How to use HubSpot for Sales - 11 Winning Ways 💪

How to use HubSpot for Sales - 11 Winning Ways 💪

Hubspot offers a Sales Hub for small businesses as well as enterprise-level organizations. Offering free and premium plans for its Sales CRM, it caters to any and all business requirements (probably including yours!).

HubSpot is built around the following four plans – designed to go from startups to scaling businesses and enable you to grow the business:

  1. Free CRM
  2. Starter
  3. Professional
  4. Enterprise

As you are seeking tools to automate your most tedious marketing and sales tasks, Hubspot’s CRM proves to be the right decision for many sales and marketing teams.

Since the buying process has dramatically changed around the world, sellers have to step it up to meet their buyers on the same page. The reality is that B2B buying and selling is a hyper competitive area with buyers driving the process.

This has paved the way for sales enablement: The concept of enabling sales teams with advanced B2B selling practices.

And because of that, today we have tech-enabled tools that help sellers to expand and explore untapped opportunities.

It’s more than enough reason for businesses to invest in sales enablement tools, it helps them streamline their selling process and that’s exactly what HubSpot offers.

You can enable your sales team by automating their tasks and enabling them to meet their prospects exactly where they are in their buying journey. By providing them with the right information, your sellers are more likely to close them as a customer.

It’s the reason why companies invest in a sales stack to help them streamline their selling process as per sales enablement best practices.

An ideal sales stack may consist of different tools like Hubspot, Content Camel, Salesloft/Outreach, Docusign, etc. Each tool is there with a purpose to make selling efficient and buying seamless.

So how do sellers get the best out of their Hubspot CRM? Let’s dig deeper below as we explore 11 ways for your sellers to use Hubspot

Manage your daily tasks

In HubSpot, you can manage your daily tasks and activities across teams to enable your reps with a goal-centric approach.

You can create all sorts of tasks that your sellers may need to take care of, such as:

  • follow-up on XYZ prospects
  • sending quotes to XYZ
  • setting up meetings with XYZ
  • And more!

With HubSpot, team leads are more aligned with their reps and are better able to keep track of their activities. Each rep can update their progress and meet their deadlines in time.

With a to-do list, you can manage your reps even more effectively throughout the process. You can assign tasks to specific team members and provide them with context to better communicate the scope of the work to leave no room for error.

When your reps are fully aware of what to do and when to do it, they are more likely to be proactive.

HubSpot sales tasks
Manage sales tasks in Hubspot

Monitor your Sales Pipeline

Hubspot enables you to view your sales pipeline in its entirety, allowing you to forecast future business trends.

You can view how you’ve been performing weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly. It provides you with an in-depth view of your selling process to capture what’s closing deals and what’s not to make strategically important decisions.

In Deals, you can monitor different stages of your sales process to identify and resolve any deal breakers. It’ll help you to gauge your sales, and provide insights on productivity; calls made and received, emails sent and received, deals created and deals won.

With valuable insights, you can also track any specific quotas assigned to each sales rep, to establish transparency into their performance.

HubSpot Sales Pipeline screen
Deals in the Sales Pipeline

Store and update contact details

Access and store all the contact details of your clients and prospects in one place.

Especially useful when your point of contact switches to a new role or a new company, you can update all the changes almost instantly from your HubSpot account.

Managing your contacts and updating them has never been easier.

HubSpot Contact Details screen
Update contacts in Sales CRM

Divide and assign each prospect to different reps

A good sales team knows how to be efficient and make their prospects feel like they’re being treated specially – prioritized and personalized.

That’s why sellers in Hubspot can assign each prospect to a specific sales rep depending on where the buyer is in their buying decision. These prospects are divided and assigned to reps for an efficient and effective sales process.

If the buyer is in the initial stages of buying, they are most likely to be assigned to a junior sales rep who can move them forward towards their buying decision.

Once that prospect is converted into a high-value lead, they are assigned to a senior rep who can close the deal with the right content.

What’s awesome about Hubspot is that when a prospect reaches out with a query or there’s a meeting scheduled, the respective rep will instantly receive a notification.

Connecting the prospect with the rep as soon as possible will allow your sellers more time to move them along the buyer’s journey and more quickly turn prospects into customers.

HubSpot Prospect list screen
Update prospects in Sales CRM

Send emails directly from Hubspot

With the HubSpot Sales extension/add-on in your email inbox, you enable your reps to send emails to your contacts directly and track the performance of those emails once they’d been read.

With that extension, you can also access sales tools directly on your personal email.

Whether you compose the email from scratch or use a pre-made sales or product messaging template, the extension enables you to reach out to your prospect at the right time with the right offer.

Using your personal email address, you can send one-to-one emails to any contact to further build that sense of familiarity and trust. No one on the team can use your personal email except for you, so your prospects know they’re getting your full attention.

Your reps can only send emails through their team email address which will be connected to the conversations inbox in Hubspot. That’s the email your reps will be using to connect with their respective prospects primarily.

HubSpot email compose view
Email and outbound from Sales CRM extension

Schedule meetings

With Hubspot, you create scheduling pages to share with your prospects so they can plan a meeting with you based on your calendar.

It’s a great way to get potential leads to book product demos.

It ensures that you’re never double-booked, so you can give your undivided attention to each prospect.

To enable this feature you’ll have to connect your Google or Office 365 calendar to the meetings tool within your account settings.

HubSpot schedule calendar view
Easily schedule sales meetings from Sales CRM

Set reminders

As a seller, you may have a lot on your plate and you may lose track of time since there’s only so much you can do.

With Hubspot, you can set reminders by date and time, and as the due date approaches for any task, scheduled meetings, calls, etc, the CRM will automatically send reminders.

With this feature, your sales team is always on top of their performance and organized in their day-to-day tasks.

Streamline your sales inquiries.

Many clients and prospects come from different channels for sales inquiries.Engaging on every channel can be a challenge for your sales team.

That’s why Hubspot offers a conversation inbox specifically for the sales team.

When a prospect reaches out with a sales inquiry, you want the right sales rep to engage. Especially when your reps are assigned specific prospects, you want them to engage with their assigned prospect to ensure a seamless buyer experience.

And to make that possible, Hubspot consolidates your inbox messages from your connected channels within its CRM. It creates a central location in Conversations for all your sales inquiries, and once you assign tickets for each conversation, your sales rep will respond to the right prospect at the right time.

Your reps no longer need to hop from one channel to another when they get access to all the conversations in a single inbox.

You don’t need your personal email to connect your inbox, you use your team email address to respond to all the messages, helping you streamline your sales inquiries.

HubSpot channel view
Centralize communication across channels

Create chat flows

Let’s say you’re getting a lot of traffic on your website but for some reason, you aren’t getting many leads. That’s because your traffic most probably wasn’t convinced enough to reach out to you.

One often overlooked feature is a responsive chatflow between reps and prospects.

Hubspot helps you add chat widgets to your website so that potential leads could be routed to your conversations inbox where your sales rep can reply.

There are two options for you to pick from; live chat, and bot chatflow. Through bot chatflow, you can take your leads down a path of pre-set actions to narrow down their query and connect with an appropriate rep, all in real-time.

HubSpot live chat view
HubSpot live chat example

HubSpot chat bot example
HubSpot chatbot example

Make phone calls

Connect your contact details and start making phone calls to your prospects right from your Hubspot CRM.

You can record these calls for future reference and enable your sales team to make calls without getting distracted on their cell phones.

HubSpot dialer view
HubSpot dialer

Get Actionable Insights

While you’re getting access to such exclusive features, HubSpot provides you with actionable insights on your sales performance. When you’re operating your entire sales efforts through Hubspot, it analyzes the impact of your sales efforts.

On top of that, your Hubspot CRM tracks your website traffic in real-time to identify key visitors who may be potential customers. You get to view their professional profile such as the company they work for or their role in the company. This will allow the sales rep to establish some key talking points to better engage with the prospect.

Not only are you able to better judge your sales progress, but you’re also enabling your sellers with key information to help them offer exactly what the prospect may need.

HubSpot sales report view
HubSpot sales pipeline reporting

Hubspot Sales CRM: Turn-offs!

Hubspot is great but it isn’t perfect.

The reporting feature on hubspot’s CRM is not as detailed as a few of its competitors. You can view some information regarding the traffic, but due to lack of segmented traffic reports, its difficult to extract value.

And as if that wasn’t a turn off enough, HubSpot fails to provide data on mobile users navigating your website. Given that much of the users are on their mobile phones, having data on such users is incredibly important.

That’s why document tracking is also equally affected because Hubspot lacks in providing you with a variation of data insights that may help you better target your marketing and sales efforts.

Content Camel offers better document tracking functionality, with powerful reporting that is leaps and bounds ahead of Hubspot.

Find out How to Track Documents in Hubspot.

Another turn-off about Hubspot is that it’s expensive. If your team is working on a tighter budget, or you just know your specific needs, Content Camel tools can help compliment your sales stack better than a full Hubspot suite of solutions.

While Hubspot is offering a free version for a single user, as your business expands, you may need to upgrade your plan which will cost more for every single user you add.

Not to forget that their contracts are rigid. You either sign up for a 6-month plan or an annual plan, and they charge you upfront.

Hubspot Sales CRM Pricing.

Another deal-breaker is that its templates are difficult to modify, and provide limited insights on all your sales efforts.

Even when you have made templates, if you want to personalize them a little bit before pressing send - HubSpot may not be such a great fit for you.

Content Camel plus HubSpot: Better together 👍

While Hubspot is great in its own right, Content Camel is a smart choice for startups and businesses that are constantly creating and distributing sales content across channels.

Content Camel is that piece of the marketing/sales puzzle that you’ve struggling with, but haven’t had a great solution for. Yet.

Offering an advanced sales content management solution, Content Camel enables your sales reps with powerful search features and accurate analytics on all your documents. It even has a free sales content audit template to help get you started.

And to top it off, it helps the users to organize their content into funnel stages in order to use funnel-appropriate content for each prospect.

Another great reason to use Content Camel is that it integrates with all the big Sales enablement tools including Google Drive, Dropbox, HubSpot, etc.

Drop your Drive, Sharepoint, and folder mess to move toward a more organized and effective way to manage your assets for Sales.

You get a free trial, flexible contract options, and an exclusive list of features that you never knew your sales team needed.

Check out Content Camel Product Overview.