In the realm of B2B transactions, ensuring a seamless and efficient payment process is crucial for businesses to maintain healthy cash flow and foster strong customer relationships. Traditionally, managing payments and subscriptions involved juggling multiple platforms and tools, leading to complexities and potential errors. However, the landscape is evolving with the advent of integrated CRM systems that offer in-built payment and subscription management capabilities.
HubSpot, a leading CRM platform, (and a favourite at Connect Labs) has recently introduced Commerce Hub, a powerful tool that empowers businesses to streamline their payment processes directly within the CRM. This innovation eliminates the need for third-party integrations and manual data entry, providing a unified platform for managing customer interactions, sales, and finances.
Let's explore how Commerce Hub revolutionises the way B2B businesses get paid online and delve into its key features and benefits.
What is Commerce Hub?
Commerce Hub is the latest addition to HubSpot, designed to simplify payment and subscription management for businesses. It seamlessly integrates with Stripe, a renowned payment gateway, to process transactions securely and efficiently. With minimal setup required, businesses can start accepting payments and managing subscriptions right from their CRM.
Now, let's explore the core functionalities of Commerce Hub and how it enhances the customer journey.
Which CRM objects does Commerce Hub introduce, and what are their key functions?
Commerce Hub brings a few new CRM Objects to work with. The two important ones to focus on are the Payment and Subscription Object.
What is a Payment?
A payment object holds the data associated with any payment activity that has occurred in HubSpot. This lets you create reports or reconcile customer charges in one place. These objects are created automatically whenever a customer completes their payment. While you can’t manually create a Payment object, heading over to Commerce > Payments will give you the option to engage in activities that result in payments.
These could be
- Creating a Quote
- Creating a Payment Link
- Creating an Invoice
- Creating a Subscription
What is a Subscription?
A subscription object captures recurring payments associated with a customer. If they make a payment that has a billing frequency assigned to it, a Subscription object is created along with the usual Payment object.
Please Note: Subscriptions and Payment Objects are not created until a transaction occurs and cannot be created manually yet.
Where do these fit into my customer journey?
HubSpot Sales users are used to creating deals to represent the ongoing sales interaction between the sales team and a prospective customer. When the customer is ready to pay, the sales team has the option to either embed the payment link inside the quote or send them an invoice.
The quoting system is powerful because it allows you to select line items from your product library with its predefined costs, while still allowing flexibility to overwrite or modify the costs before sending it over to the customer.
Commerce Hub takes this one step further by allowing you to take payments directly from quotes and converting the payment information into Payment objects and Subscription objects (if any of the line items are recurring payments).
This provides a one-stop shop for your company to engage with leads, convert them into customers and process their payments. The payment data can then be resurfaced in HubSpot’s robust reporting platform to analyse trends and make better informed decisions.
