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VP of Agency Services
CEO
There’s good news for companies that want that for their potential customers—it’s called the inbound methodology. With inbound, customers are at the center of the process, and go through the Marketing, Sales and Service phases. Each phase is meant to further inform your lead, turn them into a customer and then into a promoter. If you’re going to go all in on inbound, there’s one CRM, marketing and sales software we recommend: HubSpot.
HubSpot harmonizes your CRM, Sales, Marketing, and Service efforts in one user-friendly platform. With the addition of CMS Hub, you don’t need a developer or IT to understand the backend of your website, and it can be set up quickly and efficiently, so your team experiences little-to-no downtime. The suite of tools has options at every price point, so HubSpot will grow with your small-to-medium-sized business. You can plug and play, choosing which platforms you want, and which you can do without. Each “hub” feeds into one another, allowing you to see a bird’s eye view of all of your marketing and sales efforts, and use context to keep track of each prospect in their buyer’s journey. Sounds great, right? It is—and you can take our word for it.
HubSpot’s CRM is easy to set up, and customizable to your unique sales process. You can customize your deal stages in less than an hour and configure it to your business preferences.
A lot of the marketing and sales process happens in your inbox. A few of our favorite features are email templates, tracking, and scheduling. Templates turn a repetitive sales email into a saved template, so you all you have to do is personalize it, click send or schedule for the time of day when your prospect will be most likely to see it! A lot of companies like their sales reps to work out of the CRM when sending a response to emails. With HubSpot, you can track your email conversations within the CRM or in your preferred email provider, such as Gmail, Outlook, or Office 365. Log the information into the CRM with just a click of a button!
Although email is used frequently, everyone has a different way of looking for answers. One person may use email, another may use live chat and yet another uses social media. Keep track of all of your conversations in one inbox, so you can read and reply to all of your messages in the same place. And when you’re ready to meet with your prospect to further the conversation, skip the back-and-forth involved in setting up a meeting and send them a link from the Meetings tool. Your prospect can see your available dates and times and choose the one that works best for them.
HubSpot’s Marketing Hub is a comprehensive suite of tools designed to attract visitors, convert them into leads, close deals, and delight customers. The Marketing Hub connects with your HubSpot or Salesforce CRM to track the progress of leads, so your marketing and sales teams never miss a beat.
Your website is a 24/7 salesperson for your business, so it should be beautiful and functional, seamlessly guiding your visitor through the buyer’s journey—no pressure. HubSpot CMS offers easy-to-use drag and drop features, so anyone can build a website. With HubSpot, you won’t need to write one line of code in your website build (unless you want to, of course).
People actually have to find your website for it to do its job, though. If you’re focusing on organic search, this is where the SEO tool comes in. You can publish web page after web page and blog after blog but if no one sees them, it’s wasted time and money. The built-in SEO features will ensure you’re adding keywords, meta descriptions, inbound links, and more to up your SEO game, so you can get to page one and get results. If your strategy also includes paid search, the Ads tool easily allows you to hook up your Facebook and Google Ads accounts to track performance and create audiences.
During the buyer’s journey, blogs can help answer questions and guide visitors to the next step. According to HubSpot, 53% of marketers say blog content creation is their top inbound marketing priority—something so important should have the right tools to back it up. With HubSpot’s blogging tool, you can create an inline blog or select draft mode to collect your thoughts in a distraction-free space. Optimize, schedule, and analyze the results of your posts, all in one robust blogging tool.
Once a visitor finds your website, entice them with a call-to-action (CTA) to sign up for your email list, download an ebook, or participate in a live demo. With the CTA tool, you're able to create a button or an image-based clickable object that you can put pretty much anywhere on your website—you can even put one in a video! It also tracks the data on who clicked it, when they clicked it and where they clicked it, so you know what works and what doesn’t.
Once they’ve clicked the CTA, it’ll bring them to a landing page. Create your own landing pages by creating a form in the form tool and plugging it into one of HubSpot’s templates with content. Hit publish and come back when you have results. Through the landing pages analytics, you can see who has converted, and HubSpot adds the new contacts to your CRM automatically.
Another way to grab a lead’s contact information is through a pop-up form. Pop-up forms will leverage page visitation data, or completing a behavior threshold like time on page or scroll depth actions, and provide an opportunity to convert the user with an offer or value proposition. The form is dynamically generated right there on-site, so the user does not have to leave the page to convert!
Once your visitor becomes a lead, you can use that information in many different ways to turn them into a customer. Use the marketing automation feature to add them to a drip campaign. This will send them well-timed emails with information that will actually interest them. Also, set up a workflow that assigns new contacts to their buyer persona, so you can tailor your marketing messages to their specific needs.
When your lead is this far into the buyer’s journey, they don’t want to see another CTA for that awareness-level ebook they read months ago. Instead, use Smart content to show them a CTA they’ll actually convert on—maybe a free trial, perhaps?
Just because you turned your lead into a customer doesn’t mean your work is done. Now is where the hard part begins—keeping them as a customer. We’ve all heard that getting new customers costs a lot more than retaining old ones. But according to research by Fredrick Reichheld (creator of the net promoter score), increasing customer retention rates can also increase profits by 25% to 95%.
Use social media to delight your customers by answering questions and responding to concerns ASAP. Do this by monitoring your mentions and hashtags through the social media tool. You can also schedule Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn—and even Instagram posts, so you’re providing valuable content to your followers every day, no matter where they are in the buyer’s journey.
At every stage, you should be checking your progress. What works, what doesn’t work, what needs help… and HubSpot’s analytics tools give you the whole puzzle, not just a piece of it. Access the analytics from inside each tool, or from the report drop-down menu to see views, click-through rates, bounce rates, session times, and a whole lot more. The numbers tell you what you’re doing right and what you can do better to give visitors, leads, and customers the best experience possible.
Toss those spreadsheets into the virtual garbage can. HubSpot’s Sales Hub software helps your team uncover more leads and turn them into customers faster. The Sales Hub allows you to see your pipeline in an easy-to-manage interface, so no one slips through the cracks, and your prospects get all of their questions answered before making a purchase.
Once a lead is ready to talk to a salesperson, they’re usually halfway through the buyer’s journey—67%, according to a study by SiriusDecisions. That’s where predictive lead scoring comes in. Understanding your leads and where they are in the journey is key to connecting to the right prospect at the right time. With predictive lead scoring, HubSpot uses artificial intelligence to look at who’s converted on what, what pages of your website they’ve visited and more, and connects the dots to predict who has the highest likelihood of closing. That way, you can focus on connecting with the warmest leads, and leave the colder ones to the marketing team.
Once you connect with a lead, add them to an email sequence. As salespeople, we know getting back to prospects is extremely important, but there are only so many hours in a day! With email sequences, you can enroll prospects in a series of automated emails after speaking to them once, getting their information at a tradeshow or by another factor. This way, you’re not spending hours sending the same email over and over again to different prospects or forgetting to send an email altogether.
These emails will usually include resources for the prospect such as case studies, pricing sheets, proposals, and other documents. Instead of having to search for them, the Documents tool will hold all of your important resources in one place. HubSpot also tracks who opened what and which documents lead to clicks, and eventually sales, so you can leverage your winners.
Once your prospect is ready to buy, use the Product and Quote tools to whip up a company-branded quote to send to them. With the Product tool, add the products your company sells, and then add the products your prospects have interest in-in to the deal. Once they’re ready for a quote, a click of a button will create a visually-appealing quote you can easily attach to an email.
HubSpot’s newest product, Service Hub, allows you to provide your customers with top-notch customer service. Customers have more power than ever before and giving them support when and where they need it will allow you to retain customers and turn them into promoters.
Connect with customers in the conversations inbox, which takes every incoming email, DM, and more, and keeps it in one easy-to-use inbox. When you reply, your response goes right back to the medium they used. Live Chat is also connected, so when a customer asks a question through the chat window on your website, you can answer immediately.
When a customer contacts your team about an issue, create a ticket so you can route it to the best person for the job. The ticket will record what the problem is, who it is assigned to, what the priority level is, and more. Create tickets with automation, by setting up rules, or directly in a contact record. Open and keep track of all of your tickets on the dashboard, so everyone’s questions get answered in a timely manner.
Avoid answering the same question over and over again. Next time you get a FAQ, turn the answer into an article in the Knowledge Base. Optimize it for search engines or send it to a customer when they ask. That way, you’re spending less time on repetitive questions and they’re spending less time waiting for an answer. Another way to help your customers get an answer ASAP is through a conversational bot. Unlike live chat, there is no real-life person on the other end, but it can help a customer or lead find their way around your website, to a helpful article or salesperson.
When everything is said and done, you want to know how you did, right? Use the feedback feature to send a survey to a customer you just helped, to a list of customers who had the same problem, or to just get a pulse check on your customers. You can also use the reporting features to see customer feedback, ticket response time, knowledgebase usage and more to keep improving your customer service initiatives.
HubSpot has the simplest and easiest to use ticketing system for support teams with Service Hub Starter, add that to Marketing Hub and/or Sales Hub and you now have more visibility on the customer lifecycle than ever before, and it’s all in one place. With Service Hub Starter you can build your own Customer Success help desk and scale it with your business. Offering customers the experience they want to have with your business is the best way to grow, Service Hub allows you to do this at scale.
Building your help desk solution for your business gets a serious leg up with Service Hub Professional. Take your standard ticket system to the next level by taking action in greater scale. With the Professional subscription, you’re able to dig deeper into CX data, respond quicker with knowledge center articles and videos, and create custom reports.
Finally, a CMS that makes it easy for marketers and IT teams to work in harmony. Built for companies of all sizes, the CMS Hub allows marketers the control they need to manage their most important asset while giving the IT team the peace of mind they require to protect their network from potential threats. Site visitors get the personalized attention they deserve. A win-win for all.
Easily create and manage website pages personalized for different visitors—and optimized for devices and conversions. Enable your marketing team to make those last-minute updates on their own.
The commitment to your safety and website reliability is backed by a dedicated 24/7 security team and out-of-the-box features like enterprise-class web application firewall, SSL, custom CDN, SSO memberships, and more.
CMS Pro is for growing companies and is the next evolution of our HubSpot’s CMS. Features make it easier for both marketers and developers to work within the CMS. With the addition of themes, you are able to edit pages within an all-new drag and drop interface.
CMS Enterprise is for scaling organizations that want to build powerful web app experiences and have more governance over a growing team, CMS Hub Enterprise comes with everything found in CMS Hub Professional and robust features like serverless functions and memberships which allows you to blur the lines between static web pages and web apps. As you grow your business, you’ll be able to build out and report on two separate websites within the same CMS.
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