Well, here we are. If you’ve been following along with our HubSpot ROI series, you know we’ve now reached the final post. We’ve given you five practical approaches to getting the most out of your HubSpot investment, as well as more than 100 questions to ask yourself in preparation. Now it’s time for the final step in the process before you’ll be ready to implement these practices and start seeing the benefits.
Before we jump into the final step, make sure you catch up on the first five posts in the series:
Today, we’re focusing on closing the loop: It’s time to talk about converting sales to get—and keep—more customers. Luckily, if you’ve completed the previous five steps, you should be in a great position to make this happen. Your goals are organized, your sales and marketing teams are aligned, your database and website are ready and you’ve done your research. But how ready are you, really?
8 Questions to Assess Your Inbound Sales Readiness
- Have you implemented your sales and marketing alignment strategy? We’ve already stressed how crucial this step is, so we won’t give you the rundown again. Let’s just leave it at this: To truly improve your HubSpot ROI, it’s essential for these two departments to be fully and completely aligned.
- Have you implemented lead management with marketing automation? Is it working the way you expected? If the answer to this question is no, start looking at why that might be, then determine whether the problem is with your processes or with your expectations.
- Are you classifying and segmenting leads by buyer persona and target market? You (hopefully) already did the work of getting to know your customers—now, put that knowledge into practice.
- Are you automating lifecycle stages by lead behavior and fit? Know where your leads stand and use that knowledge to connect with them better.
- Have you implemented lead scoring by behavior and fit, and do the results make sense from a sales perspective? If not, figure out why sooner rather than later so you can take advantage of the insight lead scoring can provide.
- Have you automated lead assignment by sales process rules (territories, products, industries, channel partners)? This will help set your sales team up for the most potential conversion success.
- Does the system immediately notify assigned sales reps based on sales-readiness criteria and behavior, like website visits, email engagement, form conversions and lifecycle changes? Don’t miss out on advantages your system can provide. By setting these processes up in advance, you can ensure that, once those inbound leads start rolling in, you’ll be ready for them.
- Have you helped the sales team improve overall sales performance? According to The Aberdeen Group, sales reps spend up to 43 hours every month searching for information. That time certainly could be better spent, so help your team optimize their performance with specific and organized processes.
Having your inbound sales processes complete is one important step to getting more customers—ensuring your sales reps are ready is another. Here’s a quick checklist to help you determine if you’ve done everything you can to prepare your sales team.
10 Questions to Help Sales Reps Get More Out of HubSpot
- Do your sales reps understand how to use the HubSpot CRM and Sales tools to identify, qualify and engage leads?
- Do they use customized CRM views to prospect and prioritize assigned leads?
- Do they use sales email templates and sequences of emails to support prospect and opportunity outreach with personalized communication?
- Have you developed and made easily available a library of sales content they can use to engage sales leads?
- Do they document activities faithfully using Notes, Emails, Calls, Meetings and Tasks tracking tools?
- Do sales managers and team leaders use dashboards to monitor sales and marketing progress, goals and activity metrics?
- Do sales and marketing teams have access to each other’s dashboards to promote transparency and SLA compliance?
- Do sales teams access sales activity, tools, data and reports from mobile devices to expand their ability to respond and close sales opportunities?
- Have sales team members bought into using the HubSpot technology to improve results?
- Do they have the training needed to continuously improve results?
Now that we’ve reached the end of our series, it is time for a bit of a reality check. Just like purchasing HubSpot software doesn’t automatically increase your sales, reading along with this series won’t either. Reaching your sales and marketing goals requires hard work, dedication to the process, complete buy-in from your team and a willingness to analyze metrics as you go to ensure your sales and marketing processes are fully optimized for your unique audience. HubSpot gives you all of the tools you need—now it’s up to you to put it into practice.
To get our entire guide to improving your HubSpot ROI in one place, click here for a free download.
