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.
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.
Need to Sell Where the Customers Are
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
These are very simple custom objects to create, and can vastly extend the the Hubspot system capabilities.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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