How often does your sales team hear the words: “Work smarter, not harder?”
This sounds like a good idea, but what does it mean in a practical sense?
One of the best ways to work smarter is to use sales automation to streamline tasks and keep opportunities from slipping through the cracks.
We use HubSpot and ZoomInfo to keep processes lean, save time, and drive revenue. Here are a few automations that will help your company close more business.
When you use data enrichment tools like ZoomInfo, amazing opportunities to activate marketing and sales automation in HubSpot exist.
If your company uses ZoomInfo today, you know what a powerful tool it is for creating target lists of companies and contacts for your outbound sales motions.
One of the most valuable features includes intent data, a signal that tells marketing and sales teams when a target account is researching products and services like yours.
This tool takes the guesswork out of knowing when the right time is to get in front of a prospect with your message.
But the data is only useful when put into action. This is where automation comes in.
Integrating ZoomInfo with HubSpot enables you to trigger automated workflows when a target account shows buying intent signals. The automation can push account data directly into your CRM and activate a workflow that alerts a sales rep or sends an email to the prospect, introducing your brand to them.
Marketing and Sales often disagree about whether inbound leads are truly good or not.
Sales process automation can solve that by creating a uniform standard for a lead that’s a good fit for products and services your company offers.
The first step is to bring the leadership team together and decide what your ideal customer profile, or ICP, looks like.
An Ideal Customer Profile defines the type of company that makes a great customer for your business, determined by characteristics like the annual revenue, number of employees, industry, or the geographic location.
Once you have your ICP nailed down, you’re ready to apply it in sales automation that will help you streamline the processes.
Trigger criteria kicks off the automated workflows in which contacts are auto-enrolled.
It tells the platform – when a contact meets certain criteria, enroll this person into an automated sequence.
Sometimes the trigger is based on user actions — like filling out a form or abandoning a shopping cart – or on properties you’ve gathered about them in the CRM.
In this example, the sales automation tools will be triggered by a user action indicating they need attention from Sales.
Use conditional logic in your automation to vet the lead according to your ideal customer profile.
An if/then branch can determine whether you have a good match for any properties that are important to you:
Setting up conditional logic will enable the workflow to sort your leads, based on whether they meet your defined criteria.
Regardless of the qualifying properties you choose, they have to be captured and stored in the CRM before you can use them in automated sales processes.
When your automation identifies a qualified lead, and the contact shows signs they are evaluating a solution, you will want to update their lifecycle stage and lead status.
Lifecycle stages give you perspective about where the prospect is in their decision-making, and whether the lead is qualified.
If a previously unknown visitor fills out a form on your website for basic educational material about a challenge they have, you’ve got an unqualified lead in the "Awareness stage" of the journey.
After they explored your resources and learned about potential solutions, they’ve advanced to the Consideration or Decision stage and you've got a marketing qualified lead on your hands.
You can create automation that changes the contact’s lifecycle stage property, prioritizing the lead for Sales and adjusting the communications you send to the prospect.
Once an MQL is identified, it’s time to get Sales in on the fun.
A marketing qualified lead is just that – a prospect Marketing thinks might be a good fit.
Now, we need to assign the lead to a salesperson who can determine if we are dealing with a sales qualified lead.
The next step in the sales process automation will assign the contact to a rep. With HubSpot, you can assign leads to a single individual, or a group of people round-robin style.
You can also automate the creation of a deal.
This is particularly useful if your business is transactional and you are pretty certain a qualified lead belongs in your sales pipeline right away.
If this is the case, you can tell the automation to create a deal and make the sales rep (assigned to the contact in the previous step) the deal owner as well.
The last stage in this sequence sends a notification to everyone who needs to know a qualified lead is ready for contact from Sales.
In HubSpot Sales Hub, you can send notifications through email, SMS, or Slack. If you have field reps on staff, it might be easier to reach them through a text message rather than email.
Regardless of the method for reaching them, make sure someone from the team responds right away! A response within seconds or minutes after a sales inquiry can dramatically increase your chances of winning the business.
With this in mind, you can add another step in your sequence that sends a second alert if no one has responded to the lead within a certain period of time. Five minutes is a good timeframe.
Another important tool for qualifying leads is lead scoring.
This is where you assign numeric values to specific attributes of a contact and/or their behavior on your website, and the system automatically scores a lead using those values.
You can assign numbers to characteristics that match your ICP and to certain activities as they engage with your marketing assets. All of these insights can be tracked in HubSpot and stored in your CRM.
Lead scoring is useful not only for figuring out if your prospect is the right fit, but also for spotting buying signals, or at least signs they’re considering a solution your team provides.
And not all actions are equal.
For example, does “liking” one of your LinkedIn posts carry the same weight as filling out a form on your website for a demo?
It’s important to make sure your scoring weighs heavier on important actions. There are several different behaviors you can score in your sales automation tools that will help you qualify a lead:
When you’re applying the scoring system, keep it simple and scalable.
We usually apply a score of one to five for each attribute, with five indicating the greatest qualifying value. You will also want to ensure your system allows people to accrue “points” using a variety of actions.
For example, one visitor might fill out several forms on your website, and rarely open a marketing email. Another prospect might show a lot of engagement with emails, and less with forms.
Both leads might be a good fit, so it’s important to set up your scoring to allow people to gather points in multiple ways.
You also should apply negative scoring for actions that disqualify a lead.
If you’ve been nurturing a lead for a few weeks or months and they suddenly opt out of all emails, it usually means they are no longer interested in your services.
We use a negative score for actions like these that keep them from showing up on the sales radar.
Every business knows how much easier it is to grow an existing client as opposed to finding a new one, but not many brands have a good system in place for tracking these opportunities.
By documenting data like contract renewal dates, purchased products, and deal stage velocity, you can use automation to create lists that keep opportunities from slipping through the cracks.
Our outbound sales strategy uses the Quantum Revenue Efficiency Model, a framework that focuses on prospects who already know your brand first.
1. Clients: Is your team on top of business review meetings and contract renewals?
2. Cross-Sell & Upsell: How are you tracking opportunities to grow existing clients?
3. Referrals: Are you tracking referrals and former clients who have moved on to other companies?
4. Stalled Deals, Churned Clients, MQLs and SQLs: How are you segmenting and systemizing outreach to contacts that have expressed interest, but fell by the wayside?
5. Net New Opportunities: How are you targeting and attracting new prospects to your sales pipeline?
With these active lists in place, you can set up automation that prioritizes effective and impactful opportunities that often get forgotten.
Sequences in Sales Hub are a little different from workflows where you send emails to groups of marketing contacts that share similar challenges and goals.
Sequences are for reaching out to one person the rep is trying to secure an appointment with.
This automation saves time and improves efficiency in the sales process, giving the sales rep more time to make meaningful connections with more prospects.
In order to use sales sequences effectively, you will need to do a few things first:
When setting up your sales automation sequence, you’re actually organizing email templates and tasks. Those are the two primary components.
Templates are emails you write and save with the intention of using them over and over with prospects.
Create them by crafting a short, concise email that addresses a particular challenge the prospect has, drop a valuable tip to establish rapport, and direct them to your meeting link to book a connect call.
You can use personalization tokens to auto-fill the contact’s name, company name, and other important properties you want in your template.
It also pays to add a sentence or two to personalize the email before sending to a prospect. You might reference a shared connection or a recent announcement their company made publicly. Whatever you choose to include, make sure what you say is relevant and concise. No one likes to receive long emails.
Arrange your sequence of emails in chronological order, then schedule tasks in between them.
There are a few different tasks that you could add to your sales process. You might need a reminder to snail mail them information or call to follow up.
When you schedule these tasks it’s good to include a few notes. What are you going to call the prospect about? Nothing is more annoying than getting a sales call that just says, “Hey! Just checking in to see if you read that email I sent.”
If you leave a message in their voicemail, make sure you offer a specific reason for your call. Your message should be about them, not your product or service.
When your sequence is organized, you’re ready to enroll a prospect for 1:1 communication.
Using these automation examples, you can tighten processes, save time, and boost closing rates for the entire sales team. One word of caution, though. Before investing in an automation platform, make sure Sales is living and breathing in the company CRM. This is very important. These two tools are tightly integrated, and you cannot reap the benefits of automation when the sales team is not working out of the CRM every day.
When the team is invested and the right tools are in place, there’s no reason why your company can’t crush its goals one quarter at a time.