With the end of Q4 in sight, many sales teams and sales managers have begun to think about goal setting for 2016. Make no mistake, boosting your team’s productivity should be one of those primary goals for next year.
Depending on the size of your sales team and the complexity of your sales process, HubSpot’s CRM may be the perfect way to jump-start your progress towards your productivity goals. Here are a few reasons why:
It reduces time spent on manual lead entry.
Such a simple feature, yet it saves so much time. With HubSpot’s CRM, gone are the days of keeping your email open in Outlook, and tabbing over to your web browser to open your CRM, clicking several times to import a new contact, and pasting the contact information from you email. When you use HubSpot’s Sidekick alongside the CRM, you can easily and instantly upload the lead you may be communicating with via email right into the CRM. Right in the middle of your email conversation, Sidekick can sense that the contact you're emailing is not currently in your database, and will promp you to add them to your CRM with one click. It'll even auto-populate as much contact information it can automatically, based on the contact information the contact might have tied to their email address, or placed within their signature. Be sure to fill in the blanks, and click "Save in HubSpot". While manually adding contacts to your CRM may only take 30 seconds at a time, when you do this one task multiple times a day with Sidekick, you'll really start to notice the time you can save.
Additionally, you may want to consider adding contacts other than prospects this way as well. Say your account manager has been helping a current customer troubleshoot an issue in your SaaS platform. Even your account managers can add their customers to your database, so that your marketing team can ensure their customer-targeted emails are getting to them. Just be sure to ajust the value for the "Lifecycle Stage" property to customer, and any emails marketing sends out to that segment in the future will include your newly added contact.
You can multiply your sales email output by 45x.
If your sales team is like most other sales teams, there are probably emails that your team sends out every single day that are almost identical in content. In fact, I bet they are sending those emails out several times on any given day. Consider the example below:
Hello Laura,
Thank you so much for stopping by our website recently to download our eBook, The Complete Guide to Email Marketing. I hope you found our content useful!
I just thought I’d check in to see if you had any questions… what are you planning to do with email in your 2016 marketing strategy?
I’d love to hop on a brief, 30-minute phone call if you have time next week. How does Tuesday at 11am sound?
Let me know, and have a great day!
Best,
Jon
The email above took me a little over a minute and thirty seconds to write. With Hubspot’s CRM, you can save emails just like this as “templates”, and you can send them right from within the interface with a couple clicks as seen below…. Yes, just a few seconds. Because creating the same email from scratch took over a minute and thirty seconds, you could say I could have gotten 45 emails out within that time. Pretty slick, huh?
Their self-help documentation gets questions answered, quicker.
Isn’t it funny how Apple can sell an iPad, one of the world’s most sophisticated personal devices, in simple packaging containing no instruction manual, yet everyone knows how to use it? While HubSpot’s CRM by itself is incredibly intuitive, there will always be moments when a new member of a sales team may get hung up on the software when trying to get their work done. When this happens, valuable time may be spent problem solving… whether it be guess-and-checking, or scouring the internet YouTube videos. Other more widely used CRMs such as Salesforce have abundant amounts of information freely available outlining how to do just about anything you’d ever want to do in the CRM; this is nice, but you have to go searching for it. Thankfully, HubSpot has compiled their own concise support portal portal for showing you anything you would ever need to know about using HubSpot CRM.
Training new employees on the CRM is a breeze.
Hiring new sales people is tough. There’s always a learning curve, and training time can take away from the productivity of more season sales veterans within the organization as well. And every second your sales veterans aren't spending prospecting and selling, the organization is losing valuable time and money. Thankfully, HubSpot offers short tutorial videos that you can task your new team member to watch in between onboarding sessions. The videos are easily accessible right within the platform. Click the “Help” button on the lower right hand corner of the window to display the help tray, and view any of the videos they have created. The tray provides a checklist to help new team memebers keep track of what they have reviewed, and what material they have yet to cover. And if the videos still leave them hanginging on a particular topic, Hubspot even provides free support, on their free CRM! Clicking "Ask for Help" displays a message box which allows you to communicate directly with their support team.
Consider creating training documentation that instructs new team members to consult these training videos among the other documentation you may have them review, before more hands-on training sessions take over the calendar. The time spent on this material beforehand will allow you and the new team member to get to the more complicated subjects more quickly.
It’s just simple.
This is subjective, but I’m not quite sure who wouldn’t agree with me when I say that HubSpot’s CRM is much easier on the eyes than Salesforce. I personally often find better looking software easier to use. No having to worry about custom object creation, or how to custom configure the platform as a whole to make sense for your business. HubSpot’s CRM comes ready to use for most B2B companies that depend on lead generation right out of the box. And if your sales process is a little different than the rest of the pack, know that HubSpot’s Deals stages are incredibly easy to configure to match the process your sales team uses to close each and every opportunity on their desk.
It’s never too early to start hacking away on improvements for 2016. HubSpot’s CRM will make your team more efficient than they’ve ever been, and get them back to doing what they do best: selling.
