Using HubSpot to Improve Sales Enablement

Sales enablement is a strategy that helps all customer-facing employees in B2B businesses provide value during every customer interaction throughout the buyer lifecycle. The result is a personalized and engaging customer experience that ultimately results in customer retention, sales, and business growth. 

When your business utilizes a sales team to capture and nurture leads, it’s crucial to equip all sales personnel with a firm understanding of what they’re selling, who they’re selling to, and the most effective ways to reach that market. Personalization plays a key role in effectively reaching a market, and that’s where HubSpot can help.

Improving sales enablement with HubSpot isn’t difficult, but it does require a systematic strategy consisting of several components. 

Component #1: Align your sales team around your CRM

According to HubSpot, the first component of improving sales enablement is aligning your team around your customer relationship management system (CRM). Your CRM should be the primary tool to conduct and document all sales activities.

All sales representatives should be able to manage, update, and share the status of current prospects within your CRM. All information related to a prospect should be stored inside the CRM and all sales personnel should have access to this data. For instance, with most CRMs, all prospect data is stored in a contact record. The prospect’s name, address, lead score, notes, and information from custom fields are all visible through the prospect’s record.

Centralized contact information seems basic, but it’s actually a critical component in sales enablement. Sales reps require fast and easy access to a prospect’s data, including past communications with other sales reps. This avoids repetitive questions that can make your sales reps look bad to the prospect.

HubSpot is a powerful CRM

You want to align your sales reps around a CRM that can be included in all of your sales processes across all platforms where your sales processes take place. For example, your website’s lead capture forms, email marketing, social media, phone calls, and any other system used during the sales process. HubSpot is that CRM platform.

Within HubSpot, reports are updated and generated automatically in real-time. Reports on sales activity and productivity are just a click away. The most impressive HubSpot feature that improves sales enablement is that your sales personnel will receive a notification the moment a prospect opens an email or visits the company website. These notifications give your sales force the context necessary to follow up with leads most effectively.

Limited CRMs hurt your sales enablement efforts

If your CRM is limited in its ability to support your sales team in any way, it’s time to switch to a better application. A limited CRM is only suitable short-term when you’re still trying to settle on a professional CRM.

If you’re not using a CRM or you’ve outgrown the one you started with, HubSpot is an ideal solution. HubSpot is both free and feature-rich and will help your sales team track deals and performance all from a single dashboard. Other alternatives include Zoho, Salesforce and Pipedrive. 

Component #2: Use a chatbot 

The second component we recommend is using a chatbot. A chatbot should never replace a live sales call, but they are great to use for screening new prospects. Many chatbots now offer opportunities to automate prospect qualification. 

For example, you can reduce the amount of friction in your flywheel (flywheels are the new “funnel”) by putting a chatbot on all website pages where people are most likely to have questions. These chatbots can be automated to help website visitors, and a human can take over when needed.

Component #3: Integrate your sales efforts with marketing

Your prospects need to receive content at specific times throughout their journey. While your marketing team handles email marketing, sales pages, and ad campaigns, it’s important to give your sales team access to this content. 

A majority of your marketing content will be useful to your sales team. Data consistently shows that businesses see more growth when their marketing and sales departments are aligned and have strong communication with each other.

Component #4: Invest in ongoing training

Onboarding is important, but don’t confuse it with training. A prolonged onboarding experience is a waste of time – a problem many businesses have begun to resolve. According to data published by Regalix in 2019, decreasing onboarding time was a key priority for 44% of businesses. 

In addition to a quick onboarding process, in-depth training should be continually provided. However, you don’t need to perform the training yourself. Most businesses hire an industry expert to come in and train onsite or they send sales reps to industry events for offsite training. Providing ongoing training can raise the average tenure of your sales reps, and over time, that alone can increase your ROI.

Speaking of training, have you considered learning more about sales enablement? HubSpot Academy offers a free sales enablement certification course for marketing and sales leaders. It’s a quick course expected to take just 4.5 hours to complete. Completing this course will help you streamline efforts from your sales and marketing teams and teach you how to implement processes to generate a steady flow of qualified leads.

Component #5: Replicate your high performers’ strategies

Have you ever noticed certain sales reps are exceptionally gifted when it comes to closing deals? On the outside, it might look like they just have a gift for connecting with people. However, sometimes high performers are doing something strategically different that others can learn.

High performers often go off-script

Many business owners unknowingly create sales scripts that aren’t effective, yet fully expect all sales reps to strictly adhere to those scripts. Experienced sales reps often modify the scripts they’re given without ever telling the business owner. This leads the business owner to believe their scripts are working. 

When inexperienced sales reps come on board and use the ineffective scripts, business owners think the problem is the sales rep – not the script. In most cases, going off-script is the only way a sales rep can make a sale.

If your top performing sales reps are using their own scripts, find out what they’re doing and ask them to help you replicate their strategy throughout the rest of the sales team.

Are you ready to improve sales enablement with HubSpot?

Whether improving sales enablement has been on your mind or is a new concept, we want to help. At OpGen Media, we’re a certified HubSpot Platinum Solutions Partner specializing in helping B2B companies grow their pipeline. Request a free consultation below to learn how we can help you get the most out of HubSpot and help grow your business.