Best Tips to Use Hubspot CRM

Sales and marketing are two of the major functions of any organization whose ultimate aim is to sell its product or services. And companies are always looking for means through which they can sell faster and easier and at the same time keep their customers engaged. In this era of digitization, having a Customer Relationship Management system is extremely helpful and makes life easier for salespeople. A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is software specifically designed to make things simpler and easier for sales and marketing people. And in the recent Hubspot CRM has emerged as one of the most popular CRM tools for companies. Hubspot is helping companies in attracting customers, generate and convert leads, and close deals.

The beauty of Hubspot CRM is that it comes with a lot of special features and provides many tools so that sales and marketing people can manage all their operations in a single place. They can manage contacts, track deals, see their sales pipelines, find out high-quality leads that they can pursue, and use automated email marketing, all in one place. Hubspot CRM is more popular because it is easy to set up and use. And it is really good for the teams that are new to a CRM system or are using it for the first time. Hubspot CRM is a great tool for organizing your interactions with your customers and growing your relationships with them to enhance your business. But for getting the maximum out of your Hubspot CRM, you need to know there is more to it than merely setting it up and start using it. In order to get its maximum advantage and make it work successfully, you have to put in the effort. Here, we provide some great tips to use Hubspot CRM, which if applied, can help you to get the most out of it. So, here are the tips that will help you in using the Hubspot CRM to the maximum effect and help your business grow.

Top tips for using Hubspot CRM

1. Understand how Hubspot works

This is the most important aspect of using Hubspot. Because unless you understand how the tool you are using works, you won't be making its proper use. A tool may be excellent but it is only as good as the person using it. So, the first thing you need to do is to bring your team on board the Hubspot CRM and help them know its intricacies. This onboarding will help your team understand the why and how of Hubspot CRM and they will know how it will help them in handling their tasks effortlessly. It is important that your team gets sold on the idea of using Hubspot CRM and is enthused with the thought of using it because without this they won't make full use of it and a half-hearted attempt at using Hubspot CRM won't yield the desired results. They must know everything about it from its basics to all the tools, features, and integrations available on this platform. Once your team is excited about using the Hubspot CRM, they will take the most out of it. So, the onboarding session is the vital first step toward making the best use of the Hubspot CRM. Let your team know what they can do with Hubspot, how they can manage their contacts, what information they would be required to gather, and the number of people who would be using this tool. All these things will go a long way in making your team confident about using the Hubspot CRM.

2. Understand the proper working of Hubspot CRM

Without understanding the working of Hubspot and knowing how to set it up, you can't properly use it. Data collection and tracking are at the core of Hubspot CRM and one of the primary reasons why companies choose it. So, it is imperative that you understand how it gathers, stores, and manages data in the CRM database. The Hubspot CRM organizes data in the CRM database into four main categories. These are Contacts, Companies, Deals, and Tickets. There are default properties inherent in each of these categories so they can store different types of data. For example, all the personal information of the contacts is stored in the Contacts category and includes the First name, the Lat name, the email address, the job title, and the lifecycle stage by default. Similarly, for the Deals category, properties like deal amount and deal stage are included by default. Data in the Hubspot CRM is stored on the basis of two different types of information namely explicit and implicit. Explicit information is the one received from the individuals through the forms filled by them on your site or from the communication held with them through chat, emails, or phone calls. The implicit information is stored on the basis of their behavior and interactions. This allows you to automate things and work seamlessly.

3. Use follow-up emails for verifying the real email addresses

You would certainly like to have the email addresses of the visitors to your site so that you can create a strong and long-lasting business relationship with them and convert them to leads. But for that, you need to have their genuine or real email addresses. Moreover, if you use landing pages to turn them into leads, they would be required to provide their email addresses for receiving your offers. But this is not easy. Some visitors may be reluctant to provide their real email addresses. They want to avoid giving their email addresses for one reason or the other. Hubspot has a solution for this. It allows you to send follow-up emails to the visitors for thanking them for signing up or downloading something by which you can check if the email addresses provided are genuine or not. You can then sort out the bounced emails and take out the valid email addresses. This will leave you with a clean list of email addresses and know that these are the real people who have visited your site. This will also bring you nearer to the genuine leads that you can attempt to convert.

4. Make use of progressive profiling

Your customers may be put off if you keep asking them the same questions again and again or start asking them more personal questions from the time they start engaging with your website. All this may affect them negatively. So, your forms assume great importance whether a visitor to your site converts to a lead or not. You must make sure that you have the best possible forms on your site. You can make your forms more systematic and engaging with the help of the progressive profiling feature of Hubspot CRM. It not only will help you save time but will also help you in avoiding repetitive questions thus making your forms shorter that would include only the important and relevant questions. It also increases the conversion rate immediately. Similarly, the Queued form field will ensure that if a visitor has filled one form on your site and has answered all the questions contained in it, they would be asked to answer some other questions in the next form. This will also mean that you will be continuously adding to that customer's profile to make it more comprehensive. And this, in turn, will help your sales team in engaging with the customer in a better way.

5. Automation and workflows

There are a number of repetitive tasks that are done manually like sending emails to customers or making social media posts. This not only takes a lot of time and manual labor, particularly if performed on tools that are not very efficient. You can save a lot of time and improve the efficiency of the process by using Hubspot marketing automation workflows. It works constantly toward engaging customers and leads. The process here is that if a visitor to your site does some activity on it, that will go through a workflow and the customer will get confirmation and the desired information. The Hubspot CRM works on the basis of your data. So, you need to keep your data like email addresses, contact information, etc. updated. But workflows are not meant to just automate emails. They can also be used to set or update characteristics like deal stage and lifecycle stage.

But there is one important thing to remember here. Just because automation is possible and available doesn't mean that you should automate everything. This is because if you automate everything, there will be no human touch to your communication and interaction with your customer which is so vital to any sales or marketing activity. So, use automation to make the process more efficient, effective, and hassle-free so that there can be smoother and more engaging interactions with the customers and the leads.

6. Use Hubspot Lead scoring

You would always prefer to engage with potential and serious leads instead of those who visit your site casually. Hubspot lead scoring is the perfect tool to identify serious prospects and casual visitors. It helps you to assign a value to each prospect on the basis of their behavior on your website along with the information provided by them. This value is a numerical point attached to each visitor to your site. This will enable you to segregate quality leads and window shoppers. This will allow your sales and marketing teams to set priorities and put more focus and effort into quality leads with higher values attached to them. So, you can assign different points for different activities that the visitor performs on your site. You can assign a visitor one point for just visiting your website. You can keep increasing the points for every subsequent activity they undertake on your site like providing their professional and/or personal information. Once your team has its priorities clear and knows which leads to focus on, converting leads into customers becomes easier for them and that means more business for you.

7. Hubspot lead flows for increasing on-page conversions

Providing information to the customer at the right time is critical to every sales and marketing venture. Hubspot's Lead Flows tool helps you in doing that. You can create pop-ups, prompts, and forms on the Hubspot lead flows tool so that you can present the right content to your visitors at the right time and at the right place. This is a great way of boosting your conversion rate. You can create specific triggers with the help of the lead flows tool that will determine when your pop-up, prompt, or form will be presented in front of the visitor to your site. Lead flows can be in different forms like a pop-up overlay, a slide-in box, or a drop-down banner. With the lead flows tool, the visitors to your site find it very easy to engage with you as they have different alternatives to contact you. The lead flows tool of Hubspot CRM is a very effective way of engaging your visitors and making them part with more information about themselves that may subsequently be used to convert them to leads.

8. Utilize branching logic in workflows

You can map the workflows with Branching logic and on the basis of customer engagement you can specify if any activity on their part should trigger an action provided it fulfills certain criteria. In simpler words, if a customer has already performed an action on your site, you can set up a trigger to send them something new. Like, if they have downloaded something from the site, you can set a trigger that will perform an action of making sure that they are sent something different. Similarly, if someone has left some form semi-filled, a new form can be sent to them and see if next time they complete it. This branching logic feature makes workflows more flexible and helps in driving more traffic into the sales lifecycle.

9. Use sharp Call To Action (CTAs) with intelligent content

Every visitor to your site would like to see only the relevant content displayed. So,, displaying sharp-witted content that is relevant to the visitor even to the next level is a smart strategy. And if you want to redirect the visitors to the content most relevant to them, CTAs are the best choice as visitors can be easily redirected with them. When you use sharp CTAs, you can easily change the content being shown to the visitor and show them something different based on their interest and their position in the sales lifecycle instead of showing the same content to everyone. This will boost customer engagement with the landing pages. Moreover, CTAs help in making customers take an action like taking up a subscription or filling up some form. They also help in providing offers to the customers. This will result in an increase in traffic to your website. And more CTAs may also lead to more conversions.

Hubspot today is one of the most sought-after and successful Customer Relationship Management platforms that is helping organizations in various ways in boosting their business. It not only aids in attracting more visitors and improving conversions but helps in closing deals also through its inbound approach. We have provided you with enough tips for making the best use of your Hubspot CRM. But one important thing to be kept in mind is that before you can confidently use the HubSpot CRM, you must build a strong base by understanding everything about it and getting your sales and marketing teams along. This is how you will get the best return on your investment in the Hubspot CRM.