9 Ways You’re Underutilizing Hubspot and Why It Matters
If your company is serious about growing revenue, the right marketing technology is just as critical as a lead-generating website. That’s why many middle-market companies invest in platforms like HubSpot to automate and optimize their modern marketing. But they don’t always leverage the many ways these tools can fuel marketing to drive a steady pipeline of leads that convert to sales.
If you’re not optimizing HubSpot, you’re not getting your money’s worth. AND you’re not setting yourself up to engage in marketing that generates measurable, predictable results.
Here’s a look at 9 ways you may be underusing HubSpot—and what to do instead.
#1: You’re not segmenting your audience effectively.
Modern marketing meets buyers exactly where they are in their buying journey, and that demands good segmentation. If you don’t know where your buyer is, or what they need right now, you can’t target them with content that keeps them moving down the funnel.
HubSpot allows you to segment contacts based on their buyer persona, so you can tailor what they see at every step. You can use HubSpot’s custom form fields to ask qualifying questions that help you identify what each buyer’s persona is. That sets you up to create workflows that automatically deliver the right content to each individual, based on their answers to questions about their job title, primary points, industry, and more.
#2: You’re not using branching logic to respond to buyers’ behavior.
Basic email packages like Mailchimp let you set up email sequences, but they don’t have the smart branching logic to ensure each buyer receives the right emails at the right time, based on their behavior.
The branching logic in HubSpot lets you determine what happens automatically in response to your buyer’s actions, so you can guide them through a meaningful journey. If they’ve already downloaded a gated guide, maybe what they get next is a case study. If you don’t leverage the power of branching logic in your automated workflows, you’re treating every buyer the same regardless of their past behavior. That’s no way to nurture them…but it’s a sure way to alienate them.
#3: You’re not using lead scoring to focus on the most qualified buyers.
All leads aren’t of equal value to your business. If you treat them all the same, your sales team will waste time and energy on buyers who aren’t the ideal fit and unlikely to convert. Or they might attempt to engage too soon with buyers who aren’t quite ripe and still need more nurturing from marketing, which won’t be productive.
Growth-minded companies use lead scoring to rank leads based on the likelihood they’ll become customers, so they can focus their resources on the most qualified leads. If you use HubSpot to automate your marketing, always use the lead scoring feature to rank leads consistently and methodically, based on both attributes (like job title, industry, or location) and actions (like website visits or content downloads) that are most relevant to your business.
#4: You’re not using progressive forms to adapt to a buyer’s behavior.
If a buyer visits your website a second time, are you asking them to fill out the same generic form again? Or does your site adapt what it delivers to a buyer who’s come back, so you can learn more from every interaction?
If you talk to a returning buyer like it’s the first time, every time, you’re sure to frustrate them. You can avoid that pitfall by using HubSpot’s progressive form fields. A progressive form knows if a buyer has already filled out a form, so it asks for different information this time. Now you’re learning more about your buyer with every interaction—and positioning your sales team to close the sale.
#5: You’re not creating a smooth handoff of leads from marketing to sales.
When a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) is ready to engage with your business, you need to notify sales and ensure they take the next step. But many companies don’t use an automated process to ensure the lead handoff is smooth, timely, and accurate. And that’s when leads start to leak out of your pipeline. (Yikes!)
HubSpot’s Lifecycle Stage custom property can help break down the marketing and sales silos and plug the holes in your lead handoff process by helping to determine which leads are ready to pass on to sales (i.e., Sales Qualified Leads). From there, your sales team can use the Lead Status property to identify leads that are in their court, segment them by status, and engage in the right kind of follow-up. It’s also a great way to ensure leads that aren’t quite ready to buy are tagged for re-engagement, keeping them in the pipeline.
#6: Your sales team isn’t tracking how interested buyers are interacting.
Once you’ve invested resources into generating leads, you don’t want to see them ignored or fall dormant simply because sales isn’t keeping good track of their interactions. But that’s all too common.
The solution? Get your sales teams using the HubSpot Sales Chrome extension to log and track how buyers are engaging with emails. You can set up the system to provide real-time notifications when a buyer opens an email, automatically log any communication with the buyer to their contact record, and even make outbound calls from your inbox. This feature is especially useful when you experience the inevitable turnover on your sales team. Now, your new reps will have ready access to all the historical information on the leads they’re inheriting—something that’s not possible when contact records only exist in an outgoing sales rep’s inbox.
#7: You’re missing out on meaningful chat interactions.
When a buyer interacts with you, they want to do it on their terms. Adding a live chat feature to your site is a good way to give buyers control over how and when they engage with you. Adding a chatbot is even better.
You can use HubSpot to power-up your chat feature by using chatbots and building chat flows that automate the chat response process. By letting the chatbot handle the general inquiries and spam, you free up your staff to only engage on chats from more qualified leads. It’s an easy way to scale your personalized conversations with interested buyers, understand where they are in their journey, and determine the best next step to lead them further down your funnel.
#8: You’re creating friction for buyers by not using a meeting scheduler tool.
When a buyer is finally ready to meet with you, you don’t want to make it hard for them to schedule. But that’s exactly what some companies do—emailing back and forth about dates and times until the buyer loses interest and moves on.
If you want to convert leads into sales, you need to remove any friction that can derail the process. HubSpot’s meeting scheduler does that by giving buyers the ability to schedule a call with the click of a calendar. When you replace a generic Contact Us button with a meeting scheduler link, your sales team will spend less time on the mechanics of connecting and more time on meaningful interactions. And interested buyers won’t abandon ship out of frustration.
#9: You can’t measure you how well your marketing is (or isn’t) working.
Modern marketing that drives revenue demands a measurement-based approach—creating a strategic marketing plan that aligns with your goals and strategies, then setting metrics to assess what’s working vs what needs optimizing. But companies don’t always use their technology platforms to measure whether their marketing investment is paying off, or how.
If you use HubSpot, you have a few good measurement features at your disposal. You can use the campaigns tool to group content and calls to action, then track and optimize those campaigns. You can create customized dashboards that provide an at-a-glance view of the metrics that matter. And you can track a buyer from first engagement to closed sale, so you know exactly how much revenue marketing is responsible for contributing.
Before you invest in a marketing technology platform like HubSpot, make sure you have an experienced strategic marketing partner ready to help you leverage it for the best possible ROI. Marketri has helped many B2B companies implement and optimize marketing technologies like HubSpot as part of a strategic marketing plan that generates significant revenue.
