DC User Group Talks HubSpot's CRM, an Inbound Sales Tool

Josh Paul from Socious (at left in photo) led DC's HubSpot User Group last night in a discussion on how to incorporate HubSpot's Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool into marketing and sales operations.

Because it was a smaller turnout than the previous DC meetup (which featured HubSpot CMO Mike Volpe and hardcore speaker/HubSpot evangelist Marcus Sheridan), attendees were able to carry on a pretty lively debate about CRMs and sales processes.

Key Takeaways

For this CRM to work, you have to get your lead definitions down. If you don't have that, it can turn into a mess. But, as recent converters to the inbound methodology can attest, most aspects of inbound require a lot of internal work to function properly. It'll make you take a good look at your association's marketing and sales practices, which can be tough, but is necessary to better your efforts.

Don't get stuck doing all the work manually. You should set up workflows for almost everything. If you're doing everything manually, you're doing it wrong. Set your qualifications and automate.

Don't set up your deal stages based on actions. Just because someone took a demo from you doesn't mean you've made a deal. A deal isn't a single action, but a few actions put together (which you should identify and automate).

You'll send fewer emails once you get the system down. And that's always a good thing.

Your salespeople/account managers need the fewest fields you can give them. They don't want an excess of information like many marketers do. They want the information they need to make the sale.

Because so much is automated and tracked, it holds people accountable for their work. There's so much opportunity to track what people are doing in the CRM, and you can get daily (or instant) updates and reports.

It's got a bunch of cool features. You can record your sales calls for later review and training using the "click-to-call" function. With Sidekick, you can use templates for sales emails, and you can also send documents that track the user's actions: how many people looked at the document, what pages they looked at the most, who they forwarded it to, etc. Also, using Tasks, salespeople can be easily organized (though not all of them prefer to use this option). Josh noted that the sales templates saved his sales staff at least a couple of hours per work a day.