Unlocking HubSpot for Sales Leaders

Challenges in sales

Fifteen years ago, where a sales team struggled with stagnant revenue due to the changing nature of customer decision-making. The internet had transformed buyers into attention-poor entities, rendering traditional sales techniques ineffective. Today, similar challenges persist as customer behaviour continues to evolve, necessitating innovative approaches.

An overview of HubSpot’s sales features

Enter HubSpot, a game-changer for sales teams. Discover how HubSpot enables sales professionals to manage customer relationships seamlessly. The all-in-one platform, featuring the HubSpot CRM, centralises customer data, streamlining lead tracking, contact management, and relationship nurturing. Its integration capabilities enhance collaboration, communication, and productivity across the sales team.

Dive into HubSpot’s advanced analytics and reporting

HubSpot's analytics and reporting capabilities take centre stage, providing in-depth insights into sales performance. These advanced features track lead generation, deal pipelines, and revenue growth, enabling data-driven decision-making and allowing sales teams to measure strategy effectiveness and share visually striking reports with stakeholders.

Integration capabilities

HubSpot's integration capabilities with various tools and platforms further enhance its value for sales teams. Seamless data flow and centralised customer information result from integrating third-party CRM systems, email marketing software, and social media platforms.

Sales automation: a strategic advantage

Sales automation emerges as a key feature, allowing teams to automate repetitive tasks, from data entry to follow-up emails. Sequences, a HubSpot feature, enables automated sales outreach, optimising business development representatives' efforts. Sales chatbots further streamline interactions, allowing sales professionals to focus on high-value tasks.

A playbook for sales enablement success 

HubSpot's role in sales enablement is emphasised, offering a guide packed with stories, guides, examples, and templates. The sales enablement book serves as a valuable resource, addressing challenges related to people, processes, and alignment between sales, marketing, and services.

Sales Hub case study

This section presents a compelling success story featuring LAN3, a secure infrastructure provider. By leveraging HubSpot's Sales Hub, LAN3's sales director maximised revenue within a short timeframe. The narrative outlines how HubSpot's tools, including sales sequences and video capabilities, contributed to generating 55 new opportunities and surpassing year-end targets.

Conclusion: transforming sales with HubSpot

This resource concludes by highlighting BabelQuest's journey, emphasising how HubSpot has been instrumental in transforming sales functionalities and profitability. The success stories and awards underscore BabelQuest's expertise in leveraging HubSpot to drive measurable results for clients, solidifying its status as a HubSpot solutions partner.

In a challenging sales landscape, HubSpot emerges as a 24/7 sales machine, providing the tools, analytics, and automation needed to navigate uncertainties and drive sustainable growth. In this resource, learn all about how your sales function could benefit.

How to overcome challenges in sales

“Leads that close.”

Rewind fifteen years to a small pub in Bracknell and you’d overhear a business development director and the business unit director use these exact words while they discussed the challenges facing their sales function. Their sales team had a problem that everyone seemed to be ignoring: the inability to predictably and repeatedly close new revenue.

Nobody else across the team had realised that the way their customers were making buying decisions had changed. With the internet at their fingertips, their target buyers had moved from being information-poor to attention-poor. And as a result, they increasingly perceived the company’s traditional sales techniques as interruptive. Leads weren’t closing, resulting in time inefficiencies, wasted funds, zero accountability, and, ultimately, loss of revenue.

• Customer behaviour continues to evolve, posing a challenge for sales teams across industries. In a world where customers are more informed and have higher expectations, you need to be able to understand and cater to these needs effectively.
• Increasing competition marked by companies expanding their reach and target markets will force you to find creative ways to differentiate your sales approach.
• And the rapid introduction of new tools, sales technologies, and CRM platforms presents a continuous challenge for teams looking to stay at the top of their game.

In particular, the rise of automation and artificial intelligence (AI) is already challenging sales leaders to find innovative ways to adapt. This technology is already creating new opportunities for you to enhance your sales strategies and empower your team to sell more.

But as any sales leader will tell you, opportunities don’t automatically translate into results. 

Sales functions will need to stay updated to ensure they have the right skills and knowledge to take advantage of these opportunities. This will include being adaptable, open to change, and continuously investing in the right skills, technology, and development to drive sales.

An inbound approach to your marketing aligns your operations to this change in buyer behaviour by positioning your business in such a way that it helps, supports, and provides value to your prospects.

HubSpot is a powerful tool that can be used by sales teams to solve these challenges in numerous ways. 

“In particular, HubSpot Sales Hub is packed with benefits that, once unlocked, enable your sales team to prioritise its activity, understand your prospects, automate repetitive work, and spend more time speaking to active buyers who are a good fit for what you sell,” explains Chris Grant, the sales services and CRM implementation consultant at BabelQuest.

With its comprehensive set of features and user-friendly interface, HubSpot empowers sales teams to work smarter, close deals, and supercharge revenue growth. Let’s look at how:

All-in-one sales platform

HubSpot provides an all-in-one platform that allows sales professionals to effectively manage their customer relationships. This includes the HubSpot CRM, a centralised system where all your customer data can be safely stored, organised, and utilised by the rest of your HubSpot suite. 

As well as making it easier than ever for your sales team to access and update information, this ensures everyone across your team is working from the most up-to-date data, improving collaboration and communication. 

From tracking leads and managing contacts to automating follow-ups and nurturing relationships, HubSpot streamlines the entire sales process, saving time and increasing productivity. 

Advanced sales analytics and reporting

Additionally, HubSpot offers robust analytics and reporting features, providing valuable insights into sales performance and allowing sales teams to make data-driven decisions. HubSpot's advanced analytics provide in-depth metrics on sales activities, such as:

• lead generation
• deal pipeline
• revenue growth 

This allows sales teams to track their progress towards goals, measure the effectiveness of their sales strategies, and create visually appealing reports that can be easily shared with stakeholders for a comprehensive overview of sales performance.

Integration capabilities

HubSpot's integration capabilities with other tools and systems further enhance its usefulness for sales teams, enabling seamless data flow.

HubSpot allows for the integration of various tools and platforms, such as third-party CRM systems, email marketing software, and social media platforms. This integration ensures that all customer data is centralised, making it easier for you and your team to track and manage leads as well as to maintain a more complete picture of the prospects you’re nurturing.

Built-in sales automation

HubSpot's integration capabilities also enable your team to automate repetitive tasks, such as data entry and follow-up emails, freeing up valuable time that can be used for the higher-value, more strategic activities that actually close deals and generate revenue.

Take sequences. “These are made up of email templates and tasks, allowing you to automate your sales outreach, supercharge your BDR/SDRs and have complete control over your sales cadence,” Chris explains. “A sequence is a series of emails and tasks that can be triggered one at a time or in batches of 50. As with your templates, you can see full analytics in real-time, allowing you to optimise your sequence for maximum impact.”

Another example is sales chatbots. "As an individual contributor working with over 100 reps, I was receiving and having to respond to many high-frequency, low-value questions that needed a templated response," said Ben Cotton, HubSpot’s former principal marketing manager, Sales Enablement. "A human doesn't necessarily need to answer those support-type questions. If HubSpot’s sales chatbot took care of those templated questions, that would free up my time for lower frequency but higher value work such as deal strategy."

With functionality like this at their fingertips, your team will be able to better nurture their prospects and create tasks to remind them to follow up with their contacts, all of which will help them to build relationships with your buyers — and move them towards closing.

Sales director uses HubSpot to maximise revenue by year end

Since 2008, Oxfordshire-based secure infrastructure provider LAN3, now part of Convergence Group, has enabled organisations across healthcare, academia, and at the enterprise level to drive business development and meet modern IT needs through the provision of innovative network technology. 

In 2019, its sales director committed himself to enabling his sales team, aligning sales with marketing, and transforming the sales process to maximise business ahead of the year-end. 

With eight weeks to go, he planned to launch a campaign to close as much additional business as possible with the aim of smashing their gross profit targets.

Outbound outreach to inbound sales

His team had been using account-based outbound marketing and were working with a PR firm to generate assets with long-term value, but with the average sales cycle sitting around three months, these weren’t immediate solutions to his immediate challenge.

Using HubSpot, he was able to take a different approach based around 300 target accounts suitable for re-engagement. Drafting in the new business team, he gave 100 accounts to each salesperson and set up a leaderboard. To reduce sales and marketing friction and deliver genuine value, he pivoted to an inbound campaign that included content creation, a customer narrative, and a clear, simple-to-adopt process for ramping up the new team.

Generating opportunities through HubSpot

Rather than disrupting or migrating the sales team from their existing CRM (Dynamics), he simply moved the sales activity into HubSpot, where he could track it properly.

Underpinning the entire campaign was the rollout of a comprehensive sales technology upgrade in the form of HubSpot’s Sales Hub Professional, Sales Pro tools in the CRM, and video software company Vidyard’s video recording capabilities, integrated into HubSpot and accessible to the entire sales team via the GoVideo extension.

The campaign itself ran for six weeks, over the course of which 55 new opportunities were generated. 37 of those opportunities went on to become closed-won. The total ROI for the campaign was 45 times his investment. Most importantly, he smashed his year-end target.

You can read more about this sales director’s success story here.

Our CRM scoping guide will help you to:

• clearly define what you and your team need so you can streamline the implementation process
• reduce the number of bumps (and their associated costs) along the way
• tidy up or maintain the accuracy of your CRM data 
• identify if you need a standard or tailored approach to create the perfect platform
• pinpoint previous issues so you can prevent them from happening in the future 

After completing our guide, you can provide internal stakeholders with one document containing only the essential information to understand what the business needs from a new CRM. And, when you’re ready, you can hand it over to your implementation partner of choice, who’ll have everything they need to efficiently scope your new CRM project.

An inbound approach to your marketing aligns your operations to this change in buyer behaviour by positioning your business in such a way that it helps, supports, and provides value to your prospects.

Unlocking real-time sales tracking and reporting

How to create a custom sales dashboard

Creating a sales dashboard in HubSpot is a quick and relatively straightforward process. 

1. To begin, log in to your HubSpot account and navigate to the dashboard section. 
2. Click on the "Create Dashboard" button and select the "Sales" option. 
3. Next, choose the type of dashboard you want to create, such as a funnel, pipeline, or revenue dashboard. 
4. Customise the layout by adding or removing widgets that display key sales metrics, such as deals closed, revenue generated, or sales team performance. 
5. You can also set filters to focus on specific sales data or time periods. 
6. Once the dashboard is set up, you can save it and share it with your team for real-time visibility into sales performance. 

HubSpot's powerful analytics provide detailed insights into key metrics such as calls made, meetings scheduled, and deals closed, enabling sales leaders to measure the effectiveness of their team's efforts. 

Additionally, customisable reports and performance dashboards allow managers to drill down into individual performance, providing valuable visibility into each team member's strengths and weaknesses. 

With HubSpot's user-friendly interface and robust analytics capabilities, creating a sales dashboard has never been easier. Start tracking your sales metrics and empowering your team to make data-driven decisions that drive business growth.

How to manage your sales pipeline in HubSpot CRM

Managing your pipeline is a crucial aspect of any sales function, and with HubSpot CRM the process becomes even more streamlined and efficient.

1. Firstly, create a clear and defined sales process that aligns with your business goals. This involves identifying the stages of your sales cycle and the actions required at each stage. If you already have a sales process, refer back to it, 
2. Next, review HubSpot CRM to track and manage your leads. This includes capturing lead information, assigning them to the relevant salespeople, and setting up automated follow-up sequences.
3. Additionally, you can use the CRM's reporting and analytics features to gain insights into your sales pipeline's performance and identify areas for improvement. 

By regularly reviewing and updating your pipeline, you can ensure that you’re effectively managing your sales process and maximising your chances of success.

“With everything going on right now, being able to report on revenue closed and the health of your pipeline is more important than ever. If you’re fed up with the CEO breathing down your neck, build them a custom dashboard that answers all their sales and revenue questions before they ask.” Chris Grant, Sales Services and CRM Implementation Consultant, ‘11 Reasons HubSpot Has the Best Sales Enablement Software’, BabelQuest

How to set up lead scoring and nurturing automation   

There are two ways businesses use HubSpot to prioritise their leads: traditional lead scoring, where values are assigned to certain activities or contact/company characteristics, or predictive lead scoring, which uses machine learning to determine a contacts’ likelihood to result in a closed-won deal.

To take the traditional lead scoring route, follow these steps:

1. Start by defining your ideal customer profile and identifying the key characteristics that make a lead more likely to convert. 
2. Once you’ve established your criteria, assign values to each of these characteristics based on their importance. This could include factors such as job title, company size, or engagement with your website. 
3. Next, set up automation rules to track and score your leads based on their behaviour and interactions with your nurturing efforts. 
4. Regularly review and adjust your scoring criteria to ensure it aligns with your evolving business goals. 

To take advantage of HubSpot’s predictive lead scoring features, you just need to have a Marketing or Sales Hub Enterprise subscription. The properties ‘Likelihood to close’ and ‘Contact priority’ will be automatically populated based on analysis of various factors, which all happens behind the scenes. Get more information on how that works here.

Related read: How a Sales Enablement Strategy Will Help Your Reps Close More Deals

How to efficiently manage reps’ daily workload

Having heard the cries from sales managers everywhere, HubSpot  has come up with a simple yet effective solution to help salespeople manage their workload: the prospecting workspace (available with Sales Hub Pro and Enterprise subscriptions). This neat solution will become the go-to place for your sales team in HubSpot. 

In the prospecting workspace, they can view things like:

• Daily task lists (plus a report on task progress)
• Active sequence enrollments
• Activity from target accounts
• Their own daily schedule
• A personal activity stream
• Activity suggestions

This HubSpot feature has the ability to help reps to manage a busy workload, and makes it easier for sales managers to hold them to account.

Take a 6-minute tour of the prospecting tool with HubSpot Platform Consultant Chris Grant

How to automate sales funnel management

Are you looking to streamline your sales funnel management process? Look no further than HubSpot's automation capabilities. With HubSpot, you can automate your entire sales funnel, saving you time and effort. Here's a step-by-step guide on how to automate sales funnel management in HubSpot.

1. If you haven’t already, start by defining your sales funnel stages. Map out your sales funnel stages from lead generation to closing the deal. This will help you understand where automation can come into play.
2. Set up lead capture forms. Use HubSpot's form builder to create lead capture forms that automatically collect and store prospect information. This will ensure that no lead falls through the cracks.
3. Implement lead scoring. Assign scores to your leads based on their interactions with your website and content. HubSpot's lead scoring system can help you identify the most qualified leads and prioritise your efforts.
4. Nurture leads with automated emails. Use HubSpot's email marketing tools to create personalised email sequences that nurture leads throughout the sales funnel. Set triggers based on specific actions or time intervals to ensure timely and relevant communication.
5. Track and analyse. Utilise HubSpot's analytics dashboard to track the performance of your sales funnel. Identify bottlenecks, optimise your processes, and make data-driven decisions to improve your conversion rates.
6. Integrate with CRM. If you’re not using the HubSpot CRM, connect HubSpot with whichever CRM system you are using to seamlessly transfer leads and customer data. This integration will ensure that your sales team has all the information it needs to close deals effectively.

Getting started with workflow automation

There is so much more you can do with HubSpot’s sales automation,” Chris adds. “Workflows allow you to automate those irritating, time-consuming parts of the sales process that fall through the cracks, reducing the chance of human error and increasing efficiency.”

• For the lead that isn’t ready to buy, add them to a list or trigger a marketing nurture sequence.
• The deal that’s about to close, notify the client services team so they’re ahead of the game.
• Automate a reminder for that follow-up task you always forget to create and never miss it again.

Check out this demo sales workflow to see sales workflows in action.

With HubSpot's automation capabilities, you can streamline your sales funnel management process and drive more conversations with the right prospects at the right time.

AI Content Assistant for outreach 

HubSpot's Content Assistant tool can be an invaluable resource for creating effective content sales outreach and other forms of sales content quickly and easily.

1. To get started, first, open the tool and select the "Sales Outreach" option from the menu. 
2. Next, you will be prompted to enter the details of your outreach, such as the recipient's name, company, and the purpose of your email. This information helps the tool generate personalised and relevant content. 
3. Once you have provided the necessary details, the Content Assistant will generate a draft email for you. You can then use its suggestions and recommendations to fine-tune the email and make it more compelling. 
4. The tool offers valuable insights, such as word count, readability, and tone of voice, ensuring that your outreach is professional and engaging. 
5. Finally, proofread your email and make any necessary edits before sending it out. 

With HubSpot's Content Assistant, you can streamline your sales outreach process and create impactful emails that resonate with your target audience.

“87% of salespeople say generative AI tools are effective for writing sales content and prospect outreach messages, and many use these tools for tasks like writing emails and social media messages.” ‘How AI Helps with Sales Prospecting’, HubSpot

With HubSpot, you can easily tailor your outreach to each individual prospect, increasing your chances of turning leads into loyal customers.

1. First, use HubSpot's contact management system to organise and categorise your leads based on various criteria such as industry, job title, and location. This allows you to target your outreach to specific segments, ensuring that your message resonates with each prospect.
2. Next, utilise HubSpot's powerful email tools to personalise your campaigns. With the ability to dynamically insert contact properties into your emails, you can address each prospect by name and include relevant information tailored to their specific needs.
3. HubSpot's email tracking capabilities provide valuable insights into recipient engagement, allowing you to follow up at the right time and with the right message. 
4. Finally, leverage HubSpot's integration with social media platforms to further personalise your outreach. By monitoring and engaging with your prospects on social media, you can gain valuable insights into their preferences and interests, enabling you to craft targeted and personalised messages that truly resonate.

With HubSpot, the possibilities for personalising your sales outreach are endless. Try using it alongside AI Content Assistant to speed up your team’s content writing overnight.

Advanced sales analytics

When it comes to sales forecasting, HubSpot offers a range of powerful tools to assist sales teams in making accurate predictions. One such tool is the Sales Analytics dashboard, which provides an overview of key metrics and allows sales managers to track progress and identify trends.

1. To get started, log in to your HubSpot account and navigate to the "Reports" tab.
2. From there, select "Analytics Tools" and choose "Sales Analytics Dashboard."
3. Once you're in the dashboard, you'll see a variety of widgets and charts that provide valuable information about your sales pipeline, revenue, and performance metrics. You can customise the dashboard to focus on the specific metrics that matter most to your business. With just a few clicks, you can drill down into the data to identify trends, spot opportunities, and make data-driven decisions that drive your sales success.

With these tools, you can monitor your team’s performance, optimise your sales process, and set more realistic targets.

Detailed sales forecasting

Another useful feature is the Sales Forecasting tool, which uses historical data and current trends to forecast future sales revenue. 

1. To use this tool, log into your HubSpot account and navigate to the Sales tab.
2. From there, click on the Forecasting tool and select the desired time period for your forecast.
3. Next, input your historical sales data and any relevant factors that may impact your sales, such as marketing campaigns or industry trends. 
4. HubSpot's advanced algorithms will then analyse this data and generate an accurate sales forecast, which you can easily view and share with your team.
5. This tool also allows you to make adjustments to your forecast, such as accounting for seasonality or changing market conditions, ensuring that your predictions remain up to date and reliable. 

With HubSpot's Sales Forecasting tool, you can take the guesswork out of sales planning and make informed decisions to drive your business forward.

Our sales enablement book is the product of our experience using sales enablement to help our clients’ sales functions to overcome today’s challenges and close new revenue through selling more by:

• aligning sales with marketing and services
• implementing an inbound approach to sales
• fixing the challenges to your people and process

Packed with relatable stories, practical guides, real-life examples, and helpful templates, we hope you can use it to achieve the same.

Turning HubSpot into a 24/7 sales machine

Rewind to that small pub in Bracknell and the directors sitting there, discussing the challenges faced by their sales function. From this shared frustration, and the realisation that they could fix it, this couple left the company and started a business of their own together. That couple was Eric and Becky Murphy, and the business was BabelQuest.

In the fifteen years since making this decision, Becky, Eric, and the BabelQuest team have helped companies ranging from startups to the enterprise level across a wide range of industries and sectors transform the functionality and profitability of their sales departments.

“BabelQuest was one of the first UK agencies to proactively explore and execute on the market for sales enablement services. They have since excelled in the space, driving measurable results and providing additional value for their clients. It’s great to see them achieve HubSpot status as one of our premier partners in the UK.” Aidan O'Leary, Senior Sales Leader, HubSpot

In 2017, we were awarded a HubSpot Impact Award for our work with The Dealer App, generating 7,000 active users — a 250 percent increase — over five months. A year earlier, our sales enablement services helped IT reseller LAN3 generate £1.2 million in quoted deals over a five-month period, earning us the HubSpot Grand Prize for Sales Enablement. This isn’t the only sales project we ran with LAN3 — consider the following case study.

With LAN3’s marketing manager of many years having recently moved on, the Sales Director came to us to see what we could do from a marketing perspective to combine inbound marketing with sales enablement and help them to generate more leads that close.

Sitting down with the Sales Director, our head of revenue, Eric Murphy, looked to HubSpot’s flywheel model to discover where the quickest, most efficient opportunities lay. The length of the sales cycle ruled out new business as a realistic avenue, leading us to consider the possibility of re-engaging LAN3’s existing customers as this revenue source.

With this in mind, they identified a suitable product opportunity in upgrading existing customers to Aerohive NG. If the team could close just 75 deals with existing Aerohive customers, he would exceed his sales target and he would be helping his existing customers to get more value from the platform.

“The two biggest things for me both kicked in at the end of week 2 of the campaign. First, the Task Queue function was like supercharging me — it was so much easier to smash the activity targets. Second, when you speak to someone for the first time after they’ve watched your video, they act like they already know you. That’s a total game-changer.” Scott Daly, Former Business Development Manager, LAN3

Not only did the team overachieve on its stretch GP goal for the quarter in six short weeks, but the campaign also generated a larger pipeline of longer-term business.

We’ve since integrated the sales campaign into the quarterly marketing campaigns to reinforce the alignment between marketing and sales, ensuring both are working toward the same goal of generating a specific revenue number for each quarter. 

If any of these benefits sound appealing, don’t hesitate to get in touch. We'd be more than happy to take your questions and explain how you could use Sales Hub to hit your targets.

The current situation is putting huge amounts of pressure on sales teams around the world. While there isn't a magic solution, HubSpot comes pretty close, giving you all the tools and data you need to boost your bottom line and drive growth even through challenging times.