HubShots Episode 34: HubSpot CRM Workflow Updates, Unbranded Email Test Results, Advanced Personas

Episode 34 of HubShots is now available

Episode 34 is now available.

Recorded: Monday 16 May 2016

Welcome

In this episode we ‘crack on’ even though Ian is fighting a cold :-)

Shot 1: Inbound Thought of the Week

Apologies for the ‘ding’!

Training - we did the Agency Positioning and Targeting workshop and the content and structure was great and the relationships we made in that period has still stuck today. So consider doing some training and growing your knowledge of Inbound and HubSpot. https://www.inbound.com/inbound16/trainings

I got to meet David Weinhaus!

Also if you are doing INBOUND alone we would love to meet you…..

http://inboundcountdown.com - check how long to go!

Shot 2: HubSpot Feature/tip of the Week

Automate Lead Rotation, Task and Deal Creation in Workflows

According to a recent study, sales teams spend less than a third of their time actually selling. The rest is spent on administrative tasks like creating CRM records, logging manual activities, and searching for relevant content to send to leads.

The ability to automate is critical to the development of successful sales organisations. It saves your reps and managers precious bandwidth, enabling them to focus on what’s really important — meeting the needs of their prospects and closing deals.

With three new updates to HubSpot — lead rotation, task creation, and deal creation — you'll spend more time selling and less on busywork.

Lead Rotation

As your company grows and your sales team matures, assigning leads manually doesn’t scale. What was once five minutes a day becomes a full time job. Automating lead rotation saves precious time and bandwidth, allowing sales managers to stay focused on what really matters— their team’s performance.

How it works:

Find your way into Workflows by clicking Contacts > Workflows in HubSpot Marketing. Edit one of your workflows using the pencil icon on the right, or create a brand new one for rotating leads with "Create New Workflow." Once inside your workflow, add a new action, and you’ll see a brand new option under the “Sales” section: “Rotate Leads.”

The rotator works in a "round-robin" style — add any number of owners to the rotation, and they'll be assigned the leads evenly.

Deal and Task Creation

Here’s how sales reps often divided their days: for every two hours spent selling, an hour of CRM administration — creating contacts and companies, logging tasks to follow up on, creating opportunities. Newsflash: if you can cut down that hour of admin work, you'll sell more.

How it works:

Follow the steps outlined above to navigate into a workflow. When selecting a workflow action, you'll now have the options to “Create a Task” and “Create a Deal.”

When you choose “Create a Deal,” you’ll be able to assign a HubSpot owner, name the deal, choose a Pipeline, Deal Stage, Close Date, and amount.

When creating a task, you can set status, due date, owner, and description.

What are some common use cases?

- Auto-creating a new Task to follow up in a few days when a deal changes stages

- Auto-creating a Task or Deal when you import a new list of contacts

- Auto-creating a new Deal when a contact or prospect fills out a particular form, such as a 'Request a Demo' or 'Start a Trial' form

- Auto-creating a Task for a rep to follow up with a contact or lead who views your pricing page, clicks a certain CTA, or views a webinar.

How to get started

Sales automation is a new part of Workflows, HubSpot’s automation tool --- available to Professional and Enterprise subscriptions. Getting started is easy. Head into your Workflows to start automating your sales processes now.

Shot 3: Test of the Week

Test sending unbranded email eg strip out the images and extraneous formatting. We saw HubSpot do this with a partner email.

Even in our own testing we noticed an average open rate of 15% when it was branded and that moved to almost 30% when it was unbranded and looked like it came from us personally! eg compare a normal email in January to a recent unbranded email in April:

As with all ideas like this - make sure you test and measure - your results may vary!

Shot 4: Opinion of the Week

Un-gate all the things! Or don’t: http://www.craigbailey.net/whole-un-gate-things-trend-going-moment/

Shot 5: General Tip of the Week

Useful tips for approaching your personas by Marcia Riefer Johnston: http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2016/05/buyer-personas-essential-parts/

From Tip #1: “Don’t describe the persona to the reader. Have the persona talk to the reader in first-person.”

For an in-depth look at buyer personas check out Adele Revella’s book: http://www.amazon.com/Buyer-Personas-Customers-Expectations-Strategies/dp/1118961501
http://www.buyerpersona.com/about-adele-revella

She goes through 5 main steps for thinking through a buyer persona
#2 is to think about Success factors and the results they expect

Also have a listen to Moby’s episode 11 of Inbound Buzz where he goes through how to create personas: https://soundcloud.com/inboundbuzz/011-how-to-create-personas-for-inbound-marketing-success

Shot 6: State of Inbound Item of the Week

Take 15 minutes to do the State of Inbound Report: http://www.stateofinbound.com/
Direct link to the survey: https://soi2016.questionpro.com/

Shot 7: Community Item of the Week

Nice episode by Moby (@mobysiddique) outlining some cool content creation tools: https://soundcloud.com/inboundbuzz/ep09-ultimate-content-creation-tools-used-by-agencies-and-pros

Shot 8: Podcast of the Week

Content Inc by Joe Pulizzi: http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/content-inc-podcast/
Simple, insightful gems of marketing wisdom, less than 5 minutes.

Shot 9: App of the Week

Read Medium on your phone every night: https://medium.com/m/app

Rescue Time for working on your Mac/PC: https://www.rescuetime.com/