A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is specially designed to make your life easier. This is the case for many HubSpot CRM users who report that their sales and service teams love HubSpot’s free CRM for this very reason.
Do you feel like you're only tapping into a small percentage of HubSpot's capabilities? Are you looking for ways to better utilise the HubSpot CRM?
If so, you're in the right place. As a Platinum HubSpot Solutions Partner, we’ve had several years of experience both with using the HubSpot CRM and onboarding our clients onto the HubSpot CRM Suite.
In this blog post, we’ll run through our top tips and tricks to help ensure that you are getting the most out of your HubSpot CRM.
Clean up your HubSpot CRM database on a regular basis
As you begin using the HubSpot CRM and entering all your business information into the system, it’s very important to have the most accurate data available. However, contacts that have bounced, marked you as spam or unsubscribed are no longer a part of your marketing efforts, so do not include them in your system. By removing these contacts from your HubSpot CRM, you will help clean up your database and improve email deliverability, reporting, and domain reputation. Additionally, you won’t have to pay for additional contacts since you are not yet enrolled on the Marketing Contact plan.
Maintaining good data in your CRM is a vital component of data hygiene best practices.
Document your lead management process
It’s important for both your sales and marketing teams to get behind the same goals and understand how to structure your messaging at every stage of the buyer’s journey. Rather than having marketing impose or dictate sales enablement tools and materials, these should be developed and refined collaboratively by both teams. One way to achieve sales and marketing alignment is by documenting your lead management process.
A documented lead management process identifies the following:
How many times have you seen a lead sitting in the wrong disposition? Maybe, you just deployed a new process, and your sales reps are simply not following.
Remember, salespeople, are talking to multiple prospects, handling objections, and managing their pipeline every single day. The easier you can make their entire process of dispositions, the fewer mistakes your sales managers will encounter from the team.
One of the best ways to ensure quality control of sales data is to build out a lot of workflows that automate a bunch of redundant tasks inside HubSpot CRM for your sales team.
Here are our top five workflows that’ll help your sales team:
Here is an example of a lead nurturing workflow:
Reaching out to prospects at the right time is an integral part of the inbound methodology.
One way to do this is by using the e-mail extension tool in HubSpot. This tool allows you to connect your Gmail or Outlook e-mail account to the CRM in order to track e-mails, provide notifications and updates, and link contact information from your e-mail to the CRM for more complete records. Additionally, the tool allows for scheduled sending of e-mails which is invaluable to obtaining the best open rates. Finally, it can be set up to notify you of e-mail openings which then lets you gauge interest and follow up with a call.
Another way to achieve this is through a lead scoring model. Lead scoring is a powerful tool to help you identify ‘hot leads’ based on their interaction with your company.
In a perfect world, leads would flow continuously through the sales funnel, always moving closer to the inevitable closing of the deal. The reality is, you simply can’t win every deal in the pipeline. But just because some leads don’t close when you want them to doesn’t mean they’re unattainable.
Having a nurturing strategy in place for ‘Closed Lost’ leads is vital. After all, these leads have previously shown interest in your offerings and have gone through the qualification process and selling phase. With a smart strategy in place, closed lost can become closed-won over time.
Here’s how:
In today’s time, it’s all about making it as easy as possible for your leads and prospects to engage with you. The HubSpot platform has evolved over the years and is now more customer-centric than ever. Leverage this to your advantage by:
This tool enables you to:
Configure your meetings tool
An invaluable and often overlooked feature of the HubSpot CRM package is the meeting link tool. This is one of the first steps of our HubSpot onboarding process, where HubSpot clients are shown how to connect their calendar to HubSpot in order to set up a meeting link. This way, they can quickly schedule calls with their prospects without the back-and-forth conversation about availability.?
Learn how to connect your calendar to HubSpot?so that HubSpot knows when you can and cannot book a meeting. You can give your leads the option to easily reschedule at their convenience, without prolonging the process with tedious back-and-forth e-mails.
Maximise the ROI of your HubSpot investment
HubSpot is a robust platform with many features. With four ‘Hubs’ that cover marketing, sales, services and operation functions, there is so much you can do with it. Even just considering the 30+ features of HubSpot CRM and Sales can be overwhelming.
Be sure to follow our top HubSpot CRM tips and tricks to get the most out of your HubSpot platform. If you’re still struggling to see a noticeable return on your HubSpot investment, perhaps it’s time to consider conducting a HubSpot portal audit.