-thumb to determine who to talk to. Better still, they're often far more eager to work marketing's leads since they expect a certain quality.

Explore the lead qualification playbook.

Use case #1: Single Source of Truth

The most popular playbook & use case of Hull is to simply act as the centerpiece of the marketing stack.

Unify data from all your sources into a single customer view, cleanse & transform that data ready to sync to all your tools, then keep each tool up-to-date in real-time so they always have complete, accurate data.

In an environment of complex data & tools that don't easily talk to each other, a real-time B2B customer data platform is the only method to simply & reliably tie it all together.

Explore the Single Source of Truth playbook

How do SaaS teams use Hull?

Looking for data-driven marketing ideas? See our complete library of common use cases from all these companies.

Explore Hull Playbooks

What you should do now

  1. Request a custom demo - and see how to unify & sync all your tools, teams & data (like we did for all these companies), or book a demo with a product expert.

  2. If you'd like to learn our best practice for customer data integration, read our free Guide to Getting Started with Customer Data Integration.

  3. If you enjoyed this article, perhaps your team will too? Why not share it with the links below.

Ed Fry

Prev 'Ed of Growth at Hull, working on all things content, acquisition & conversion. Conference speaker, flight hacker, prev. employee #1 at inbound.org (acq. HubSpot). Now at Behind The Growth

If you've questions or ideas, I'd love to geek out together on Twitter or LinkedIn. 👇