It seems like we’re all competing for attention, budget, and time these days, especially in B2B sales. According to Gartner, about 80% of interactions between sales teams and buyers take place digitally – and our research shows that the number of interactions required to convert a stranger into a customer can be more than 30.
Whether you’re a marketer or a sales rep, I know what you’re thinking: We don’t have time to talk to every prospect 30 times!
Thankfully, it won’t take 30 phone calls or meetings. Your digital presence – your website, email campaigns, social media posts, review sites, blogs, and other online assets – can do a lot of the heavy lifting for you.
But how do you get those assets into your prospects’ hands without having to remember 30 different touchpoints for every lead? Enter HubSpot! The automation tools in each hub can be major game-changers that free your sales and marketing teams up to do what they’re best at: building strong relationships and closing those important deals!
How Does Automation Work in HubSpot?
Automation in HubSpot is a pretty well-oiled machine, streamlining your sales and marketing processes to enhance efficiency and effectiveness. By leveraging HubSpot’s plethora of automation features, businesses can free their sales and marketing teams from repetitive tasks, allowing them to focus on higher-value activities that drive growth.
These tools help manage your sales pipeline, streamline your sales process, and ensure you maximize your return on investment (ROI) by optimizing your resources and time. Whether you’re a sales manager or part of the marketing team, HubSpot’s Sales Hub and Marketing Hub are designed to transform how you engage with qualified leads, nurture prospects, and ultimately close deals.
Marketing Tools to Automate Your Pre-Sales Process
HubSpot’s Marketing Hub is a treasure trove of marketing automation tools designed to take your campaigns to the next level.
These tools facilitate automated social media posting, ensuring your brand remains visible and engaging without constant manual effort. Additionally, they streamline ad campaigns, allowing for precise targeting and monitoring of ROI. The lead-scoring feature is a big win for marketers who want to be sure they’re passing warm, qualified leads off to the sales team.
By implementing these automation features, HubSpot empowers your team to operate more strategically and effectively, driving better results across the board. These tools set an excellent foundation for sales and marketing alignment that your teams can build on!
Efficiency is the name of the game. That’s where HubSpot’s automation tools come roaring in, promising to streamline processes, reduce repetitive tasks, and keep your team laser-focused on nurturing qualified leads.
From sending personalized emails to managing entire email campaigns, marketing automation tools in HubSpot can change how you engage with potential customers.
Welcome Emails
When you land a new subscriber or identify a new website visitor, first impressions matter, and the best way to make that impression last is a simple welcome email. These emails are some of the most successful tools at the top of the funnel, boasting a 50% open rate across industries.
Fortunately, HubSpot’s automation features make it a breeze to send timely and personalized welcome emails as soon as new subscribers or inbound leads come into your orbit. Try setting up this simple workflow:
- Trigger: website visitor fills out the “new subscriber” form on your website
- Step 1: Delay 10 minutes
- Step 2: Send automated email: “You’re in!” which includes a few great blogs that introduce your team and solution, while they wait for the next edition of your ongoing email campaign.
By setting up a simple workflow like this, these emails can introduce your brand, set expectations, and provide valuable content right out of the gate. This not only helps forge a connection but also primes prospects for future interactions down your sales funnel.
MQL Nurturing
Transforming marketing qualified leads (MQLs) into sales-qualified leads can often be a cumbersome part of the sales process, but HubSpot simplifies this journey with its automated lead nurturing workflows.
By segmenting your MQLs and targeting them with curated content through email campaigns, you can ensure these leads are well-informed and engaged, paving the way for a smoother handoff to your sales teams.
This process not only boosts the likelihood of conversion but also aligns the marketing and sales efforts, making life easier for both the marketing team and sales reps.
In order to maximize this automation option, you should create content and automated emails that function as the follow-up to any “entry point” on your website or in person. Entry points are things like downloads, lead magnets, free trials, webinars, marketing events, subscriptions, etc. By having a relevant follow-up cadence for each different entry point, you provide curated, interesting information to your prospects that helps them move down the funnel.
Webinar or Event Promotion
Are you hosting a webinar or event? HubSpot’s automation capabilities can relieve the pressure of promoting and reminding people about your event!
By scheduling and automating your promotional emails, reminder messages, and follow-up campaigns, you can ensure that your events are well-attended and highly engaging.
Plus, with built-in tracking and reporting, you can measure the success of your promotional initiatives and refine them for future endeavors. Let HubSpot handle the nitty-gritty details so you can focus on delivering an unforgettable experience.
Social Media Posting
With a robust social media post scheduler, HubSpot enables you to automate your social media marketing efforts across various platforms.
We’ve all seen a social media manager on vacation, locked onto their phone, pushing a manual post to their business’ social channels! It’s time to kiss manual posting goodbye.
By pre-scheduling posts in your social calendar up to 90 days in advance, analyzing engagement metrics, and even automating interactions, HubSpot ensures that your brand maintains a consistent presence without the need for constant hands-on involvement from your team. You can even set posts to repeat automatically (we suggest once every 3 months for “evergreen” content) in order to fill up your social calendar and hit the recommended daily posting frequency.
This functionality frees up time for your marketing professionals to focus on crafting innovative strategies that resonate with your audience while keeping your brand’s voice alive and vibrant in real time.
Ad Interaction Follow-Up
Your audience sees a lot of ads every day – and I mean a lot. According to the University of Southern California, the average person sees 5,000 ads a day. Incredibly, they only click on 5-12 of those ads.
But even that ratio adds up when it comes time to follow up with those clicks. If you have 100 people per day click on your ad, could you reasonably expect a person to:
- Add each clicker to a retargeting list,
- Make sure that list gets added to a retargeting ad campaign,
- Send each clicker an email with an offer, and
- Send each sales rep a notification that their prospect clicked on an ad?
That would be a full-time job by itself! Fortunately, HubSpot helps your brand stand out by automating these follow-ups with prospects who interact with your ads.
This means immediate engagement through customized messages or offers, keeping your brand top-of-mind, and increasing conversion chances. Automating this process ensures that no potential lead slips through the cracks by nurturing interest when it’s at its peak.
By providing prompt attention and personalized follow-ups, you strengthen potential customer relationships, driving them further down your sales funnel.
Internal Team Notifications & Tasks
Speaking of sending your sales reps a notification when a prospect takes a high-interest action:
Keeping your sales team informed and organized around their warmest leads is one of the most important parts of sales and marketing alignment. It can be a monumental task in itself.
With HubSpot, you can automate internal team notifications and create tasks seamlessly. This feature adds real-time efficiency by alerting contact owners of any changes in lead status or when follow-up emails need to be sent based on actions that a prospect has taken. For example:
- Susie is a sales-qualified lead in Bob’s pipeline.
- She talked to Bob once but wasn’t ready to take the next steps in the buying process yet. Bob enrolled Susie in a nurture campaign to keep providing her with interesting information about her problem and maintain a relationship while she was doing her research.
- Today, Susie opened an email from that campaign, clicked on a link to download a pricing guide, and checked out a comparison guide on Bob’s website.
- Thanks to HubSpot’s automation, Bob received an email alerting him to these activities, and a task was created for him to call Susie while her intent and activity were high.
- Bob and Susie connected and scheduled a discovery call to talk about pricing and a proposal.
- Now, Susie has graduated to an Opportunity in the pipeline because Bob was able to strike while the iron was hot—and before she reached out to their competition.
Automating these notifications ensures your sales and marketing teams are always in sync, reducing the chances of missed opportunities and improving overall productivity.
Marketing Reporting
Manual marketing reporting can be a time drain — The average marketer spends 8 to 20 hours per month collecting, aggregating, and reporting on data from various marketing channels. That’s 8-20 hours better spent on building assets!
Enter HubSpot’s automated reporting tools, which save valuable hours each month by aggregating and analyzing data efficiently.
With just a few clicks, your marketing team has access to comprehensive reports on campaign performance, ROI, and more, enabling faster and data-driven decision-making. Reports can be sent out on an automated cadence, which keeps every stakeholder informed and aware of progress and performance.
By freeing up time spent manually gathering this information, your team can pivot their focus toward crafting strategies that propel growth and engage qualified leads at every stage of the sales funnel. In short, HubSpot makes marketing metrics easy to understand and act upon, giving you a clear view of your success.
HubSpot Sales Automation Tools to Speed Up Your Sales Cycle
HubSpot’s marketing automation is great, and they didn’t slack on automation features for the sales team by any means! By leveraging the robust suite of features in HubSpot Sales Hub, your team can eliminate many of the tedious tasks that once bogged them down.
From streamlining the sales pipeline to choreographing effective outreach structures, HubSpot is the go-to platform for marrying convenience with performance.
Automation for sales is not about replacing the human touch; instead, it’s about enhancing it to drive more meaningful connections and results.
Lead & Contact Assignment
Manual lead assignment wastes valuable time between when a lead is created and when a rep knows about it.
HubSpot automates this process by using powerful allocation Workflows, ensuring that new leads or contacts are promptly distributed to the right sales reps. You can rotate leads by product or service, location, landing page, form conversion, or any other factor visible to HubSpot through the property library and website tracking code.
This not only speeds up the response time but also ensures that leads are engaged by individuals most capable of converting them.
By defining criteria like location, product interest, or company size, HubSpot’s Sales Hub smoothly matches leads to the best-suited sales representatives, minimizing lead response time and maximizing conversion potential.
Lifecycle Stage & Lead Status Updates
Keeping track of a lead’s progress in the sales journey can be challenging, especially without automation. Sales teams want to spend their time selling, not updating CRM records.
HubSpot handles lifecycle stage changes and lead status updates with ease, allowing you to set rules that automatically update these fields. This ensures consistency across contact and company records without creating an extra workload. By automating these updates, you ensure that your sales and marketing teams are always aligned, working with the most up-to-date information to craft precise strategies and personalized approaches.
Meeting Schedules & Reminders
Scheduling meetings with prospects shouldn’t be a time-consuming ordeal. W
ith HubSpot’s Meetings Scheduler tool, you can automate the entire process of booking appointments. Prospects can directly book meetings in the available slots shown on your calendar, reducing back-and-forth communication.
Plus, the tool sends automatic meeting reminder emails, ensuring that both parties are always in the loop and minimizing no-shows! This fluid automation not only saves time but also enhances the customer experience by offering them a hassle-free way to connect.
SQL Nurturing
When a lead is passed from marketing to sales, the next step is always to nurture that new Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) into an Opportunity. That can take many “touches,” from meetings and ads to emails and social posts.
Each stage of your pipeline has a different nurture goal, too. After discovery, you’ll need to nurture them into a demo or trial. After that, you’ll need to nurture them into a proposal and contract.
HubSpot provides automated workflows and sequences that guide your SQLs through each stage of the sales pipeline. By establishing triggers and actions, you can execute targeted email sequences to keep the lead engaged, informed, and advancing down the funnel.
Whether it’s delivering personalized content or reminders for follow-up actions, HubSpot takes the guesswork out of SQL nurturing, ensuring your sales team focuses on what they do best—closing deals.
Pipeline Management
Managing the deals in your sales pipeline manually can feel a lot like herding cats — it’s chaotic, and you can never really be sure you got them all. HubSpot’s robust set of automation tools ensures that your sales pipeline management is as seamless as possible.
By automating task assignments, setting deal triggers, and moving deals between stages based on pre-defined criteria, you keep the pipeline flowing smoothly. Examples include sending automatic reminders to sales reps when a deal is idle for too long or triggering nurturing sequences when a lead changes status.
This thorough automation frees up valuable time, allowing your sales team to focus on high-priority leads and improving win rates.
Sales Reporting
Generating insightful sales projections and comprehensive reports is pivotal for any sales manager, yet it can be a time-consuming chore.
HubSpot steps in with automated sales reporting tools that collate data, analyze trends, and deliver actionable insights with minimal manual effort.
By automating this process, sales managers can save countless hours each month—hours that can be redirected towards strategy and growth rather than data crunching.
Whether it’s churn rate analysis, revenue forecasts, or sales rep performance, HubSpot provides a clear snapshot that guides informed decision-making.
Unleash Your Team’s Productivity With HubSpot
Make the most of your HubSpot investment with automation that saves your team enough time to make HubSpot pay for itself! With HubSpot’s suite of automation tools, you can set your team up to close more deals and grow your brand like never before.
HubSpot is a powerful tool when used to its full potential, but it can be challenging to figure out on your own. Let our HubSpot-certified specialists help!
