By design, HubSpot is a tool built to help gain and nurture inbound leads, that is, the leads you get through your ebooks, educational content, organic search, blog articles, etc. So, what happens when you want to boost outreach with additional sales prospecting? Does it fall flat on its face, or can HubSpot be used for that as well?
Many B2B and manufacturing clients are doing both outbound and inbound marketing. While we believe inbound efforts lead to great results, we also see the time and place for prospecting beyond online efforts. Over the next couple of minutes, I will walk you through how to think about that in regards to the HubSpot system.
Here's a scenario that we'll use as an example. Let's say you have a targeted list from an industry that you work with regularly. They are great prospects and companies that meet your target profile. What can you do to reach out to them? Here are four things you can do to move the needle and utilize HubSpot along the way.
Lifecycle stages and lead status should help guide your sales efforts daily. These pieces inform your team whether a contact is ready to talk or needs further nurturing.
Take some time to think about how you want to define lifecycle stages and statuses regarding outreach vs. inbound leads. While these two should align, your targeted list may drop into different locations in your lifecycle map and lead status designation. For instance, depending on how much the list is vetted or if you have spoken to any of the prospects before, you may want the lifecycle stage to be sales qualified lead instead of a subscriber.
If you've more recently purchased HubSpot, you are probably familiar with the idea of marketing contacts. If not, here is the skinny.
Marketing contacts are the contacts in your database that have not signed up to receive any "marketing" communications from your company (e.g., emails and target ad campaigns) but that you can use for outreach efforts. This means we can now add the new set of prospects to the system for sales to access through the CRM without being worried they will accidentally end up in a marketing campaign. That doesn't mean we can't convert them to a marketing contact once they've taken action like downloading a spec sheet, white paper, or ebook, but it won't happen accidentally.
When adding marketing contacts, make sure you correctly set the marketing contact field, lead status, and lifecycle stage.
Also, as a side note, when you import your list, use a helpful naming convention to prevent confusion and to notate the source of the leads. Using a name like "Joe's List" doesn't say much. A list name like "ProMar Trade Show_June 2021" is much better because, at a glance, it identifies essential information.
With your targeted list in HubSpot and the lifecycle stage and lead status set, we now know who needs to be contacted. The next thing to do is set up a view for you or your sales team to use.
A view can be used within the contact, companies, or deals tab in HubSpot. This lets you filter by any field you want and saves those views for future use. So, in this case, we may want to set a view for anyone that is a member of the list we just uploaded, and we may want to sort by lead status so we can see who we have contacted and who has responded, etc.
Now it's time to reach out to prospective customers. To get the ball rolling, determine your outreach plan, what tools you will use, and how you will measure success.
When you consider your outreach plan, decide how many times you want to reach out to a customer before moving on. I have heard of sales teams reaching out anywhere between 6-15 times, but there isn't a touchpoint magic number. However, I recommend measuring what you’re doing to figure out what works best for you.
From there, decide how you want to connect as there are many ways, i.e., email, calls, meetings, text, etc. HubSpot can easily track emails and outbound calls, so consider setting up that functionality within your portal. Also, if you have HubSpot Sales Pro or higher, you can set up sequences to automate emails and related sales tasks.
Lastly, don't forget to set up a report to see how your outreach is going. If you are using sequences, it will automatically tell you how each email is doing and your overall campaign performance. But don't be afraid to set up a custom activity report to track the action on the contacts you are reaching out to.
Need help using HubSpot to make your sales prospecting efforts more successful? We'd love to help if you have questions about:
Schedule a time to meet with our team, and we'll discuss immediate and long-term recommendations for getting the most of our HubSpot and your sales prospecting efforts.
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