CRM Tools: Sales Team's Silent Ally

Lead Management

If your sales team isn't already using a CRM software, there's a good chance that their leads are either scribbled across the pages of several worn out notebooks or kept in a cluttered and less than user-friendly spreadsheet. The very first benefit you'll receive from a CRM is a better way to manage leads.

The HubSpot CRM, for example, provides an integrated database to store and manage all of your contacts. The contact records automatically populate with user activity as the HubSpot tracking code monitors their behavior, giving your sales and marketing teams valuable insight into the buyer's journey.

Some of the activities that can be tracked through the HubSpot CRM include page views, social media interactions, email clicks, and opens, and form submissions. The primary contact properties can be customized so your sales team will be able to open a contact record and find exactly what they need to know without digging through multiple spreadsheets or programs.

Here are a few examples of behavioral trends that might warrant attention from your sales team:

• Page Views: Certain page views, such as Pricing or Services pages, may be indicators of legitimate interest in your business. Additionally, multiple page views or frequent website visits may also be a sign that the prospect is looking for more information.

• Content Engagement: A prospect that downloads multiple content offers or frequently opens and clicks newsletter emails may be a warm lead for your sales team to follow up with and further nurture.

• Form Submissions: Whenever a contact submits a form, their field submissions will show up on their contact record. This makes it easy for your sales team to quickly assess the prospect's activity and form properties in order to more directly address their needs.

You can get even more out of your HubSpot CRM with the lead scoring tool. It allows you to assign a value to a particular behavior or activity in order to automatically segment and prioritize leads. This takes the guesswork out of which leads should be contacted right away and those that need a bit more nurturing before being contacted by a sales rep.

Sales Pipeline

Sales CRM tools also provides a framework for visualizing and updating leads within your sales pipeline. In the HubSpot CRM, this is done with the use of deal stages. These are the default deal stages:

• Appointment scheduled

• Qualified to buy

• Presentation scheduled

• Decision maker bought in

• Contract sent

• Closed won

• Closed lost

Custom deal stages can be added or removed to fit your specific needs. You can also create multiple sales pipelines with their own unique deal stages. Not to mention you can mandate fields that must be entered before moving onto the next deal stage. Some common examples include: proposal sent date, estimated amount to close, date expected to close, next steps and so many more!

In addition, to deal stages, a robust CRM such as the one offered by HubSpot will provide your sales team with a number of deal properties to further organize their notes so they can spend less time searching for information and more time selling. These can be viewed on a board or table view and easily exported into a CSV. There are hundreds of properties you can add a customized but here are just a few examples of the most common ones:

• Deal amount

• Closed won/lost reason

• Deal owner

• Date last contacted

• Number of times contacted

In addition to helping your sales team prioritize and plan their activities, this information can be used to generate reports that will help you optimize your sales process. Some reports that achieve this are:

• Deal Forecast: This report shows the amount of revenue for deals in each stage of your deal pipeline and calculates the forecasted revenue by multiplying the deal amounts by deal stage probability.

• Close Rate: This can be calculated for the company overall or by the individual salesperson. It can also be set up to show the close rate for a specific type of lead, such as those from a certain channel or belonging to a particular persona.

• Deal Revenue Leaderboard: This report helps show which team members are driving the most closed revenue as well as where other projected revenue that is still in other deal stages.

• Deals Closed vs. Goal: This report shows how close you are on track to hitting your monthly, quarterly or annual goals. Set company, team or individual goals.

• Time in Deal Stage: If you are curious about where deals get stuck in the pipeline or why some move faster than others use this report to take a deeper dive into the analytics.

• Deal Forecast by Owner: We commonly use this in two ways with sales teams; set the report to show a total number of deals by owner/ stage or use it show actual revenue by owner/stage. Both give valuable insights into the volume and size of deals.

• Productivity Leaderboard: Get deeper insights into daily activity that closes deals. Use this report to analyze what it takes to close deals; emails, meetings, calls etc. By using this report you can see what your best performing sales people actively do in order to close those deals! Use these metrics to roll out best practices to your other salespeople.

These reports can be customized to the needs of your business and will help you to identify gaps and opportunities within your pipeline. For example, if you know you have a lower close rate with a particular type of lead, you can adjust accordingly to achieve better results.

With sales CRM tools, any information relating to a particular deal can be stored in one place and easily updated, saving your sales team valuable time.

Email Integration

Even the least technology savvy sales teams are comfortable with using email. Utilizing a CRM integration with your email can be a great way to get your sales team comfortable with the software with minimal disruption. It also makes updating your CRM a dynamic and seamless process with few additional steps.

Here are two of our favorite features of HubSpot's email integration.

Auto-logging Emails

Email communications sent from the connected email account will automatically show up on the contact's timeline. This makes it easier to figure out when you contacted a lead, where your conversation left off, and if/when you should follow up with them. No more searching through your sent folder or trying to find your written notes - everything you need is right in their contact record.

Email Tracking

Notifications can be set up to alert your sales team when a prospect interacts with an email they sent. These notifications can include when an email is received when an email is opened, the location of the recipient when they opened the email, and if the recipient clicks a link in the email.

This information may be useful in helping your sales team gauge a lead's interest. For example:

• If a lead has not replied to a contract proposal but has opened the email multiple times, it may be worthwhile to reach out to help them make a decision.

• If a lead has not opened your contract proposal at all, you may want to call them directly to make sure they did not miss your message.

These are just two examples of the many ways that email tracking can help you close more deals by being in tune with the behavior of your leads.

Sales Automation

The contact and deal properties discussed above present ample opportunities for sales automation. That information can be used to trigger automated workflows, set up predictive lead scoring, and generate custom reporting within the CRM. Of the many sales automation tools available through the HubSpot CRM, here are the ones we most highly recommend:

Meetings

Forget the back and forth of trying to find a time that works for everyone. Instead, share a meeting link that allows recipients to select from available time slots. You can customize your availability, offer multiple meeting length options, and customize the information gathered in the booking form. You can also set up automatic email reminders to confirm meetings with prospects without having to type a single word.

Email Scheduling

This feature is called Send Later in the HubSpot CRM and it allows you to draft an email response to a prospect to be sent at a later date and/or time. Using machine learning, there is even an option to allow HubSpot to automatically select the best time to schedule the email based on the recipient's engagement history and contact properties. Once scheduled, the email will be tracked within the contact's timeline for easy reference.

Workflows

Workflows are often associated with marketing emails, but they are actually a very versatile tool for your sales process. They can be used to automate internal processes that would otherwise be time-consuming and manual, such as:

• Data entry

• Updating contact properties, such as lead status

• Lead rotation and assignment

• Task assignment and reminders

• Sales funnel notifications

These workflows are relatively simple to set up, will save you an enormous amount of time, and nearly eliminate the element of human error from updating information on your contact records.

Here are some examples of workflows that can give your sales team some quick wins:

• Lead Rotation: Automatically assign new leads to sales reps instead of manually determining who will own each new lead. They will be notified about the lead as soon as it comes in so there is no confusion or delay in responding.

• Task Assignments: Automatically assign tasks and set reminders for your sales team to make sure nothing falls through the cracks. If your process requires you to follow up with a lead two days after a contract is sent, this workflow can automatically create a task for the sales rep once a contract is sent that reminds the rep to follow up after two days. It can be further customized as to assign different tasks using if/then branches that allow it to be responsive to the dynamic nature of the sales process.

Workflows are highly customizable and offer limitless possibilities to automate the most time-consuming manual tasks so you have more time for nurturing and closing leads.

Sequences

A sequence is a series of pre-written emails that automate your lead nurturing process. There's a good chance that many of your conversations with new leads are similar iterations of the same questions and value propositions. Rather than manually typing out a new email each time you receive a lead, you can utilize sequencing to send a series of perfectly timed and personalized emails that will qualify leads ahead of time.

• Pre-Call Sequences: These emails allow you to introduce your company to new leads that haven't yet spoken directly with you.

• Long-Term Nurturing Sequences: These emails are mapped out ahead of time to account for a nurturing period that may last weeks or even months.

• Referral Introduction Sequences: These emails help you capitalize on referrals in a way that is concise and strategic.

Customer Relationship Management

Using sales CRM tools is all about helping your sales team build and manage their relationships with prospects in order to close deals faster. Encourage your sales team to think of it less as learning a new way of doing things and more as doing more of the things they love to do and less of the things they don't. In the end, any tool that helps your sales team sell faster and better will ultimately make them happier and more efficient.