Sometimes there aren’t enough hours in the day for busy sales representatives (or marketing staff!) to get everything done. We get it. And we can help.
If your organization uses HubSpot, here are five easily implemented tools that will minimize busy work and supercharge your sales team’s efforts.
Use The Inbox Integration
The HubSpot Sales extension allows users (in all plans) to access sales tools directly from their inboxes, instead of going into individual HubSpot records. Setting up this add-in will return your investment of a few minutes almost immediately. Talk about a time and sanity saver!
If the add-in is being used, once a contact’s name or email is entered as the recipient of the email, their information appears in a contact pane to the right of the email body. The sender has immediate access to templates, documents and sequences and can create, view and edit meetings from their inbox.
Further, the email will be logged into the contact’s activity log in HubSpot, forever recorded for future reference. The sender can also opt to be notified when the recipient opens their email.
Decide that a phone call is better than an email or want to add something via a quick conversation? You can initiate a call using this integration, too.
Keep Up With the Timelines
Having all the pertinent information regarding a contact, company or deal in one place is essential, and you can find it all in the HubSpot timelines.
Whenever there is an interaction at the contact, company, deal (or ticket) level in HubSpot, that activity is recorded in the record’s timeline. You can find the following in these feeds:
- Notes
- Emails
- Calls
- Tasks
- Engagement
- Lifecycle stages … and more!
Imagine picking up the phone and calling a prospective client, only to find out your associate left them a voicemail earlier in the day. (Awkward!) If you take a moment to check their timeline, you will see a record of that call – and know to put the phone down.
The activity tab has it all, but if that feels clunky, there are other tabs that only show notes, emails, calls, tasks or meetings, respectively. Users can also filter what they want to be displayed to keep it tidy or hide irrelevant information.
I like to say, “If it’s not in HubSpot, it didn’t happen.” And where I look to check is the activity tab in the record’s timeline. It’s important to know what sort of engagement has already occurred with a contact or their company before going full steam ahead.
Also, if contacts are associated with a company or deal, their activity will appear in the deal activity log, as will contact info in their associated company. It’s quite comprehensive, so it’s easy to avoid mix-ups and keep communication streamlined.
See Who’s Looking With The Prospects Tool
Wouldn’t it be handy to know who’s been visiting your website, even if they’re not already in your database? The prospects tool can clue you in by using the HubSpot tracking code to recognize the IP address for each page view. Then, it pulls up publicly available details about the company associated with that IP address to give you some insight into your website visitors.
A simple search and quick click will populate your prospects list, and you can manage them right there to create favorites, add records to your database, find their company LinkedIn profile or even see similar or related companies in their industry. That’s a wealth of information, giving you valuable insight into new and existing prospects.
Not only does it collect the data, HubSpot will let you know who has been on your site. If you’d like to be notified about website visitor activity, you can opt to receive a daily email summary of the companies visiting your website as well as real-time notifications when a company in your view re-visits your site. You can choose to send alerts to yourself or to an entire team.
Setting up notifications and checking these summaries are terrific ways to efficiently parse through the prospect tool data and give further attention to the most promising visitors without a daily trip down a rabbit hole.
Automate Your Sales Outreach
Outreach is a huge part of sales but automating some of that communication and follow-up can help reduce sales’ workload immensely. HubSpot employs two main automation features: sequences and workflows.
Sequences generally contain multiple touches: a mix that can include calls, templated emails, totally automated emails and LinkedIn contact. Use sequences to provide relevant content, follow up after an event or nurture leads over time. Contacts enrolled in a sequence receive a series of personalized, timed, one-to-one emails that don’t have that “canned” feel. Contacts will proceed through all prescribed steps of the sequence but can be unenrolled manually or when a response is received in the form of an email reply or booked meeting.
You can monitor your sequence from its summary page, where you can also pause or resume enrollment. Sequences are only available in Professional and Enterprise accounts.
Workflows are a bit different, mainly when it comes to each step being automated. Workflows automatically enroll contacts who meet specified enrollment triggers. Certain parameters can be set for suppressing enrollment and there are other settings involving unenrollment and re-enrollment, so contacts don’t end up with dozens of emails from you in short order!
In a sales outreach scenario, for example, let’s say your sales team will have a booth at a hardware trade show in Toledo. You might set up a workflow to send a series of emails (containing intentional, valuable content, of course!) to all contacts in that industry in Toledo.
You may want to narrow the field more, and that is entirely possible by using more filters. Workflows can contain if/then branches, so subsequent emails or actions depend on their interaction with the first one.
The possibilities are many, limited only by the data you need to use as filters. Some other examples:
- You could use a workflow to send out a birthday email to a contact whose birthdate is known and recorded as a property in their record. You could even have it arrive two days early.
- Send out an email to customers six months after their initial purchase to remind them of an add-on feature, with subsequent follow-up based on their interactions with that email.
- Having a webinar? Send invites to your target audience 30 days prior to the event. Two weeks later, send it (or a slight variation) again to anyone who didn’t open it. Then, you could set up another workflow to send a reminder email to registered attendees two days before the webinar. Afterward, send out a thank you email with links to event content.
In short, workflows give you the ability to reach a targeted audience, large or small, with content and that content can be automatically tailored by their behavior. Detailed data will give you valuable insight into how well (or not!) your workflow performed.
Workflows can also be used for notifications, setting properties, creating tasks, sending leads to the sales team and more … but that’s another conversation!
Sales execs who spend less time and energy completing redundant tasks, identifying choice leads and organizing data have more time and energy to sell. And isn’t that what they do best? These features can help supercharge your team’s sales efforts by easily optimizing communication, saving time and allowing more effort to be put toward the hottest prospects and closing deals.
If you’d like to learn more about how we can help your organization implement HubSpot and optimize your entire customer lifecycle using HubSpot’s full potential, we’d be happy to assist.
