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HubSpot from a Salesperson's Perspective

Posted: Wed Dec 04, 2024 9:04 am
by shukla53621
Which CRM works best in practice? Which one is the most functional in the daily work of a salesperson? What features and functions should it have? I invite you to read the text, in which I will answer what it looks like from my perspective as a long-time practitioner.

As a salesperson, I had the opportunity to work on various CRM systems. One was a small Polish system, the rest were systems provided by the largest companies in the industry. In this article, I will explain why I consider HubSpot the most functional of them and why I can no longer imagine working without it. This will be partly my subjective assessment, I know, but I am certain that the functionalities I am writing about will be useful in every sales department.

The first thing I really liked was that this is the first system I’ve used where sales and marketing have exactly the same data. In my experience, sometimes marketing sends salespeople just a little bit of data saying “call me” without explaining where the lead is from or what they were doing on the site.

If a company has a Marketing Hub and Sales Hub , marketing sweden business email list doesn’t have to pull data from the marketing program into Excel and send it to CRM for the salesperson to see. Instead, the salesperson can enter the system and see how the potential customer interacted with marketing campaigns, what items they viewed, or downloaded any materials. This allows for much better preparation for the first call. Not only does this give the salesperson more points to refer to during the conversation, but they also feel more confident and better prepared for the conversation. I wrote more about the advantages of CRM over Excel here .

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It works like this in this example: we can see that the lead was on the site on June 30. He viewed the article “Digital Body Language”, then returned to the site on July 3 and left a contact on the “Discover Digital Marketing” subpage.

The second thing that I find very useful and convenient is the email plugin. I've seen the option to add a template or tracking link before, but only when sending emails from a program for that purpose. In HubSpot, I can continue working in my Outlook or Gmail, but use HubSpot's sales tools.

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So, as in the attached illustration, I can add templates that I created from recurring emails or fragments of text. I can also add a contact to the sequence so that I don't forget to follow up, I can paste a link to my calendar. (What's cool about the calendar is that we can send the client our calendar, but we can also choose a few hours that we propose, and send the calendar in this form.) I can also send the document in the form of a link, so that I can see whether the client opened it.

The third thing that comes in handy is the great freedom of adding new fields to a contact. It would seem that this is obvious, but from my experience it turns out that it is not entirely so. Some CRMs only have their standard fields, and in order to introduce fields that are needed by our business, we have to hire programmers to add them at the code level. In HubSpot, we can add and freely change fields ourselves through the editor to use the database most effectively. Below you can see the statuses that we can add manually, such as seniority, marital status, etc.

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The contact list is also very clear, where you can add or remove views yourself. What I think is really cool about Hubspot, unlike the systems I've worked with, is that Hubspot will distinguish whether the last contact with a lead was a phone call, email or meeting, so it doesn't just show the date of the last contact.

The fourth thing worth mentioning is very clear reports of our transactions, showing at what stage they are. In other CRMs, it often requires creating another report or even several reports, if we want to additionally check transaction totals, etc. In this case, the salesperson has a nice dashboard, where they can see which deal is at which stage, what is the total and average amount of the transaction. This can help plan work, for example, by checking how much is missing to the goal or contacting all companies that are in the negotiation stage to manage to close the transactions by the end of the month.

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Fifth, HubSpot dashboards are clear and easy to set up manually. In the case of many CRM systems, creating a report is not simple and intuitive enough for every salesperson to do it quickly on their own. In larger companies, this task is often delegated to a person or team of people who specialize in organizing work in CRM, and only after some time can they get their report ready to check what they want to check. This is of course burdensome for the salesperson themselves, who has to wait for someone to do it, and requires hiring more people who will be able to extract this data from the system.

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Sixth, a very useful thing in Hubspot is also the ability to create a sequence (work flow), which allows you to automate the distribution of leads to a specific salesperson. This is not comparable to the situation I encountered before, when a separate program is responsible for marketing automation, collects leads from landing pages, and then sends them by email, through CRM or, God forbid, marketing forwards them in Excel format to the sales department (it is still good if this happens automatically based on some rule, worse if the marketer or manager assigns them manually to a specific person). Then this process takes time and before the salesperson receives such a query, it may turn out that the potential customer has already talked to several other competing companies, has already chosen a solution or simply does not want to have the same conversation again.

If marketing and sales are working on the same data source, firstly, this transfer happens instantly thanks to automation, and secondly, the salesperson has access to information about what pages the prospect has visited or what exactly they have downloaded. They can quickly check it themselves and call the customer without any delay. "The Lead Response Management Study" conducted by InsideSales.com showed that the chances of establishing contact with a prospect are highest when the salesperson responds to the inquiry within five minutes of receiving the request. The longer you wait to respond, the less likely you are to close the sale.