5 HubSpot Tools to Drive Sales for Startups

What would an early-stage startup want to do with a full-scale, end-to-end marketing, sales, and service platform? I’m glad you asked! Below are five of the HubSpot sales tools and features that can supercharge the sales wing of your startup company (and to be honest, these only scratch the surface of what HubSpot can do):

1. Deal Stage Automation

HubSpot’s built-in workflows tool can automate just about anything within HubSpot, including your sales deal pipeline. Once you’ve defined the stages of your pipeline(s), HubSpot is ready to start automating sales for startups.

Deal-stage automation works tightly with the free HubSpot CRM to save your startup sales team oodles of labor. One way to take advantage of this is by personalizing the default HubSpot CRM property called “lead status.” Rather than continually going back in to update each contact’s status as a deal progresses, you can set the program to update automatically as the deal moves through each stage.

Every stage of your sales process can convert into a deal stage in the CRM, no matter how long, short, direct, or nuanced your sales cycle is at your startup’s current stage of growth.

2. Email Touchpoint Automation

The HubSpot “Workflows” tool can automate every email touchpoint in your sales funnel, from the landing page conversion welcome email to a post-sale thank you. Try setting up deal-based workflows, too! For example, if someone signs a quote or contract via email, an automated workflow can follow up with a confirmation or next steps so your reps can reserve their time for 1-1 nurturing over the phone or in live demos.

3. HubSpot Live Chat

The “Messages” tool launched in 2017 to integrate a live chat function that works seamlessly with the free-forever HubSpot CRM. Your startup sales team can use it to:

• Automatically route incoming chats to the reps who own the contacts in HubSpot
• Easily view past conversations in the CRM
• Enroll chat contacts in sales sequences
• Schedule follow up tasks from within the chat

Perhaps the best thing about HubSpot’s live chat tool for a startup on a tight budget is that it’s totally free. However, there’s a HubSpot ad link at the bottom of the free live chat widget, which can be removed if you upgrade to a paid plan. Another perk of a paid plan is that you can create multiple teams and route incoming chats to specific groups or users.

A lot of startups would step in at this point to say, “Hey, we’re a startup company—we don’t have the resources to offer live reps 24/7.” That’s a good point, especially since customers might be comfortable with about a 6-hour response time via email, but they’ll expect an immediate response on live chat. This can cause problems when 21% of live chat requests already go unanswered:

But HubSpot has you covered! You can set your availability so that you only offer chat as an option when you have the resources to engage prospects. Another possibility (which is great for a high volume of requests with a small team) is to try chatbots that can handle low-level requests and direct users to FAQ pages. If the user needs a real rep, they can ask for one and switch over to a live chat.

4. Automated Call Tracking

HubSpot Sales has a built-in calling and call tracking feature that will automatically log calls in your CRM (or Salesforce, if you prefer).  That’s right; no more manual call logging required. A single click is all it takes to send or record a call from your conveniently queued-up list. And if you’re using both Salesforce and the HubSpot CRM, the bidirectional synchronization means that both databases will log the details without any grunt work. There’s a lot of urgency in sales for startups, so less record-keeping means more time for high-value contact opportunities.

5. Vidyard Integration

This is one of my favorites. Few things can save you as much time as one-on-one personalized videos send right from the CRM. HubSpot Video now has full integration with Vidyard’s video browser extension. Use it to:

• Screen record
• Voice record
• Create a video of yourself

These videos are easy to make and quick to send directly to prospects in an email, kind of like a video voicemail. The recipient just has to click a video thumbnail in the email, and it’ll link them to an automatically created landing page where they can watch it. And since it works through your CRM, you can also track views and clicks.

Bottom of the funnel videos are enormously powerful growth tools. They allow salespeople to more easily show off a product or service and answer questions through a conversational video format. Rather than going back and forth with meeting invitations, booking calendars, and other coordination headaches, you can shoot a one-minute video to the prospect that shows them exactly what they need to see. You can even build CTAs and forms directly into the videos, and save a whole library of them for future use.

When you equip your team with any (or all) of these 5 HubSpot tools that drive sales for startups, you’ll save reps time and empower them to close more deals with faster responses and far less busywork.