How To Use HubSpot To Generate More Sales

HubSpot is one of the coolest things on the planet. And that’s not hyperbole. If you’ve used it, you know it’s true. If you haven’t, hopefully, you’ll get with the program by the end of this blog (or before - because the CRM is free!). And although the platform has an excellent array of tools for marketing, sales, and customer service, today, we’re going to focus on the Sales Hub. 

You like sales. We like sales. Everyone likes sales. So how can you ensure you’re generating a steady stream of qualified leads to close more sales? It takes a lot of strategizing and learning how to use many of HubSpot’s features. Thankfully, they’re user-friendly and once you get the hang of them, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without them. 

HubSpot Sales Tools Overview

While the HubSpot tools at your disposal will vary depending on whether you have a Starter, Professional, or Enterprise account, there are integral basic features that are available across the board. These include:  

Conversations Inbox

There are many ways a customer can probably reach you: email, social media, live chat, text. HubSpot’s conversations inbox keeps all of these communications in one central location, regardless of which channel they came through. This enables you to have conversations with prospects within context — even if the communications started over live chat and continued over email. Every conversation is automatically saved in the contact’s file. You can also route communications to specific team members so that there’s no backlog of people waiting for a reply. 

Email Marketing

Traditional marketing is disruptive. It’s why you skip YouTube ads and fast forward through commercials when streaming TV shows (or pay for a premium subscription to skip them altogether). Email marketing, however, can be read at a time that’s convenient to the recipient. And thanks to HubSpot’s automation and personalization tokens, they can go out upon preset user behaviors and be relevant to the reader, so they are more likely to engage with your content. 

Booking Meetings

Think about some of the marketing emails in your inbox. Maybe some of them are from forward thinking companies that have a great user experience (UX). Others are living in the days of Rolodexes and rotary phones and still expect you to call to schedule a meeting. Don’t be the latter. You’ll lose so many sales that way. HubSpot makes it easy for your target audience to book meetings with you directly from your content — whether they’re marketing emails, landing pages, blogs, or anywhere on your website. 

Tracking Deals

HubSpot’s deal tracking software monitors how much potential revenue is in your pipeline at any given time. This helps you identify high-priority prospects for your sales reps to follow up with. And to make things even easier, you can also set up automation for your leads to receive email communications upon taking a specific action — such as downloading a lead magnet, filling out an online form, or scheduling a meeting. 

Live Chat

We live in an age where people are used to instant gratification. Scratch that. They expect it. If they can’t find an answer to a quick question fast enough, your competitors are only a click away. Avoid sending them to their website by being available at any moment to answer their queries through live chat. You can even use a chat bot to answer frequently asked questions so that your team can focus on more complex issues. 

Monitoring User Behavior

HubSpot tracks website visitors even if they aren’t a contact on your database yet. They are assigned a tracking cookie, so that you’re able to see which pages they view, which content they interact with, and how often they remain on a page. And once they fill out a form on a landing page, this data is collected so that you can send them information that’s useful specifically to them according to where they are in their buyer’s journey. 

Customized Dashboards

You can’t track what you can’t measure. And you definitely want to measure progress to optimize efficiencies and maximize your ROI. HubSpot’s customized dashboards can be tailored to the specific needs of the team who’s reviewing it (e.g. marketing, sales, customer service, board of directors, etc…). You can also set up the layout to make it as easy as possible to understand. Specifically for your sales team, you can add metrics such as leads by source, pipeline stage, average time it takes to close a deal, upsells, revenue, and open activities (such as people who've requested  a demo or scheduled a call). 

How To Generate More Leads

Ok. All these tools are enough to make you leap with joy, I know. But wait! There’s more! HubSpot also helps you generate as many leads as possible through several methods: 

Landing Pages

Any time you’re promoting a new campaign, you spend precious time crafting pay-per-click (PPC) ads, marketing emails, and/or social media posts. And every time your target audience clicks on a call-to-action button, they are routed to… a landing page. These stand alone pages are effective because they focus the reader’s attention on one thing only: Whatever it is you’re promoting. No additional links. No shiny objects that detract from your message. 

HubSpot has many user-friendly capabilities that don’t require any coding knowledge for you to create effective landing pages: Headline modules, CTA creators, exit-intent pop ups, A/B testing, and responsive design. The platform also offers SEO recommendations so that you can increase the likelihood of being found by your target audience.

Online Forms

The pièce de résistance on landing pages are the online forms. This is how you get readers’ contact information so that you can nurture those leads. This is crucial, since not everyone who gives you their email address is ready to buy. Maybe they enrolled in the webinar you were promoting, but then went radio silent. Since their information is saved, you can then send them timely follow up communications or reengagement emails. 

HubSpot’s form builder is free and comes with drag-and-drop functionalities. And every single person who fills them out is automatically routed into your customer relationship management (CRM) software. In addition, if you have a Professional or Enterprise account, you can even create smart forms that adapt each question to a particular visitor’s circumstances. 

Lead Magnets

Sometimes, people will fill out a form just because they’re genuinely interested in joining your contacts list. But more often than not, you’ll need to offer something to incentivize them to provide their information. This is where lead magnets come in. 

These can come in many formats — such as eBooks, templates, tip sheets, infographics, checklists, video courses, white papers, reports, case studies, workbooks, podcasts, webinars, or whatever else may provide the recipient with truly valuable information. 

Drip Campaigns

Dip campaigns refer to sending marketing content over a preset period of time. They can be designed to welcome a new subscriber, promote a new product or service, boost engagement, increase brand awareness, and/or reengage leads. You can also design educational campaigns to consistently provide your readers with industry information that they can use today to solve some of their short-term pain points. 

HubSpot makes this process easier by providing you with a wide array of templates, CTA creator capabilities, and scheduling to best fit your goals. They can also be set up as workflows, so that specific user behavior triggers certain communications. 

Calls To Action 

Calls to action can be tricky. You’d think they’re the easiest part to make, since they’re small and have such little text. But that’s precisely why it can be challenging: You have a very limited amount of space to entice someone to do what you want them to do. 

HubSpot’s CTA creator lets you try different colors, shapes, sizes, and fonts; and you can design them to batch your style and brand. And of course, you can also implement A/B testing to see which one is most effective. HubSpot will then automatically switch to the version that generates the most leads. 

Prioritize Prospects Based On Their Lead Score

Not all leads are created equal. Depending on where a person is on the sales funnel, they may just be becoming aware they have a challenge, or conducting research, or ready to buy. HubSpot’s lead scoring feature lets you assign a point value to specific actions (such as subscribing to your blog, engaging with your marketing emails, requesting a demo, etc…) The higher the point value, the more likely they are to become a customer. Once a lead reaches enough points, your sales reps will receive a notification so that they can reach out to them during the most ideal time to do so. 

How To Qualify a Lead

A qualified lead is someone who has opted-in to receive further communications from our business. But the process of qualifying a lead requires a lot more than simply knowing that someone submitted a query. When determining who’s a sales qualified lead, ask yourself the following questions: 

Are they an ideal fit for your business? 

If you serve B2B businesses and a B2C requested a demo (or if your products are within a price range that you know they can’t afford), there’s no sense in focusing your efforts on that person. 

Are they actively engaged with your content? 

Did they subscribe to your newsletter and that’s it, or do they actually keep returning to your website, rereading the same content, opening your marketing emails, clicking through to your site, filling out online forms, and enrolling in your webinars… You get the drift. The more a person engages with your business, the higher the likelihood they’ll turn into a customer. 

Are they likely ready to buy? 

This doesn’t mean that they already pulled out their credit card and are ready to enter the number into your native payment system. While this could be the case, also take into account factors such as whether they have requested an assessment, consultation, or demo, or have reached out to you to ask questions about specific features, or watched some of your bottom of the funnel educational content, such as online tutorials. 

Get a Free HubSpot Audit To Ensure You’re Optimizing Your Sales Efforts

HubSpot really does make things significantly easier for everyone involved — business owners, sales, marketing, customer service, and most importantly, your customers. Learn about how these tools can best align with your goals (or whether you’re currently using the platform in the most efficient way) with our free HubSpot audit!