Improving Your HubSpot ROI: Getting New Sales Qualified Leads

In the previous post in our “Improving Your HubSpot ROI” series, we detailed the questions companies need to ask themselves to ensure their website is ready to make the most of their HubSpot investment. Once your website is optimized, it can start doing the work of bringing in more qualified prospects.

(Need to catch up on the other posts in this series? Learn about setting goals and organizing plans, cleaning up your database and getting to know your customers.)

Regardless of how well your website is working, though, you’ll still need a dedicated process to attract and manage your leads so you can get them on the path to being sales-ready. Let’s break that process down into four parts and go over the questions you can ask yourself at each stage to ensure you’re on track for success.

Setting Up for Success

First, you’ll need to take care of the preliminary steps. This mostly breaks down into deciding who will be responsible for which tasks. Delegating specific people to take on specific tasks helps make sure that what needs to get done, well, actually gets done. You’ll need to decide who is responsible for the following:

• Project management, analysis and reporting
• Creating, editing and reviewing content offers and assets for your campaigns
• Creating web page graphics, email graphics and calls-to-action
• Creating landing pages and confirmation pages for conversions
• Creating copy for emails, blogs and campaign pages
• Creating ad copy and design ads for PPC, social media and other paid channels
• Setting up and managing paid media campaigns
• Managing email marketing and social media content promotion
• Setting up and interpreting campaign reports and analytics

Once those processes are in place, your website will be ready to do the important work: attracting qualified sales leads.

Attracting Qualified Buyers

Just like your investment in HubSpot, your website won’t attract qualified buyers unless you’re taking intentional steps to make it happen. Ask yourself these questions:

1. Have you identified the top personas and target markets you want to attract and convert into customers?
2. What are your goals for each persona and market?
3. What are your business goals for each marketing campaign?
4. What topics, keywords, types of content and channels will attract target personas?
5. Have you optimized website pages with the best search keywords and phrases for their topics, content and likely visitors?
6. Have you developed a content strategy and marketing calendar (deliverables and timing) for each campaign?
7. What channels (owned, earned and paid) will you use to distribute and promote your offers?
8. What keyword strategy will you employ for paid search?
9. What is your budget for paid media, and is it enough to achieve goals?

Hopefully, if you’ve been following along with all of the steps to improving your HubSpot ROI, many of these questions will be easy to answer.

Converting Visitors Into Leads

By this point you’ve done the hard part: You’ve brought people to your website. The next step is converting them into leads — and there are a few steps you can take to increase your conversion rate. Here are eight questions you should be asking yourself:

1. Have you gone through the previous steps to identify target buyer personas and develop campaigns to attract them to appropriate offers?
2. Do you have relevant conversion opportunities (landing pages, forms and CTAs) deployed and visible on your most visited web pages?
3. Have you helped visitors understand the value and benefits of your offers in every conversion opportunity?
4. Have you tested various messages and supporting content (like videos, for example) to enhance conversion rates?
5. Have you used A/B testing to maximize conversion rates on landing pages and emails?
6. Have you deployed lead flows on key web pages, landing pages and blogs to increase lead conversions?
7. Have you deployed retargeting ads to remind visitors of your offers and persuade them to come back and convert?
8. Are you using smart content to identify returning personas and engage them with fresh, relevant content that answers their questions?

Nurturing Qualified Leads Into Buyers

Now you’re almost there. You’ve done the work to attract and convert visitors—the only thing left is making the sale. Since making sales is the single most important aspect of improving your HubSpot ROI, here are the questions you should ask to double-check you’re doing everything you need to be doing:

1. Have you captured sufficient lead data to segment personas and qualify them by fit and sales-readiness?
2. Have you created smart, segmented lists to reach and engage target personas?
3. Have you used workflows and inbound marketing campaigns to nurture existing leads into customers?
4. Have you set up lead scoring to rank prospects by fit and behavior and used notification workflows and emails to keep the sales team aware of hot leads and new opportunities?
5. Have you used chat tools like Drift or HubSpot Messages to increase engagement and answer buyer questions?
6. Have you increased email deliverability, opens and clicks using integrations like Seventh Sense?
7. Have you improved your team’s ability to monitor and report results with real-time dashboards across multiple analytics platforms using integrations like Databox?
8. Have you involved customer service in engaging with customers using integrations like Zendesk?

By thinking of these questions as a checklist, you’ll be well on your way to more sales and a higher ROI. Up next is the final post in our series: Getting More Customers and Keeping Them Delighted.

Can’t wait? Download the full eBook here: Improve Your HubSpot ROI: 100+ Questions to Ask.