Automating sales outreach and lead management with HubSpot CRM

Managing your sales pipeline is always important, but with lockdown confirmed to go on for at least three more weeks, ensuring you are getting the most value from each lead is absolutely essential.

Unfortunately, nearly 50% of all leads are never followed up by salespeople.

Why is this?

One of the biggest factors for salespeople not following up leads is a lack of visibility over their sales pipeline and individual workload. If you don’t have a CRM system, or are over-reliant on manual processes, it’s easy for tasks to slip down the back of the sofa. How often have you forgotten to call somebody or send an email over the course of a long working day?

By using three key features in the HubSpot CRM, you can automate day-to-day sales activities to create efficient, effective and scalable sales processes, which will help sales people close more deals and reduce those wasted opportunities. 

Let’s take a look at these three features, starting with Tasks. 

Feature 1: Tasks

The first of these HubSpot features is Tasks, a handy tool that provides automated reminders to help salespeople stay on top of their workload. Tasks will remind salespeople that they need to do a variety of important jobs - from following up leads through a phone call, to completing an action before an upcoming deadline, or even adding a prospect on LinkedIn. 

The Tasks feature goes beyond simple pop-up notifications for individual users - it also allows you to create a wider scalable process to ensure your salespeople all approach outreach and lead management in the same way. If you know it’s most effective for a prospect to be emailed within an hour of downloading an eBook, for example, you can set Tasks up in HubSpot to ensure this happens. 

Once you have a tried-and-tested process, it can be easily turned into a task list, which every salesperson in your business can use. 

This not only helps salespeople at an individual level, but it also helps you to create a scalable, systematic process to improve both sales results and the onboarding of new starters. A new member of your team can quickly be shown how you manage both inbound leads and their outreach activity through a tool in an easy-to-use tool, all while providing you with greater visibility over your sales team's actions. 

Feature 2: Queues

The Queues feature dovetails perfectly with Tasks in the HubSpot CRM, allowing users to create task queues and easily manage their workload on a daily basis. 

If your sales team are working with outbound initiatives as well as inbound leads, there can be a large number of contacts in their pipeline, leading to a hefty stack of tasks to get through - and no salesperson alive likes to organise a week’s worth of tasks on a Monday morning. 

Queues help automate a person’s workload by organising tasks into a sequential list, which HubSpot will go through with the individual user. 

So when a phone call with Isabelle from Company A is the next job to be done, HubSpot will start the call for you. If your next task is to send Juan from Company B a followup message, HubSpot will open up an email window.

Queues can help reduce downtime and ensure leads are getting worked efficiently and effectively.

Feature 3: Sequences

Finally, Sequences brings these two HubSpot features together to create powerful sales automation across both outreach and lead management. Sequences allows you to send out manually deployed emails at an individual contact level instead of enrolling contacts into workflows en masse.

So what’s the benefit of this? Sequences give you the best features of automation (greater efficiency, reduction of human error, speed and convenience) while also allowing you to personalise emails easily for big opportunities. 

You can also set tasks between each email. In order to ensure that every lead is getting targeted across multiple channels, you may decide to set tasks to remind yourself to connect with the prospect on LinkedIn and send a message there, or maybe to place a follow-up phone call. The beauty of this is that you can create a scalable sales process across the business, which means new sales employees can jump right into selling - following a process that is proven to work. 

As well as helping salespeople manage leads, Sequences provide far greater visibility over how effectively your team is closing deals. Through this HubSpot feature, you can review and report on the effectiveness of each Sequence and easily add the most effective ones to your sales process. 

Every Sequence is stored in a library that any member of the team can access and use from their own email account. So if one salesperson has a particularly good Sequence that’s getting great results, you can encourage other members of the team to adopt it, helping you to create an effective, company-wide approach to sales, and ensuring you get the maximum value from every lead. 

Tasks and Queues are available in all versions of HubSpot - and although Sequences is a paid-for feature in Sales Professional, this powerful sales tool effectively stitches these various HubSpot features together to create the ultimate sales automation package.