“A strategic, cross-functional discipline designed to increase sales results and productivity by...
What are most businesses doing if sales figures start to decline? They hire more salespeople – or resort to more cold calling. What if it were possible to achieve better ROI in the sales department without hiring more people or taking on more sales calls? With marketing automation, it’s actually possible. Here's how you can solve the task using inbound sales and HubSpot.
A good salesperson, puts down a lot of time to read up on prospects before reaching out, and this process can, of course, be time-consuming – yet essential for the salesperson to succeed in closing the deal. So how do you solve this? By using inbound marketing, inbound sales and the marketing automation software HubSpot.
5 Ways HubSpot can help you free up hours for your most important tasks
1) Less time researching prospects
Proficient salespeople know that a deal doesn’t close itself and that prospects no longer believe in generic sales pitches. It’s therefore necessary that the salesperson is well acquainted with the prospect that he or she will meet before they initiate the first call.
How do you do this without spending your entire working day on research? The answer is, as you may already have guessed, inbound marketing and sales.
The philosophy behind the inbound methodology is:
- Attracting new, relevant visitors to the website
- Offer them tailored and relevant content that is so good that they want to leave information about themselves to access it
- Using this information to guide them through the buyer’s journey using content that answers their questions
This way, both the marketing department and the sales department can address the challenges of each prospect and help him or her make the right decision. The marketing automation software HubSpot helps the salesperson spend less time on research.
How? Because all information the prospect leaves about himself or herself in forms on the website, as well as all history of which pages the prospect has visited and what content he or she has been interested in, is located on the contact card in HubSpot.
2) Collect valuable information
When a lead downloads content that you’ve placed behind a form, you can choose which information you would like to receive as a "payment". Remember that email addresses always need to be a required field so that HubSpot manages to connect the lead to the correct contact card or create a new contact.
You should also try to find out what challenges the lead is trying to solve, for example by having a separate field with several alternatives where the lead can select which statement best applies to him or her.
This way, you can map out which persona the lead is and thus know what type of content he or she is interested in.
Come to an agreement with the marketing department on what you need to know about the leads in order to qualify them. Everything the lead does on the website, whether it's downloading a checklist or looking at the product page, the salespeople can see it in their CRM system.
As long as the lead has filled out a form and thus are registered in the system, that is.
This way, salespeople already have a good idea of what the prospect's challenge is when they talk with the lead for the first time. At the same time, they have saved time because they don’t need to create new contacts as the information is automatically transferred from the form that the lead converted from.
In order to follow your leads and their activities as described above, you need to connect your CRM system to HubSpot Marketing software. If you don’t already have CRM in HubSpot, you can set this up for free or you can integrate your existing CRM system with HubSpot.
Regardless of whether leads come through marketing automation or manually, for example, if salespeople meet prospects at trade fairs or networking events, you can always use marketing automation to track your prospects through automated emails. This way all leads are followed up quickly with relevant content – always.
3) Better running contact
If your company sells services or products that are relatively complex and are of a certain price, you most likely also have a long sales process. One of the most challenging and time-consuming tasks a salesperson has to do is to keep track of all prospects, who they’ve already been in contact with, what has been agreed to, and when to follow up.
Your salespeople are surely in talks with many leads each month and it can quickly become difficult to keep track of everyone. Therefore, a CRM system that helps them keep track of all the interaction the sales department has had with their leads can be of great help.
Salespeople should log all conversations and emails into their CRM system so that you’re able to quickly and easily see what different people in the company have talked to the prospect about, how many times the prospect has been in contact with the person and when the prospect last spoke with someone in the business, either market or sale.
In HubSpot, you can also track emails to see if the prospect has opened the emails you've sent and whether he or she has clicked any links. This will give you an overview of what content has been opened and read.
HubSpot also has a sales extension to Google Chrome that allows sending notifications to salespeople when a lead becomes sales-qualified or if a prospect has made an action that requires an immediate response, such as filling out a "contact us" form.
How quickly salespeople are contacting a sales lead is crucial to how many deals you close.
Statistics also show that the chance of a lead becoming a qualified lead is 21 times greater if the lead is contacted within five minutes, versus 30 minutes after a lead converts on the website. If you set up notifications in the CRM system, salespeople can respond faster, close more sales and become more effective.
4) Fewer administrative tasks
A large part of the working day of a salesperson is spent doing administrative work such as planning meetings, follow-up of leads, and email correspondence. This you probably can’t avoid, but there are many tools in the HubSpot Sales Pro version that can remove some of the burden.
Let's take a meeting booking as an example: With the Meetings tool, you allow people to book a meeting directly in your salesperson’s calendar through an application linking the CRM system to the calendar.
If the person booking the meeting isn’t already present in the CRM, a new contact will be created automatically. This tool works with Google Calendar and Office 365 Calendar.
The salespeople themselves can set up how much preparation time or break they need between each meeting and that way the application will ensure that people are not able to book these times. See the example of our meeting booking feature here:
5) Write personalised emails faster
HubSpot’s CRM allows you to create email templates where you can insert so-called "personalization tokens" to personalise the email. This works because the software automatically extracts the relevant information about the person to whom you send the email from the contact card, such as name or company name.
This way, you can create templates for all the typical emails that salespeople send out to prospects throughout the sales process, so salespeople don’t have to write emails from scratch every time. See example below:
It is also possible to create automatic sending of email sequences, also known as workflows. An example may be:
- The seller addresses the prospect by email
- If the recipient isn’t responding, there will be a follow-up mail
- If the recipient still isn’t responding, a "break up email" will be sent explaining that you won’t contact the person again if he or she does not respond to the email
The salesperson decides how long it will take between each email. Should the recipient answer email number two, he or she will automatically be withdrawn from the workflow so that the person does not get email number three.
Therefore, you don’t risk sending a breakup email to a contact that shows interest in what you’re saying.
These are just some of the opportunities you have to free up time to do your most important sales tasks, and with integrations, you can make your work even more effective. Want to know more about HubSpot and how it can help your business? Contact us and get a free consultation!
