Sales Force Multiplier

11 Ways To Use Hubspot Sales CRM as a Sales Force Multiplier

Table of Contents

Let’s Face It, There Are More Opportunities Than Salesmen To Pursue Them.

 

Some would say this is a good problem to have. I say, it is a waste of money to have generated those opportunities based on setting up expensive marketing campaigns, only to have them lay fallow and ignored by today's marketing teams

Build Close Customer Relationships


What you want, instead, it is to learn where the customers are and then to use the marketing automation system and tools to help establish and maintain close customer relationships.  Makes life a lot simpler.

 

Hubspot CRM

 Need to Sell Where the Customers Are

 

What Is a Sales Manager Supposed To Do?

 

What can an Account Executive do to leverage the ‘systems’ as a force multiplier. The new Hubspot CRM, a marketing automation platform, is specifically designed to support an Inbound Sales process, and is the new kid on the block who happens to already have over 625,000 users globally, but with a lot of potential if used right.  It is one of the best force multipliers you can add to your tech stack.  I will help you significantly increase your sales team's productivity.

 

What Special About the Hubspot CRM Platform?

 

The Hubspot CRM Software Platform and All of HubSpot's marketing, sales CRM, customer service, CMS, and operations software are built on one single platform.  This all but eliminates manual data entry, among many benefits.  Ultimately, this means the CRM system is fully aware of all activities a contact has taken on your website, as well as all purchases made, and all customer support inquiries made, all key pieces of information needed to support your customer journey.

 

Holistic Lead Generation

Due to the integrated nature of the Hubspot system, lead generation, whether via content offers on your website, or from third party systems available on the Hubspot app marketplace, is handled holistically.  

 

Easy Lead Management

While generating leads that turn into sales is a top priority for sales and marketing teams, efficient, effective lead management is a prerequisite to accomplishing this.  That's why the ability of Hubspot to track every lead, from first contact on through to post sales support, is a critical capability of Hubspot.  It does this through a variety of tools, of which, the creation and population of various kinds of list and workflows to handle the, is the most critical. When it comes to Sales Management, Hubspot helps you plan, execute and track every sales activity.

 

What Business Benefit Does Hubspot's CRM Platform Deliver?

 

Having used many CRM’s over the years, including SAP, i2 and ACT!, to name 3, I was anxious to see what Hubspot would deliver with this new sales tool, especially given that they are or were originally a Marketing Platform company. 

 

Shorten the Sales Cycle

One of the major benefits of a sales automation platform is to shorten the cycle.  Hubspot does this by facilitating lead generation and tracking, providing easy-to-use sales automation, and allows for predictive lead scoring to understand how each area of your sales cycle is performing. Rather than using multiple tools to accomplish each of these tasks separately, HubSpot's sales software enables teams to do all their work under one roof.

 

Deep Analytical Insights

 

What I found was that the Sales Hub Sales CRM Software allows you to get deeper insights into prospects, automate the tasks you hate, and close more deals faster and help you keep track of deals won.  It also provides a single source of the truth for all your customer interactions.  The result? Better team alignment, and a seamless experience for your customers.

 

Creation of Custom Reports

The data collected in a CRM system offers valuable insight into sales rep productivity. Hubspot CRM reports measuring individual and team productivity help salespeople track progress against quota. These reports also give management a clear view into team performance.

 

However, Hubspot reporting goes far beyond simple reporting.  While it comes with a huge library of standard reports especially suited for marketing and sales, it also comes with a Report Builder, which provides the ability to create just about any kind of custom report you could ever need.  The user friendly interface of the Report Builder can be mastered by almost anybody with little if any training.

 

Track Your Entire Sales Pipeline

With the Hubspot Reporting Capabilities and the Sales Pipeline Modeling and Design capabilities, you can track your entire sales pipeline.  You can also track multiple products and services across multiple sales pipelines, and you can track them by countries or other groupings relevant to your business model.

 

Custom Objects

They say no man is an island.  Hubspot realizes this and provides the ability to create custom objects within the CRM system.  While there is an almost unlimited number of uses cases for this, what we commonly find is that many customers have a need to support:

 

  • Purchase Information
  • Warranty Information
  • Service Information including integration with location information based on GIS information, such as that available from Google and Apple maps.

These are very simple custom objects to create, and can vastly extend the the Hubspot system capabilities.

 

 

Build Custom Landing Pages Quickly

 

While this blog is mostly about the sales aspects of the Hubspot CRM platform, it's worth mentioning that you also have all of the Hubspot Marketing Hub Platform capabilities.  One of the most useful aspects of the marketing platform is the ability to quickly build dedicated landing pages.

 

Build an Awesome Help Desk!

 

If you use any of the Hubspot Hubs, be they marketing, sales, operations service, one thing will quickly stand out - Hubspot delivers the best support of any software provider out there. 

 

That's why one of the key sales tools you should make use of is the Hubspot Service Hub, which allows you to build a Help Desk that delivers a customer experience that will wow them.  

 

As customers ask you questions and you provide answers, the system allows you to create a online knowledge base, which as a side effect, generates many more pages for the search engines to index.  It also helps you and your customers save time, as they are able to find answers to their questions quickly.  Your sales and marketing teams will also save enormous amounts of valuable time by having these answers to common questions readily available.

 

You can see many examples of this on Hubspot itself.  Over the years, they have created an ever larger, higher quality library of knowledge base articles, based largely on customer problems they have answered as well as from suggestions customers such as ourselves have made.  These pages also include Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) and if you take the time to implement schema.org tags, you get additional Google SEO credit from these, which you can frequently verify using the Google Search Console (GSC) Tool.

 

Contextual Email Marketing Capabilities

While email marketing continues to deliver the highest ROI of any marketing activity, the integrated email marketing capability of Hubspot is unrivaled by any competitor.  Because it is built right into the Hubspot Marketing Hub, it is able to take advantage of 'signals' that are generated anywhere on your website.

 

It also can leverage lead activity signals generated on other platforms, such as webinar attendance, course completions or even live events.  This is facilitated by the Hubspot Integrations and Hubspot Connect, which all can be leveraged by the Hubspot Smart List and Workflow capabilities to deliver just the right customized message at just the right time.

 

Content Management System

While there are many Content Management Systems (CMS) out there, the Hubspot CMS is unique in that it supports marketing, sales, service and support functions.

 

It provides especially strong support to sales teams by leveraging a wide array of content management and delivery capabilities and deep analytical insights.  

 

Content can be defined fairly broadly when it comes to marketing and sales.  Regardless of how you define it, it cost a great deal of time and money to create it, and you want to know what the ROI of everything is, so you can concentrate on creating and delivering the very best content.

 

Drag and drop design capabilities are one of the critical technical capabilities every Hubspot designer needs, and the Hubspot CMS delivers an enterprise class developer experience that just happens to be useful by marketers who are not technical developers.

 

With the Hubspot CMS and the drag and drop capabilities it provides, marketers can create templates from scratch or easily modify existing templates by simply dragging and dropping in modules to meet whatever design goal they are trying to achieve, without ever having to ask a developer to do it for them.

 

Enterprise Level Protection of Customer Data

With today's data protection requirements of customer data as well as financial transaction data under GDPR and other rules, having a defined, auditable sales process for acquiring and protecting customer data is mandatory.  Hubspot provides enterprise class protection that meets all such security standards.

 

Small Businesses to Enterprise Level Capabilities

 

When I first starting using the Hubspot CRM Software, I was not disappointed; it is a new tool, which leverages a lot of different information sources to provide an AE with unprecedented visibility into his accounts, without doing much more than clicking.

It doesn’t try to be all things to all people, but instead, is ideal for small to mid-size companies and even large enterprises with defined sales processes, particularly those that implemented SMART goals.

 

How do you use it as a Sales Force Multiplier:

 

  • Fully leverage all your leads generated from your Inbound Marketing efforts

    Leave no stone unturned!

    Quickly Dial Phone Numbers.  For inside sales teams, the ability to have the system, using predictive lead scoring, line up today's calls to be made, it is huge time saver.  We normally use a combination of smart lists, workflows, and predictive lead scoring to not only set up a day's worth of calls for every Account Executive, we are able to prioritize which ones should be called first, and at which time, based on when they are most likely to respond.

    Scheduling Meetings.  For many sales processes, scheduling customer meetings represents a significant first step toward achieving your sales goal.  With the Hubspot meeting tool, you can provide plenty of opportunities for customers to get on your calendar.  Of course, if your sales manager, you will want to know if these meetings are happening, and if so, what was the outcome.  Hubspot's tracking and reporting capabilities mean you can keep track of how many meetings every salesperson is having, as well as how many calls they are making or receiving, how many tasks they are working, and how many sales they are making, all without any manual data input.
  • About the only manual part of any of the processes you need to work with using this system involves creating company records from the prospects list that have not had a conversion event.

    We highly recommend you take the time, using a methodical grouping approach, say by state, country, or industry, of entering in these prospects so you can see how you’re progressing with regards to establishing relationships within that account.
  • You no doubt have other lead sources outside of your Inbound Marketing efforts; I recommend you develop the discipline to create company records of every inbound job lead and as well, create an associated contact.

    Ask me how to leverage a couple of Lists and Smart Workflows to do something useful with these leads.
  • As a Sales Manager, you need to run your opportunities off of the Hubspot CRM deal panel right in the system.

    Like all systems, unless you make them part and parcel of your operations, they wither and die, and you won’t have to wait long to hear the typical grumbles from the sales team.

    Sales Coaching Opportunities:  When you run your opportunities off the Hubspot Deal Pipeline report, you will find many more opportunities to deliver 'in the moment' sales coaching opportunities to your sales reps.  Effective sales coaching is one of your highest leverage opportunities as sales manager.
  • If you don’t have LinkedIn premium accounts, for each AE, you’re going to find it very difficult to truly leverage all the contact information the system is automagically pulling in on each company you are working with.

  • The system fully supports Account Based Marketing and can fully model highly complex relationships.

    We recommend you add all contacts, regardless of role, to each company.

    Otherwise, you will find you’re losing track of who's on first.

    When it comes to effective account based marketing, the integrated nature of Hubspot really shines. 61% of overperforming leaders who work in an ABM environment report using a CRM to automate at least part of their ABM sales process compared to 46% of underperforming leaders.

  • Given this limitation, you do, however, get a huge head start when you take a look at all the contacts the system already has about any particular company you have entered.

    Sometimes, there may not be any, but most of the time, the list of other contacts it shows is extensive.
  • At a certain volume, especially in those cases where your sales process still requires facetime, you will want to have enough details in the contact and company record to be able to filter by location to increase productivity.
  • If you, like us, have to prepare pre-sales demonstrations and presentations to make the deal, you will want to create and store ‘common presentations’ on the google drive to be accessible by all.

    This is one of those activities that will take some discipline or at least behaviors, that isn’t normally part of the process.

    You want to do whatever it takes to alleviate this time suck from your sales force.

    One very effective sales tactic is to leverage Hubspot CRM Video.  While it is possible to create a library of marketing prepared, standard videos, Dan Tyre, a master sales trainer from Hubspot, clued us in to making and using short, custom videos with Loom and Hubspot CRM.  This allows you to quickly create short, customized videos and send them to each of the Sales Qualified leads in your task queue, all before lunch.

  • Finally, the system provides multiple ongoing opportunities to coach your sales team, especially regarding activity levels, as it keeps track of just about every interaction that happens between your sales team and the prospect.

    When you combine the power of the SideKick (now just called Sales) app with the Hubspot CRM system, along with the huge volume of contextually relevant information provided by the system, you have the makings a true ‘force multiplier’.

  • Use the 'Book a Meeting With Me' functionality.  

    The paid version of the tool provides a mechanism to allow your prospects to book a meeting with your sales team members online.  

    This saves a ton of time trying to deconflict a schedule and also increases productivity.

Bonus Round:  This represents a new way to sell for many people, and the temptation of many will be to revert to the norm, i.e., a business card in the sunvisor is the only customer I need, as I was once told. 

 

World Class Culture Change

 

What all of this means is that implementing Hubspot CRM is a change management project like any other new system.  But in this case, it touches all aspects of the company's operations so a Hubspot CRM implementation plan is not a bad idea.

 

Grow Better with Hubspot CRM

 

We fully expect continuous improvement in this product, and have already seen several updates to the product. We’ll be addressing those as they hit the street.  These ever expanding capabilities are why we believe the award winning Hubspot Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is one of the greatest force multiplier tools available to you and your business. 

 

Get Help Implementing Hubspot CRM

 

In the meantime, if you're ready to get started with implementing Hubspot CRM, we can help. Just click the button to schedule an appointment to speak with one of Hubspot implementation experts. 

 

Help Me Implement  Hubspot CRM!

 

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Lonnie D. Ayers, PMP

About the Author: Lonnie Ayers is a Hubspot Certified Inbound Marketing consultant, with additional certifications in Hubspot Content Optimization, Hubspot Contextual Marketing, and is a Hubspot Certified Partner. Specialized in demand generation and sales execution, especially in the SAP, Oracle and Microsoft Partner space, he has unique insight into the tough challenges Service Providers face with generating leads and closing sales using the latest digital tools. With 15 years of SAP Program Management experience, and dozens of complex sales engagements under his belt, he helps partners develop and communicate their unique sales proposition. Frequently sought as a public speaker in various events, he is available for both inhouse engagements and remote coaching.
Balanced Scorecard Consultant

He also recently released a book "How to Dominate Any Market - Turbocharging Your Digital Marketing and Sales Results", which is available on Amazon.

View All Articles by Lonnie D. Ayers, PMP

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