3 HubSpot Quick Wins You Can Crush in Your First 3 Months

New HubSpotters may find it hard to contain their excitement. After all, they have access to one of the leading business software options in the world. 

Not to mention, there are so many success stories from businesses in all kinds of industries. From nonprofits, manufacturing, and education to healthcare, software, and beyond, HubSpotters see amazing results all over. 

Some of the most notable success stories include:

• Airstream increasing their lead generation by 78 percent
• Trello reducing publication time by 47 percent
• Oakland Harley Davidson increasing contacts by 48 percent
• Parlor Skies driving a 200 percent increase in leads

While these success stories are certainly inspiring, they don’t happen through magic. The results you get with HubSpot directly correlates with the amount of effort you put into learning your tools. 

The good news is that if you get started with HubSpot the right way, you can earn big results in just a few months.

Getting Started With HubSpot: 6 Common Issues You Can (and Should Avoid) 

Adopting new software for your entire company is no easy task. Making that transition comes with plenty of obstacles.

Fortunately, these HubSpot implementation challenges are avoidable with some preparation.

Legacy System Nostalgia

Change is hard for everyone, especially for employees who are familiar with software that they’ve used for years.  Despite the fact that HubSpot is more streamlined and easier to use than most options, people will miss their legacy systems because they’re familiar. 

It’s important to gain buy in from your team upfront. You need your team to be game to learn something new and use their new tools to hit the ground running. 

Clumsy Website Migrations

When it comes to switching your website to a new host, there are so many factors involved, which is why migrating your website to HubSpot requires expert guidance. 

The entire process is very complex. And if the migration goes awry, you can experience a ton of costly issues, including:

• Losing SEO results, like page ranking
• Losing organic traffic
• Breaking internal links
• Delivering a poor user experience
• Losing content
• Experiencing lengthy downtime

This is where HubSpot specialists come in handy. Not only can they get your migration completed fast, but they can also do it correctly. 

Botched Tool Integrations

Integrations are the name of the game with HubSpot. With over 200 integrations available, you can connect all your favorite tools under one roof. 

However, when integrations are not properly executed, you risk losing data and having important information slip through the cracks. Fortunately, the app directory provides a comprehensive list of all the integrations available, along with setup guides to walk you through properly setting them up.

Messy Contact Data Imports

The HubSpot CRM, the best free CRM option on the market, is incredibly powerful and easy to use across your entire company. It’s the heart of your business because it empowers you to deliver a stellar customer experience at every touchpoint. 

But when you’re importing your contacts from your previous CRM or your spreadsheet of contacts, you can lose a lot of customer information if you’re not doing it the right way. HubSpot’s import guide is essential during this step. 

Analytics and Reporting Confusion

One of the most notable perks of HubSpot is the robust reporting functionality. Depending on what tier you’re using, you can create customized dashboards with personalized reports to hone in on the data that matters the most. 

However, without the right guidance, you’re at risk of creating poorly organized dashboards and not fully maximizing the use of your reporting tools. In terms of the big picture, this can lead to poor strategy decisions. Simply put, failing to use data-driven tactics slows your revenue growth. 

Failure to Properly Automate 

Automation should save you time and money. That’s another main benefit of using HubSpot – simplifying everything so your team can focus more on the actions that matter, not menial tasks. 

Without expert implementation of your automation tools, such as sequences or workflows, you can get lost in the weeds. Or worse, you could overlook a simple automation setup and not make use of an awesome tool you’re paying for.  

As you can see, many of these bumps in the road are preventable when you’re working with HubSpot specialists or if your internal team has the time and expertise to handle getting started with HubSpot.

After you get all the boring technical setup out of the way, you can look forward to your first quick win.

How to Hit Your First Quick Win in 5 Easy Steps

Your first few months using HubSpot will include many amazing learning opportunities, and you might potentially have some setbacks. After all, your whole team is getting accustomed to using their tools in their day to day.  

But all of this time and effort pays off when you get your first quick win. While most HubSpot users report positive results from their inbound efforts by the time their sixth month rolls around, you can get a jumpstart and hit your first success story in as little as three months. 

Here are five steps to get there. 

1. Set Long Term SMART Goals. 

Your quick wins will align your big picture company goals. Without a clear target in mind, your teams are shooting in the dark. 

Long term SMART goals set your company up for success because it gets everyone in your company rowing the boat in the same direction. For example, if your annual goal is to increase sales by 20 percent, your marketing team will need to set a SMART goal associated with lead generation that sets their sales team up for success. 

2. Break Your Big Picture Goals Into Smaller Wins. 

As you break down your big picture goals, you can create smaller objectives. Make sure you're assigning these targets to the right teams. 

For instance, to hit that goal of increasing sales by 20 percent , your marketing team will need a lead generation objective because they're the ones attracting and converting your target audience into leads. So the smaller win for marketing might be to generate 100 sales qualified leads in six months. 

3. Build Your Quick Wins Strategy. 

When you have clear expectations in place, you're ready to map out your strategy for achieving that quick win. Following the same example, to boost SQL generation for your marketing team, you need to walk through the actual initiatives required to drive leads. 

This likely includes consistent blogging, so you'll need to create an editorial calendar that aligns with a content marketing strategy. Your strategy will also require conversion elements on your website, so lead generation initiatives need to be established. 

4. Assign Initiatives to Your Teams. 

Based on your strategy, you can start setting up projects for each individual team member. As you organize your project management system and start planning tactics, take stock of all the amazing HubSpot tools you're using. 

But also, be realistic about your resource allocation. You know how many team members you have and what their capabilities are. You want to find tactics that can be acted on right now. If you're struggling to find the resources internally, consider outsourcing to agencies or freelancers. 

5. Take Action and Measure Progress. 

The best part of the quick wins approach – taking action! This is where the rubber meets the road. Make sure your initiatives are being carried out properly. 

At this point, while your HubSpot technical setup is being completed, you should have reporting set up as well. Use your HubSpot analytics tools to stay in the know of how you're tracking toward your quick win. If you're seeing low performance, make adjustments and test new approaches. 

3 Quick Win Ideas and How to Accomplish Them Fast

Now that you have a high level understanding of how to build and complete a quick wins strategy, you need some inspiration.

Keep in mind that your quick wins should be goal-oriented and systematic. When you establish a process for your quick wins, you can repeat them and refine that process over time to continue driving results. 

Here are a few easy quick wins you can get started on right now. 

Turn Repurposed Content Into a Lead Magnet.

As with most businesses, you likely need qualified leads to fill your pipeline. You can expedite this process of creating a full lead generation campaign by evaluating your existing content to find ways to repurpose it. 

For example, look at your blog posts you already have published. Find a particular subject you covered extensively, then combine those existing posts into a comprehensive ebook that addresses a primary pain point for your target audience. 

This requires a little more than copying and pasting blog posts and throwing them together in one PDF. You want to take some time to refine the content and organize it into a flow that makes sense. Then, work with designers or use free ebook design templates through easy-to-use platforms like Canva or Venngage.

Once you have your designed ebook, save it to your HubSpot file manager so you can gate it behind a form on a landing page. Creating forms in HubSpot takes just a few clicks. Then, you can add that form to your landing page and publish it. 

With a published landing page that highlights your awesome ebook, you can drive visitors to it by adding calls to action (CTAs) to relevant webpages and blog posts. This takes just a few moments. 

For example, when you're in the blog editor, follow these steps:

1. Find a blog post that relates to the ebook. Remember context is key. If your visitor is reading a blog post related to the topic of the ebook, you want to tailor the CTA messaging to entice the reader to download it.

2. At the end of the blog post, center your margin and go to Insert > Call-to-action.

3. Search through your CTAs and find the one you created for your ebook. In this example, our content team is adding a CTA for our ebook "How to Create an Effective Inbound Marketing Campaign" in the blog post titled "5 Essentials for a Successful Inbound Marketing Campaign."

4. Select the CTA, then click Insert.

5. Test the CTA by opening your blog post in the Preview tab in the top right corner of the blog editor. Once you open the blog post in preview mode in a new tab, click the CTA and test your landing page form to download the ebook. 

That's it! You're ready to get qualified leads to download your ebook, which you made by repurposing existing content. 

Nurture Existing Contacts Through a Targeted Campaign.

You likely have an existing database of contacts. That gives you a lot of opportunity to shake some qualified leads loose and nurture them through your sales process. If you're not doing this, your leads are just sitting there. Why not get them engaged?

This is why lead nurturing campaigns are so valuable. With the right segmentation and contextual messaging, you can guide the best fit leads through the buying process.

For example, if you want to get leads on the phone for a free demo of your product, you can create a campaign with engaging messaging that gets your leads to raise their hand and learn more about your product. 

Start by segmenting your existing contacts list, which is easy in the HubSpot CRM. You can base your segments on levels of engagement. If you're looking for leads who are ready to demo, this might be your best bet. The more active they are on your site or with opening your emails, the more interested they are in your products or services. 

Once you establish your goal for a quick win with lead nurturing, you can set up a simple automated workflow in HubSpot in just a few steps. 

Grab Leads With Exit Intent Pop-Up Forms.

The Bluleadz team knows from personal experience how impactful exit intent pop-ups can be. One of our main goals in 2020 was to boost blog subscribers. Our blog gets a lot of traffic, but we only got about 3,500 new subscribers through all of 2019. 

In the beginning of January 2020, our content team added exit intent pop-ups on our actual blog posts. We wanted to get in front of our readers because most of our traffic is organic, so those people are not seeing many conversion elements, aside from the subscribe option in our footer. 

After just five months, we saw a 61 percent increase in total subscribers. Additionally, our average monthly subscribers jumped 312 percent, going from about 300 per month to earning an average of 912 per month. 

This is another easy quick win if you're looking to drive leads. Simply add exit intent pop-ups on high trafficked pages. But make sure your messaging is contextual and that it highlights the benefits your visitors get from whatever offer you're providing them. 

To create an pop-up form, follow these simple steps:

1. Go to Marketing > Lead Capture > Forms.

2. Select Create Form, then pick Pop-up Form on the left sidebar.

3. Click Next in the top right corner, then select the type of pop-up you want. It can be a slide-in box from the left, slide-in box from the right, drop-down banner, or a box that appears in the center of the page. 

4. Then, add your callout text and callout button text, select the color you want to use, and tie your pop-up to a specific link. For example, you can direct people who convert to a URL, blog post, form, meeting link, calendar event, or a file download. 

5. The next step is building your form in the pop-up. This includes a featured image, body text, form fields you want to add (e.g., email, first name, website URL, etc.), form button text, notice and consent checkbox, language, and the lifecycle stage you want to associate with those who convert on this form. 

6. Finally, write your thank you message that will appear once they successfully submit the form on the pop-up. 

7. You can also set up follow-up emails that instantly contact the new lead, which is a great way to confirm their submission and engage them immediately in their inbox.

8. Before you launch your pop-up, you need to select the following:

• The webpages to add this pop-up form to
• Filters to control who you're targeting (i.e., who you want to see this pop-up)
• Triggers based on the behavior on each webpage (e.g., after scrolling to 50 percent of the page, elapsed time, etc). 

9. Finalize any last options, including when you want to schedule the pop-up to go live, whether or not you want the pop-up to display on mobile devices, how often you want the form to reappear if visitors dismiss it, and who on your team should get email notifications when new leads are captured. 

This takes just a few minutes. And when you're strategic with your messaging and targeting, you're well equipped to capture a lot of qualified leads.  

Leverage Quick Wins to Fuel Momentum

Earning your first quick win with HubSpot is that aha moment everyone needs when first adopting a business software. It's the start of your journey to grow better with HubSpot. 

You can get there fast when you team up with HubSpot specialists for proper onboarding. Most onboarding processes include:

• Technical setup of your HubSpot hubs
• Goal setting and strategy development
• Reporting setup 
• Training and recommendations

When you find the right HubSpot Solutions Partner, you can collaborate effectively and hit your quick wins fast. In turn, you set your company up for future success and much bigger wins on your HubSpot platform.