Connecting With the Right Leads at the Right Time Using HubSpot Sales Tools

Many businesses have embraced the shift in behavior by adopting an inbound approach to marketing. But what about sales?

The traditional sales process that once sustained your outbound efforts simply doesn't have what it takes to close the types of leads your inbound efforts will bring about. After all, buyer behavior has changed. The simple, standardized outreach call is no longer effective on highly engaged and educated prospects.

While generating these leads certainly isn't a bad problem to have, any uncertainty in terms of how to communicate with and close these leads is. 

Simply put, in order to generate a return on your inbound marketing investment, your sales team needs the lead intelligence necessary to carry out productive communications. 

HubSpot Sales (used to be Signals, and was most recently SideKick) is a tool that creates efficiencies for sales teams by providings salespeople with the “inside” information they need to better engage their leads, track them through the sales process, and communicate with them in context.

Use HubSpot Sales as a Prospecting Tool

In terms of prospecting, HubSpot Sales serves as a way to remove the guesswork that comes along with sending and following up with prospecting emails.

Rather than repeatedly checking your inbox for a response, HubSpot Sales will alert you as prospects open and engage with your emails, so you can continue to be productive in the meantime.

Even further, notifications can be set to track a specific HubSpot list, giving you visibility into the prospects you care about most.

When it comes to engagement insight, HubSpot Sales will also notify you when a prospect clicks on links within your emails. This helps salespeople to identify which prospects are engaging with their emails, ultimately serving as an indicator that they are interested in the content they've presented them with.  

The ability to understand which prospects take action on the resources you've provided them with makes it easier to differentiate a legitimate opportunity from one that might not be a good fit. 

Generating Richer Context

Contextually based conversations serve as a way to set your business apart from the noise. 

While it's easy to get caught up in automated email communications, segmentation and personalization can be used to more effectively tailor the conversation. The features of HubSpot Sales let's you create this. 

Let's say that a lead you haven’t heard from in a while, or even a lead that you've just engaged with, has suddenly started visiting your site again. But this time... it's from the pricing page. Perhaps pricing is a critical purchasing factor, or they’re trying to figure out which pricing structure is best for them.

Your sales team can utilize this information to prepare their next piece of communication or a follow-up conversation that solves for pricing concerns or questions. The real value is being able to address it WITHOUT your lead even asking...

Most likely, this information can prove helpful for your sales team, and figuring out what your team’s next steps would be would require an analysis of the steps in your particular sales process.

Nail Down Effective Timing

Top-of-mind awareness is a really powerful concept.

Having the ability to follow up with leads while they are in the process of viewing a page on your site or reviewing a resource makes initiating a productive conversation much easier. 

Rather than attempting to reach out to them at a random hour, you can open up the line of communication while they're actively engaged. As they review your content and begin to generate questions or additional interest, this becomes the perfect time to HELP them (or even freak them out... in a good way of course).

Using HubSpot Sales, you can send your prospects or leads a friendly, real-time email with a few helpful tips and resources related to the exact content they just viewed.

Source: HubSpot

Don't be afraid to tell them you can see them viewing specific articles or pages. In most cases they will appreciate it and should you open up an in-person dialogue. You've increased your close percentage exponentially by being first-in. Finally, make it easy for them to book a meeting with you by including a link to your personal calendar invite that can be setup directly in HubSpot Sales.

Source: HubSpot

Again, part of generating richer context is by being much more personal. Essentially, if your sales team can see exactly when a lead opened their email or landed on a page, they can tailor their next conversation to be more timely and relevant.

This type of insight will ultimately encourage them to act faster knowing the lead is engaged and interested, potentially winning a client over a competitor who didn’t have these alerts.

Knowing When and How to Close with HubSpot Sales

You can learn a lot about a lead by the emails they open, the links they click, and the documents they're viewing.

But once a lead moves lower and lower into the funnel, it's even more important to cater your materials to their specific buying triggers. The HubSpot Sales' documents tool gives sales teams the ability to upload case study PDFs, presentation decks and other sales documents and track lead engagement down to the amount of seconds that they spend looking at a particular page or slide. I'll say that again... a salesperson can see exactly how long their opportunity is viewing even one particular slide in a 50 page deck...

This type of insight is invaluable when approaching the close. As a salesperson, if you know that your opportunity happens to be spending most of their time reviewing the case study section of your slide deck, that your next move will be to introduce them to that successful client to seal the deal.

Reusing and Measuring

Building efficiencies means creating repeatable processes that are easy to implement, work effectively, and can be measured.

By the time you've utilized HubSpot Sales to the point where you're executing on everything we've just discussed, you're going to have written emails upon emails that have worked wonders to get prospects to engage. Why not reuse and track the effectiveness of those emails? The same applies to each of the sales documents you've leveraged in the past as well.

Preserve those successful emails as more generalized versions within the templates tool so you can easily customize them to use again with new prospects.

Moving one step further, connect a string of those emails into a HubSpot Sales Sequence to automate the prospecting process. Once you've build a sequence, you can activate it for any particular prospect you'd like to engage and customize each email in the series before they're delivered.

Automation + Personalization = Meaningful Efficiency

To close the loop on the performance of your emails, sequences, and / or sales documents, HubSpot Sales provides metrics on your open, click, and view rates for each giving sales teams insight on the most effective ways to communicate with prospects.

[Bonus] Improving Account Management

Once a sale is closed, it's up to client services to maintain the account. 

So, while the tool's ability to improve sales interactions is no secret, there is no reason why account managers can't leverage HubSpot Sales' insight to strengthen their relationships with clients. 

In order for account managers to maintain accounts, it's critical that they develop a strong line of communication in which they can carry out interactions, build trust, and ultimately deliver results. 

With HubSpot Sales, this line of communication can be streamlined to a point where account managers can become more efficient without additional phone calls, emails, or meetings. This means leveraging the ability to identify the specific times that see high email opens so that you can cater your next email send or conversation around specific, previous communications.

The quicker clients open and respond to emails, the quicker you can return to carrying out the actions necessary to meet and exceed their expectations.