So, your team purchased HubSpot a while ago. And while marketing seems to be getting some use out of it, sales just hasn't seen the same success.
That's tough. It's hard to adopt a new CRM, and that task is made even harder when your sales team is scattered across regions and territories. HubSpot services for your sales team can be some of the hardest to implement.
Side Note: If you just jumped into this blog and aren't feeling like you're quite here yet, check out our tool: What is HubSpot? A Plain English Guide. It'll get you up and running with the lingo before you dive into sales process improvements.
But, you're paying for HubSpot Sales, so it's probably about time you start seeing some results from the platform, right? Like most things, you're going to get out of HubSpot what you put in. HubSpot can do wonders to help your sales team improve productivity, but you have to use it, first. So, if your sales team has HubSpot, but is struggling to make the most out of it, we've got solutions. Here are a few ways you can improve your sales team's productivity with HubSpot:
Like I said, the first step to improving sales productivity with HubSpot tools is getting your sales team on the platform. This blog on 7 Ways to Get Your Sales Team to Use HubSpot Every Day is a great place to start. The tips and tricks outlined there do an amazing job of helping your sales team create a routine around HubSpot.
The simple takeaways?
No doubt about it, this will be the hardest step. Change is hard for any company, and changing the way your sales team sells can feel especially intimidating. But, once your sales team is using HubSpot regularly, the rest of these steps will come much more naturally, and you'll be well on your way to improving sales productivity with a range of helpful tools.
One of the best ways to improve sales productivity is to start with marketing and sales alignment. Why? When your marketing and sales teams are aligned, marketing does a better job of delivering the leads that sales wants to close, and sales has the tools they need to close those deals. Together, that equals more leads, closed faster. Which is pretty much the definition of improved sales productivity. Okay, so how does HubSpot help align sales and marketing?
HubSpot Dashboards make it easy for your sales and marketing teams to all the relevant data they need to assess performance at a glance. Marketing can see how many leads they've delivered to the sales team, how many of those turned into contacts, and how many of those contacts closed to sales.
Sales can see how long it took them to move a prospect from one stage of a deal to another, what their close rate is, and more.
Together, both teams have complete visibility into each and every lead coming through your sales pipeline. With this level of transparency, both teams can work together to identify gaps in both marketing and sales processes.
HubSpot's custom reporting tools are another awesome way to bring marketing and sales together. If your teams just aren't seeing eye to eye, or don't have a good understanding of what the other team is doing, create a custom report!
Great examples of this are:
Aligning your marketing and sales teams will do a lot to improve sales productivity, and your HubSpot portal offers a ton of tools to make alignment easy. When everyone is on the same page, it's so much easier to work towards the big goals your company has set.
If there's one HubSpot tool your sales team uses, it should be deal stages. In terms of boosting productivity, this tool will be your best friend. What are HubSpot's deal stages? Well, each stage represents one key part of your sales pipeline. When you put them all together, you can view your entire deal pipeline on HubSpot, which ends up looking something like this.
It's essentially a visual representation of your entire sales process, but when you use it, it will show your sales team at a glance where every lead and prospect is in the pipeline. Your sales reps can filter to see just the deals they're working, or every deal your team has in progress.
Deal stages are useful for a number of reasons — once you have them set up, HubSpot offers a huge range of automation tools you can set to correspond to each deal stage. But maybe the biggest benefit of identifying and deciding on your HubSpot deal stages comes from bringing your entire sales team into just one sales process. When all of your reps are following the same sales process, you can improve productivity in quite a few ways. The big ones:
Alright, so you've got your sales and marketing teams working together, and you've got your sales team on one aligned sales pipeline. How else can HubSpot help you improve sales productivity? Automation!
Your sales reps are busy, and there are probably a number of mindless tasks that take up their time, without contributing to closing deals. HubSpot helps them out in a big way here by offering a number of automation tools and features that help them keep their focus on what they're best at — closing. Here are a few great automations you can set up in HubSpot to help improve sales productivity.
I wrote an entire blog about using HubSpot's lead scoring tool to streamline sales. That's how you know it's a big deal. HubSpot lead scoring is a great way to assign value to each lead that comes in, helping your sales time quickly prioritize their time towards warm and hot leads.
HubSpot Sequences are an amazing way for your sales team to automate communication, without sending impersonal, irrelevant information to your sales-qualified leads. With your deal stages all set up, it's easy for your sales reps to develop sequence emails that correspond to each deal stage, and to the questions your prospects ask the most often:
Use sequences to draft up email templates that your sales team can easily adjust for each prospect and send out in minutes.
Your sales reps have a million irons in the fire, and usually all at once. Keeping track of every prospect in their pipeline is a losing battle, especially if they're still managing all of that communication manually. HubSpot workflows remove some of the daily stress associated with, "did I email that person?", "has it really been two weeks since I talked to that lead?".
If you're new to the tool, this blog about Email Automation and HubSpot Workflows will help you out. Essentially, a HubSpot workflow is an automatically triggered sequence of events that you can set up any way you want. A few commonly used sales workflows include:
Automated follow-up emails
Think emails that auto-send after a connect call with a new prospect. I also love the sales breakup email for leads who have gone cold.
Follow-up reminders
These send your sales reps notifications that you can set to your preferences, but a common example might be a reminder to call a prospect back 48 hours after they've received a pricing sheet.
How fun is this team workflow? When sales closes a deal, it sends a notification to our team slack channel letting everyone know!
Email workflows
Let's say a prospect says they're not quite ready to make a decision and wants a few more months to think. When your sales rep sets that lead to "cold" or "closed lost" you can have a corresponding workflow that automatically enters that lead into an email nurturing workflow that keeps them in your flywheel until they are ready to make a decision.
To improve sales productivity, consider how you can empower your sales reps to do more of the work they're best at — selling. If there are mindless tasks you can minimize with automated follow-ups and workflows, they'll have more time and more capacity for the specialized work they're great at.
This blog has probably given you plenty to think about. From aligning your sales and marketing teams to developing a solid deal pipeline to automating portions of that process, you've got plenty of action items to help boost your sales team's productivity.
That said, I'm going to leave you with one more tip to improve sales productivity with HubSpot. That's continuous improvement, in the form of regular sales training and sales enablement. Your sales team is only as good as the resources and the training they have access to. We live in a quickly changing digital world that's influencing how consumers buy things every day. Help your sales team do their best by providing them with the training and tools they need to keep up.
Sales training with a Certified HubSpot Trainer can go a long way to improve your sales teams productivity using this platform you're already paying for. HubSpot is constantly making improvements and rolling out new tools. Working with a HubSpot Solutions Partner for even just quarterly training sessions helps ensure you're getting the most out of the platform.
This tip hearkens back to our first point on sales and marketing alignment. Your sales team is amazing at what they do. So is your marketing team. Sales enablement focuses on bringing those two teams together to develop and implement the materials and resources that will help your sales team sell better. HubSpot makes it super easy to use those new sales enablement tools in the right places, too. With established deal stages, simple-to-set-up workflows, and convenient sales sequences, you can pop those sales enablement tools in wherever they'll do the most good for your sales team, and optimize as you go.
With tools, tracking, and reporting designed to support every part of your marketing and sales cycle, HubSpot is a powerful tool for your entire team, but especially for sales — if you know how to use it right.
If it's been some time since your sales team has had a HubSpot training, or if you're just not sure you're getting the most out of your subscription, some outside help can deliver serious results. Get in touch with the Evenbound team for support improving sales productivity with HubSpot.
