HubSpot Sales Tools Every Sales Person Should Be Using

HubSpot Sales Hub is the sales tool that compliments HubSpot’s customer platform. Sales are the single most important element of HubSpot - because without sales - businesses do not grow, are outcompeted, and will cease to exist. 

So how do we use HubSpot Sales Hub effectively? What are the key elements we need to be aware of? 

Let’s jump in. 

Prospecting

Prospecting is something all sales teams do daily. Often the details of prospects and follow-ups get lost in Excel spreadsheets or written in a notebook. HubSpots Prospecting tool allows salespeople to manage prospects.

Among the most useful tools are:

• Task creation for follow-ups and new contacts.
• Scheduling tools to manage meetings.
• A feed that shows opens, clicks and responses.

Alongside this, it suggests new contacts in the CRM and splits leads into those that are New, Attempting, Connected and Engaged. Follow-up tasks can be created and all of this can be managed and reported on by sales managers with multiple team members. 

Sequences 

Accurate and timely follow-ups lead to more closed deals. Nailing this strategy is often time-consuming and difficult to do at scale accurately. Sequences in HubSpot allow you to add lists to a predetermined sequence with a set of rules to help with follow-ups.

These touch points can be across:

• Email
• LinkedIn (Connection requests and InMails)
• Calls
• Follow up tasks 
  
  

These activities are recorded against the contact record, and the effectiveness can be tracked through easy reporting. The automation helps salespeople save time and get multiple touchpoints while still allowing for personalisation. 

A/B testing can be used to tweak and alter campaigns so they can be as effective as possible. Open rates, click rates and reply rates can be used to build better follow-up campaigns.

Goals

Sales teams all work towards goals. Sales targets are as much a part of sales as selling is. How these goals are created varies from company to company. What doesn’t change is the need to track these goals effectively without the need for unnecessary administrative effort. 

HubSpot’s goal feature allows sales leaders and salespeople to see a view of their sales goals and how they are tracking in one dashboard. Individual and team goals can be set up with each salesperson having a view of only their sales goals. These are split into monthly, quarterly and yearly goals for which the progress can be tracked in real-time. 

HubSpot gives you a snapshot of how the individual or team is performing and it is possible to dive into these individual statistics. These can then be measured against forecast numbers.

Common goal types tracked in HubSpot:

• Calls made 
• Deals created 
• Meetings booked 
• Revenue
  
  

Forecasting

Forecasting in sales always presents a challenge to sales managers. Forecasts are often inaccurate and difficult to keep track of.

In the HubSpot forecasting tool, each sales function can be broken down into teams. Salespeople submit their forecasts and HubSpot splits these into different sectors.

These are:

• How many deals they have closed in company currency concerning their forecast? 

• What amount in company currency is active in the sales pipeline for that sales function? 

• This is an automatic calculation done by dividing the goal by the total pipeline. This gives an idea of how likely a sales function/person is to attain their forecast. 

• Where salespeople submit their forecast for the month?
  
  

Further to this, HubSpot will give a figure based on the previous month's goal and forecast data to show the estimated amount each salesperson will close. These are all tied directly to sales goals. 

AI forecast

Additionally, HubSpot is now using AI to give sales leaders extra data points for their forecasting.

Playbooks

The Playbooks tool in HubSpot has a wide array of uses, depending on how businesses run their sales functions. In basic terms, it is a set of steps a salesperson would follow for any given sales stage. Some useful examples are:

• Creating a set of Discovery questions that need to be answered in a discovery call.
• Notes for SDRs to pass on to Account Executives and Business Development Reps.
• Information a salesperson collects that needs to be passed onto another team (i.e., CSM, Tech, Finance).

This information allows for teams to follow a predetermined or structured approach to meetings or prospect information. These are recorded as notes. Some fields can be required if they are more important to the organisation or team receiving them. Along with all this, they are personalised. 

Integrations 

HubSpot has over 1600 integrations already built into the platform (Granted not all of these are sales-related). Apart from the more obvious ones like Google Meet, Gmail, Outlook, Slack and the various calendar options are a few stand-out integrations that can help salespeople be smarter in their sales activities. 

LinkedIn Sales Navigator

This requires a SalesNavigator advanced as well as a HubSpot Sales pro licence but it is one of the most effective integrations available to sales professionals.

HubSpot automatically pulls through a lead's LinkedIn profile and allows a connection request or InMail to be sent directly from HubSpot. This not only saves search time but also allows you to use this function in both the prospecting and sequencing tools. By doing this you add an extra point of contact for yourself in the sales process. 

Apollo

Sales teams spend a large amount of their time searching for prospects that fit their ideal profile only to be met by gatekeepers and bounced emails. Apollo allows sales teams to search for their ideal prospects and gives access to a large amount of email addresses and other contact information. Links to LinkedIn profiles can be easily accessed and vertices can be saved and combed through. 

The best part of this integration is that it links not only with HubSpot but also LinkedIn SalesNavigator. This means that lists saved in SalesNavigator can be pushed directly to HubSpot including their contact information and LinkedIn profile. They can then be approached using the tools within HubSpot. The data is stored centrally and this reduces the chance of multiple salespeople contacting the same person. 

OrgChart

This sales tool allows salespeople to visualise client organisations directly within HubSpot, making it easy to understand complex hierarchies.

By mapping decision-makers and influencers, enhancing relationship management and outreach strategies sales outreach and ABM< strategies can be actioned more systematically. 

A seamless integration keeps all client data synchronised and up-to-date, enabling sales teams to leverage visual insights for more targeted and personalised communication approaches.

The Wrap

Selling in 2024 is a science and the tools that are used are becoming more important. Leveraging HubSpot not only saves time for sales managers but also is a valuable tool in the salesperson's on-the-grounds arsenal.