How to Improve Sales Productivity with HubSpot Sales Tools

So, your team purchased HubSpot. Your marketing team might be getting some use out of it, but is the sales team lacking the same success? 

Trust us; we know it can be challenging to adopt a new CRM, and that task is even more difficult when your sales team is scattered across regions and territories. But you're paying for HubSpot Sales, so it's time you start seeing some results from the platform, right? 

Like most things in life, you'll get out of HubSpot what you put in. The platform can help your sales team improve productivity, but you must use it correctly. 

If your sales team has HubSpot but is struggling to make the most out of it, we've got solutions to improve your sales productivity with HubSpot tools.

5 Ways to Improve Sales Productivity with HubSpot Sales Tools 

Are you ready to maximize your investment in HubSpot and take your sales to the next level? Here are a few ways you can improve your sales team's productivity with HubSpot tools: 

1. Get Your Team on HubSpot

As mentioned earlier, the first step to improving sales productivity with HubSpot tools is getting your sales team actually on the platform. This blog, 7 Ways to Get Your Sales Team to Use HubSpot Every Day, is a great place to start.  

The best tips to get your sales team to use HubSpot every day:

• Encourage every sales rep to spend just 5 minutes a day on the platform. 
• Incorporate HubSpot's sales dashboards into your regular sales meetings. When sales reps don't see the deals they've closed on those dashboards, they'll be more motivated to get that info in before your meetings. 
• Establish regular training sessions. Whether once a week or once a month, HubSpot training sessions should happen on a set schedule so your sales team has a place to bring their questions and ideas. 

Change is hard for any company, and changing how your sales team sells can feel especially intimidating. However, once your sales team uses 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. 

2. Align Marketing & Sales Teams

One of the best ways to improve sales productivity is to start with marketing and sales alignment. When your marketing and sales teams are aligned, marketing does a better job of delivering the leads that sales want to close, and sales have the tools they need to close those deals. Together, that equals more leads, closed faster. 

So, exactly how does HubSpot help align sales and marketing?

Dashboards

HubSpot Dashboards make it easy for your sales and marketing teams to have access 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 contacts are 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 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 Custom Reports

HubSpot's custom reporting tools are another awesome way to bring marketing and sales together. If your teams aren't seeing eye to eye, or need a better understanding of what the other team is doing, create a custom report! 

You can set this custom report up to show how many leads marketing has delivered this week, where they came from, and even how qualified they are. Make this report a part of your weekly sales meeting to make sure sales is following up on those leads. 

You can also create a custom report that identifies which leads sales is working this week, and make it part of your weekly marketing meeting. With visibility here, marketing can not only see that sales is following up on their leads, but they can offer suggestions and helpful materials sales can use to continue nurturing those deals.

3. Establish Your HubSpot Deal Stages

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 a visual representation of your entire sales process. Using 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 on or every deal your team has in progress.

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 follow the same sales process, you can improve productivity in several ways. With everyone on one streamlined sales process, it's easy to identify strengths and challenges in your sales process. Plus, with established deal stages, you can develop supporting sales materials designed to nurture prospects according to the deal stages they're in. 

4. Automate the Easy Things

Alright, so you've got your sales and marketing teams working together and your sales team on one aligned sales pipeline. How else can HubSpot help you improve sales productivity? Automation!

Your sales reps are busy, and many mindless tasks take up their time without contributing to closing deals. HubSpot helps them out in a big way here by offering several automation tools and features that help them keep their focus on what they do best — closing. 

Here are a few great automations you can set up in HubSpot to help improve sales productivity:

HubSpot Lead Scoring

HubSpot's lead scoring tool can streamline sales in a big way. HubSpot lead scoring assigns value to each lead that comes in, helping your sales time quickly prioritize their time toward warm and hot leads. 

Automated Email Sequences

HubSpot Email Sequences are a fantastic way for your sales team to automate communication without sending impersonal, irrelevant information to your sales-qualified leads. With your deal stages all setup, 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.

HubSpot Workflows

Your sales reps have a million irons in the fire, 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?" and "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. A HubSpot workflow is an automatically triggered sequence of events you can set up any way you want. A few commonly used sales workflows include automated follow-up emails, breakup emails, follow-up reminders, and more. 

5. Focus on Continuous Improvement

Here’s one more tip to improve sales productivity with HubSpot – 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 influences how consumers buy things daily. Help your sales team do their best by providing the training and tools they need to keep up. 

Regular Sales Training

Sales training with a Certified HubSpot Trainer can go a long way to improve your sales team's productivity. HubSpot is constantly making improvements and rolling out new tools, so working with a HubSpot Solutions Partner for even just quarterly training sessions helps ensure you're getting the most out of the platform.

Sales Enablement

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 to help your sales team sell better. HubSpot also makes it super easy to use those new sales enablement tools in the right places. 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 best for your sales team and optimize as you go.