Building a scalable sales function in HubSpot
Guest post by @HSGrowthGuy
Hi Everyone. Today I bring you a guest post from the resident HubSpot Master @HSGrowthGuy
Give him a follow on Twitter if you use HubSpot: @HSGrowthGuy
Why HubSpot?
Scaling your sales function is essential to the growth of your organization. With so many tools and software available in the market, it can be challenging to choose the right one for your business.
HubSpot is a popular and powerful sales and marketing platform that can help you build a scalable sales function. Many business owners recognize HubSpot as one of the best CRMs to grow into because of its wide breadth of free and tiered pricing models .
So, let’s explore how to build a scalable sales function using HubSpot.
1. Create a Sales Activity Process and Understand Your KPIs
The first step to building a scalable sales function is to create a sales process. This process should outline the steps your sales team needs to take to move a prospect from the top of the funnel to a closed deal. HubSpot's sales tools can help you automate your sales process and make it more efficient. You can set up stages for your sales process, create custom fields to capture important information and set up automated workflows to help your team stay on track.
Many activities you do in the CRM - email, meetings, calls, and LinkedIn messages - can be automatically logged with the right configurations.
If you are a Sales Exec who cares about activity logging (most do), HubSpot Sales Analytics tool helps you easily measure performance. It’s important to note, however, that your team must be tracking their activity logs each day or at least each week. If you phase issues with getting reps to log activity, consider tying the volume of activities to their performance and bonuses. This provides a tangible incentive for people to consistently update activities and keep the CRM data clean and robust.
2. Identify Your Ideal Customer Using Personas and Forms
To build a scalable sales function, you need to know who your ideal customer is. HubSpot's marketing tools can help you create buyer personas to identify your target audience. Once you know who your ideal customer is, you can use HubSpot's sales tools to create targeted lists and automate your outreach efforts.
HubSpot has a great Persona tool; you can add this data directly into the Persona property in HubSpot. Then, you can use Workflows to set a contact based on the information they submit. For example, if you have a persona centered around the Job Title of CEO, you can create an automation that sets the persona based on the Job Title field.
Check out my tutorial on using this persona generator here
Finally, make sure you are only adding fields to your lead forms that help you qualify them further. Every field added to a form reduces the conversion rate so you want to make sure each field is used wisely. This is where custom properties can be potent. By asking potential leads to supply specific information right on the form, you can qualify them better up front and then route them to the exact person via Workflows.
3. Use HubSpot CRM as the Single Source of Truth
Most people think of HubSpot as a Marketing Automation Platform. However, they have made significant updates to their CRM product in recent years and are now consistently rated as one of the top CRM tools for companies of all sizes.
You can track your deals, create custom reports, and manage your contacts all in one place. HubSpot CRM also integrates with HubSpot's sales and marketing tools, making it easy to create a seamless sales process. Creating that “Single Source of Truth” for your marketing, sales, and customer success operations is extremely possible in HubSpot (and ultimately what it was built for).
4. Automate Your Sales Outreach
HubSpot's sales tools can help you automate your sales outreach, making it easier to scale your sales function. You can set up email templates, create sequences, and use HubSpot's scheduling tools to make sure your outreach efforts are consistent and timely. With HubSpot's automation tools, you can focus on building actual relationships with your prospects and customers.
What does a good sequence look like?
A good HubSpot Sequence has cross-channel coverage across your prospects. You should be including emails and tasks for both phone calls and LinkedIn connection requests. It’s imperative for sales reps to leverage HubSpot tasks so they can keep all their daily to-do’s in one place that are directly tied to the CRM.
5. Use HubSpot Sales Analytics
To build a scalable sales function, you need to track your progress and identify areas for improvement. HubSpot's sales analytics tools can help you do just that. You can track your team's performance, analyze your sales data, and identify trends and patterns. This information can help you make informed decisions about your sales process and make adjustments as needed.
Building a scalable sales function using HubSpot is a powerful way to drive growth for your business. By creating a sales process, identifying your ideal customer, using HubSpot CRM, automating your sales outreach, and using HubSpot sales analytics, you can streamline your sales process, increase efficiency, and close more deals. Follow these best practices, and you'll be well on your way to building a successful and scalable sales function.
Need to improve your sales operations in HubSpot? Get in touch with the experts.
Your CRM Should Be The Single Source of Truth
Any successful business owner will tell you: managing customer relationships and sales processes efficiently is paramount for success. That's where a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system like HubSpot CRM comes into play. By harnessing the power of HubSpot CRM, sales leaders can establish a single source of truth for their business, enabling them to make informed decisions, improve collaboration, and drive revenue growth. Let’s explore why your CRM should be the single source of truth for your business and provide practical tips for sales leaders to achieve this using HubSpot CRM.
Why Your CRM Should Be the Single Source of Truth:
In any organization, data is scattered across various systems, spreadsheets, and email chains. This lack of centralized information leads to inefficiencies, miscommunication, and missed opportunities. Here are some compelling reasons why your CRM should be the single source of truth for your business:
Holistic View of Customer Interactions: By consolidating customer data in your CRM, you gain a comprehensive view of all interactions across departments and touchpoints. This allows sales leaders to understand customer needs, preferences, and history, empowering them to provide personalized experiences and build stronger relationships.
Streamlined Sales Processes: A CRM serves as a centralized hub for managing leads, tracking opportunities, and forecasting sales. When your CRM is the single source of truth, sales leaders can streamline their processes, automate tasks, and gain real-time visibility into the sales pipeline. This ensures smooth collaboration among sales teams and enhances overall efficiency.
Accurate Sales Reporting and Analysis: Reliable data is crucial for sales reporting and analysis. When your CRM serves as the single source of truth, you eliminate discrepancies and data silos. Sales leaders can generate accurate reports, measure key performance indicators (KPIs), and gain actionable insights for strategic decision-making.
Enhanced Collaboration and Communication: With a centralized CRM, your sales team can collaborate effectively, share information, and work towards common goals. Transparent access to customer data promotes cross-team alignment, reduces duplication of efforts, and fosters a culture of collaboration within the organization.
Scalability and Growth: As your business scales, maintaining a single source of truth becomes even more critical. A robust CRM like HubSpot allows for seamless scalability, ensuring that as your customer base grows, your CRM can accommodate the increasing volume of data, interactions, and sales activities.
Regular CRM Audits: Ensuring Data Accuracy and Integrity
To maintain HubSpot CRM as the single source of truth, conducting regular CRM audits is essential. A CRM audit involves reviewing, cleaning, and optimizing your CRM data. Here are some examples of what makes a good CRM audit:
Data Cleansing: Identify and eliminate duplicate records, outdated information, and irrelevant data. Regularly review and update contact details, deal stages, and other relevant data points to ensure accuracy.
HubSpot Starter tiers and above will have the ability to manage duplicates for both companies and contacts.
If you have Operations Hub or Enterprise level tiers, you’ll get access to HubSpot’s Data Quality product which will give you even more insight on properties, records, integrations and data syncing, and workflows:
Data Consistency: Standardize data entry practices and ensure consistency across the CRM. Define clear guidelines for naming conventions, data formats, and categorizations to maintain a uniform and reliable dataset.
Here is a structure that you might use to name your lists:
[Day number] [First 3 letters of the Month] [Last two digits of the year] [Description]
Customization Evaluation: Assess your CRM customization to ensure it aligns with your evolving business needs. Review custom fields, tags, and deal stages to match your specific sales processes and terminology.
At the end of the day, this simply requires asking questions about your business - your current processes, what data is entered (manually or automatically), where their friction is, etc. From here, you can outline specific solutions to customize your CRM to your exact business.
Integration Assessment: Review integrations between HubSpot CRM and other systems in your tech stack. Ensure data flows seamlessly between platforms, eliminating manual data entry and maintaining a complete view of customer interactions.
HubSpot has one of the best app ecosystems of any CRM. This means most of the tools you use will have a native HubSpot integration. Each of the integration pages has documentation showing what features are available and how data flows between the two systems. This is critical information to understand when you are looking to get a new technology for your company and integrate it with HubSpot. If one tool does not mesh well with your CRM while the other one does, you should likely go with the latter.
Need to improve your sales operations in HubSpot? Get in touch with the experts.
User Adoption and Training: Evaluate user adoption rates and identify any knowledge gaps or training needs among your sales team. Provide ongoing training and support to maximize the utilization of HubSpot CRM and encourage active participation.
Watch this video to see exactly where in HubSpot you can start to run your audit
6. By regularly conducting CRM audits, sales leaders can ensure the accuracy and reliability of their CRM. And at the end of all of it, your CRM should look like this:
Need to improve your sales operations in HubSpot? Get in touch with the experts.
Thank you @HSGrowthGuy for a great guest post!
On a separate note I have some exciting news I’ll be announcing here very soon!