Leveraging HubSpot's Sales Automation Features to Save Time

A former sales manager used to say, “We don’t want you wasting your time playing email-email”, or “If you aren’t talking to people you aren’t selling”. These days with the advanced sales automation tools we have in HubSpot it is easier than ever to focus on selling. One does not need to be an AI engineer to set these up, they are built in. In the below post, we will unpack some of the simple and more advanced features that can help salespeople save time.

Simple day-to-day automation

We often talk to sales teams that have one common pain point, their salespeople spend too much time on “admin”. This admin normally comes from a place of process or a necessity to collect information. These are two very basic problems to solve with a tool like HubSpot. Some basic tools to consider in HubSpot to solve these problems are:

• Tasks: To manage what you need to be busy with during the day to be a successful salesperson.
• Templates: These have many uses in the sales space, but primarily they are used to make repetitive emails easier to compile.
• Sequences: An easy way to create follow-up tasks, emails, calls or even LinkedIn steps.
• Lists: If there is a focus on narrowing down who you want to be targeting and drilling down into a specific ICP
• Snippets: This is a shortcut tool to save time compiling notes or gathering recurring information with the use of a hashtag to save time typing out repetitive information.
• Meeting Links: No need for a third-party app to find a suitable time to meet prospects, you can share a link for a team, have a round-robin or schedule a team meeting using a link created in HubSpot.
  
  

Speeding up the sales process

Salespeople are not normally strong in the aspect of administration. They want to close deals and will find the quickest way to capture information. This, along with having to repeat information they have are common bugbears.

Playbooks

There are three ways we can solve these issues in HubSpot. They are not overly complex, but they can help save some time when it comes to administration. The first is a tool called “Playbooks”. You can define a set of questions for discovery or clients' phone calls that the salesperson can fill in live on the call, post or before the session. These questions or information can then be saved directly to a record in HubSpot. Notes are then created directly from the filled-in Playbook and certain properties can be updated. If you wanted to be a little “fancy”, you could even use these to score or qualify your leads and deals upfront through automation.

Smarter collection of Data

The second way to help automate these administrative tasks is to set up the way that contacts, leads, companies and deals are collected to begin with. If there is a base set of information you need upfront then capture just that. As the sales process with a prospect or company matures then you can have different information become available when it is needed. If your HubSpot portal is optimally set up then you can have this information carry from one object to the next.

Eg: If you have collected a company's annual revenue when the company was created there should be no need to collect it on a deal level because it can be synced, or because you already have the association with the company in question.

When we are implementing HubSpot we will often ask what information is crucial to a certain deal or product type. In some situations (where a specific product requires a specific set of information), we can limit the amount of clutter and confusion caused by using conditional properties. This means that if a specific product is selected then only the necessary information about that product is required. No need to fill in long confusing forms.

Advancing the automation

“Where the is a will, there is a workflow” - Caleb from MO Agency.

This statement reads true more often than not. If there is a way to save time it is with workflows in HubSpot. Based on a trigger event we can run back-end automation that can do a whole host of things in HubSpot:

• Create tasks

• Edit records

• Create Deals

• Qualify/Disqualify

• Send communications

• Increase or decrease values

• And more.

When a workflow is being considered as a solution to save time it is always key to understand what is it that is being automated, what are the possible flaws and whether are there any other workflows or business processes that are going to be affected. Access to workflows should be limited to those with knowledge of the system as well as an understanding of how they work. It is easy to overcomplicate a process with workflows to save time.

The new HubSpot features for sales:

HubSpot is an ever-evolving tool that has come a long way, specifically in the sales space. While it is often seen as a CRM or Marketing tool, HubSpot has had a big sales focus in the past few years and they have emerged as one of the leading sales tools. They haven’t stopped there, they have been innovating the sales elements within HubSpot to be industry-leading.

Two recent updates have been implemented to help save time. The first of these is the implementation of a new, updated Google Calendar extension. This allows sales staff to prepare and save meeting notes using their Calendar tool. The meeting outcome can be changed in your calendar and, tasks can be scheduled. No need to go back and forth between tools. Using this alongside other “older” HubSpot extension tools like the email extension (templates, snippets and auto-creation of contacts and contact information) can save some valuable time.

Sales workspace

Getting in on a Monday morning after a relaxing weekend or trying to focus after back-to-back meetings can slow you down as you may not know where to start next. The HubSpot Sales Workspace has got you covered. Here you will find all of your leads, tasks, deals and schedules all in one glance. This limits the need to flip between different objects in HubSpot to figure out what you need to be busy with next. If you have set the correct follow-ups during your meetings and the other time savers have been followed then you can simply pop into this workspace and start getting stuck into the work you need to get done. Managers can have an overview of how their teams are performing through some basic reporting and views that have been built in for ease of use.

Integrating with HubSpot

Over 1800 apps can be integrated into HubSpot. If you are using another tool in your sales process, it would be tough to not find that it can be plugged into HubSpot. Correctly mapping the sync between the tools can be a massive time saver. Here are some of our favourites:

• Hublead
• Panda Docs
• Slack
• Apollo
  
  

They plug seamlessly into our process by linking with HubSpot to save our salespeople time. No need for any advanced connections.

AI in HubSpot

AI is used by sales teams as often as any other business unit. It can save time and it helps to get quick win tasks done quicker than a person ever could. That is why HubSpot has invested heavily in developing its AI tools as many other tools have. Copilot is there to help you with missing information where you need it. It can be used for quick summaries and overviews. There is even a function to help summarise email threads. The main AI tool in a salesperson's arsenal would be the Breeze Prospecting Agent. Using the data you have in your CRM your team will be able to craft highly personalised emails for outreach. Further to this it will help create a higher level of focus on the prospects that are ideal for you to be chasing and following up with. It adds a personal touch with minimal effort so it takes all the thinking out of crafting outreach and emails to prospects. Useful sales signals like intent and activity can be leveraged to keep your sales pipeline ticking even when you are busy talking to people.

In Summary

Not everything in HubSpot works for each team. Consider how advanced your knowledge of HubSpot is. You can always utilise a HubSpot partner if you are unsure of how to create the right level of automation for your business. It is always a good idea to start slow and automate where you see repetitive tasks. HubSpot is an ever-evolving tool, new product updates are launched almost weekly. Having said that there are also tools that have been around for a while that have been refined to help salespeople get to the job at hand, selling.