Meeting quarterly goals each sales cycle is a cornerstone of many companies’ success, but it’s often easier said than done. Salespeople can spend over half of their day on administrative tasks, wasting time and resources on manual tasks like data entry that could be put to better use.
Part of any great sales enablement strategy includes setting up sales automation to ensure opportunities are identified and followed. Sales automation tools, like those in HubSpot Sales Hub, make it both simple and practical to take full advantage of sales events.
What does the sales process look like at your company? Is it a dreaded slog that takes forever, or does it enable you to make lots of qualified contacts and close deals efficiently?
If it’s the latter, I bet you’re using a CRM like HubSpot. That’s because HubSpot Sales Hub offers sales automation software to nurture leads, identify opportunities and track your campaigns. HubSpot also offers automation that runs in the background to ensure that your business development is always humming along.
In this blog post, we’ll take a closer look at ways you can use HubSpot Sales Hub to automate parts of your sales process, make business development easier and make sure no opportunity goes unexplored.
Organize meetings with prospects
Executives in the United States attend around 11 million meetings a day, equating to 220 million meetings per year. If each executive sends a couple of emails to arrange each meeting, imagine the time that’s wasted.
There’s no need to have an executive assistant (virtual or otherwise) schedule your meetings for you. There’s technology to do that baked right into HubSpot CRM and many other meeting booking tools that are a lot less expensive than an assistant or the time it costs you to do it.
You can automate this process by using a tool like Meetings within HubSpot Sales Hub or a software tool like Calendly to send a prospect your calendar and let them book a time that works best for both of you.
Receive website lead revisit notifications
When sales and marketing teams set up your website to be a sales resource for your customers, you’ll find that your prospects will visit your website repeatedly at each stage in the buyer’s journey.
To be thorough, your salespeople will want to know when one of their contacts or leads revisits your website so they can connect. Having your marketing automation platform set up to notify the lead owner when a prospect comes back will remind the salesperson to reach out and see if there’s anything they can help with.
Get reminders on idle or inactive deals
It’s easy for a salesperson to get caught up working on active opportunities and forget about inactive ones. Making sure that deals don’t fall through the cracks is essential to meeting sales goals.
Creating some automation that notifies the salesperson when an opportunity hasn’t been updated in a certain period of time will help remind them that there’s work to do. A sales follow-up with a personalized email can boost conversion by as much as 10%.
Get notified when a prospect increases in priority
Data points such as email interaction and browsing history can tell you which prospects are most likely to make the jump to customer. However, it can be a challenge to track the habits of hundreds or even thousands of prospects at a time.
Having a lead scoring system in place will help to automate the setting of priorities for sales outreach. Your CRM can “listen” for when a certain sales threshold is reached and notify you when that occurs.
Improve CRM record keeping
Keeping detailed records of sales content is an important part of understanding and predicting your customer base's behavior. What's more, it gives companies an easy way to contact prospects en masse.
With HubSpot Sales Hub, the prospect’s company information is pulled into the record based on their email address. If the contact record doesn’t contain a company, you can set up an automation that pulls the company name from the company record into the contact record, helping to fill out and complete the contact record.
Automate common sales followup
There are likely processes and follow-ups that your sales team regularly does, which can be templatized to an automated reply.
For example, if your sales team always has to reach out and ask a prospect for certain information once the deal is closing, you can automate a series of emails so that if the person doesn't respond, future emails in the sequence are sent to them automatically. If they do respond, the sequence is halted, and you get the information you need.
One common automation is to send followup emails to prospects that don’t respond when you send a proposal or purchase order.
The HubSpot Sales Hub makes it easy to follow up with prospects to help improve conversion rates. You can line up automated sales emailing to keep in regular touch with high-priority prospects.
Route website lead notifications
You’d be surprised how common it is that website inquiries don't make it to the intended person. Without regular communication, a prospect may lose interest and move onto another, more engaging company.
If your web forms are hooked up to your CRM and marketing automation system, you can notify the proper people and set timed reminders for followup by email and text message. You can also make those notifications conditional based on information in the form, so the right person gets the right lead, or so your sales team rotates those leads in a round-robin format.
Notify your operations team when you win an opportunity
For sales organizations to operate at peak efficiency, all departments have to work together like a well-oiled machine. If departments don’t communicate, customer requests can end up slipping through the cracks.
You can set up automation so that when your sales reps close a deal, it alerts your delivery team or operations team, giving them an immediate heads up that new work is coming. With everybody on the same page, you don’t have to worry about the handoff from sales to operations or delivery.
Schedule social media updates
These days, a healthy social media presence is a necessity for any business that wants to succeed online. With almost half of the world population on some form of social media, it offers a powerful way to reach new prospects.
Social selling is a popular trend among business-to-business marketers, but who has time to post something every day so you stay top of mind?
With HubSpot, you can automate social media updates on platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Schedule all of your social media publishing for multiple team members, including sales reps, in advance and let the app do all the work.
In Conclusion
HubSpot's sales CRM automation tools can help streamline your business development, saving you time by taking over time-consuming administrative tasks and eliminating the need for certain sales training. Including a sales automation platform like HubSpot in your sales management strategy can boost productivity and improve sales numbers across the board.
At Whittington Consulting, we offer sales enablement services to help you map out your sales process, install that process on HubSpot Sales Hub, and train your team for a more efficient, effective, and productive sales process.
You get your sales process done right, which helps you to maximize the amount of deals you close. You'll have a documented and automated strategy for converting leads into customers. If you’d like to learn more, please see our Sales Enablement page or contact us to ask a question.
