Harnessing the power of HubSpot CRM for Marketing and Sales

In today's fast-paced world, having an up-to-date CRM isn't just desirable – it's essential. While traditional CRMs served a purpose in bygone eras, they need to be more than mere digital storehouses in today's market. In essence, your CRM should be the gateway to leverage the goldmine of prospect and customer data at your fingertips.

This article delves into how you can unlock the potential of your data, transforming your CRM from a mere data repository to a robust revenue catalyst.

The potential of data

Raw data in itself holds no inherent value. For data to truly shine, it requires careful collection, storage, and optimisation to yield significant outcomes with minimal effort.

Consider this: having a list of everyone who's expressed interest in your brand over the past year and a half is useful. But wouldn't it be more valuable to discern who's ready to make a purchase or even who was on the verge of buying?

By intelligently interpreting your data, you can immediately ensure that the right messages reach the appropriate audience without cumbersome or off-putting tactics.

Advanced targeting strategies mean advertisements are now less intrusive and more enriching. Many of us have grown so accustomed to high-calibre ads on our social media feeds that we barely give them a second thought.

The old way doesn't cut it anymore

The digital marketing and sales landscape has changed in the past two decades. Elements like GDPR, growing privacy concerns, discerning customers, and even corporate giants like Amazon reshaping data strategies have all played their part.

Sadly, some businesses still cling to outdated, privacy-compromising methods that tarnish the industry's image. Such companies pale compared to those that have mastered modern marketing and sales techniques. The unfortunate reality is that these companies, blinded by outdated methods, fail to recognise the treasure trove of data they possess, which could offer invaluable insights into customer behaviours and preferences.

Embracing the modern CRM!

A CRM is a repository of information about potential and existing customers. From rudimentary spreadsheets to sophisticated AI-driven systems, a well-utilised CRM can be a powerhouse, steering revenue and enhancing customer interactions throughout their purchasing journey.

The imperative of an experience-driven CRM approach

Modern marketers are hyper-focused on the customer experience. They use experience-driven content to put their potential and existing customers at the centre of everything they do.

It's most likely a substantial reason why HubSpot has adopted its flywheel. When you focus on customer experience, your marketing attracts and feeds into your sales, your sales engage and feed into your service, and your service delights and feeds back into your marketing. Unlike the traditional and linear funnel model, it's an ongoing process where each journey stage benefits the others. This is only possible with the customer at the centre, managed by your CRM.

Leveraging your CRM is the key to proper experience-driven marketing, and experience-driven marketing is your secret to growth. Forrester Research discovered that companies centred on customer experience saw a rise in customer lifetime value by over 60% and experienced a growth rate 40% quicker than their counterparts.

Very few companies have all their tools and tactics tightly integrated into a CRM, often leading to disconnected customer experiences, siloed data, and an inability to know what works. 

This is why HubSpot puts so much effort into integrating the Marketing Hub tightly with the CRM. As a result, HubSpot gives you and your company a unified view of the customer experience, allowing you to create personalised experiences across all touchpoints to help you measure your success as a marketer correctly. 

A CRM must personalise marketing and sales offers

Leveraging a CRM in your marketing strategy can facilitate tailored experiences across every platform. In today's fiercely competitive landscape, capturing attention is more challenging than ever. Personalisation is the key to breaking through the noise; the more bespoke your approach, the more likely you will make an impact.

So, what epitomises genuine personalisation? It's when your website dynamically alters content to suggest material a visitor hasn't engaged with yet. It's presenting offers in line with subjects they've shown an interest in. It might feature distinct CTAs for potential customers compared to existing ones. It even extends to having a chatbot that recalls a user's name and company and their designated sales representative. Such a depth of customisation is achievable with the power of CRM-focused marketing.

The three pillars of effective CRM

1. Segmentation

Tailor content and features to align closely with your prospect's specific needs and obstacles.

2. Contextualisation

Clearly articulate the significance and benefits of your offering.

3. Personalisation

Engage with users in a manner that resonates personally, ensuring they feel acknowledged and treasured.

Segmentation: The key to resonant messaging

The typical customer is inundated with countless promotional messages and encounters a myriad of adverts daily.

Reflect on the last time you scrolled through your phone – perhaps conducting online research, catching up on social media or perusing the latest headlines. How many adverts felt completely irrelevant to you?

I'd wager that just this week, you've exited a web page out of sheer frustration; its adverts disrupt your browsing experience. Yet, there's a greater peril for businesses than merely irking their potential customers. A far more daunting threat looms – sheer apathy.

Customers who don't perceive your messages as relevant to their current circumstances will swiftly disengage. This underscores the significance of an advanced CRM for your marketing and sales endeavours. Without a keen understanding of potential and existing customers, it becomes a challenge to offer them timely, pertinent content in the manner they prefer.

Fortunately, the solution is readily available – the wealth of data within your CRM. Utilising this, you can effectively segment customers based on their desires, needs, and purchase readiness. 

Harnessing HubSpot lists for effective segmentation

Lists present a powerful tool for delineating segments of your database based on specific data points. They enable you to categorise your contacts by variables such as their mode of contact, the organisation they represent, or even specific actions they've undertaken on your website – like visiting a particular page. With an adept CRM, these lists evolve in real time, automatically updating as more contacts meet the set criteria.

Within minutes, you could compile a list spotlighting contacts in the third month of their agreement with you. Might they find value in a suggestion that enhances their existing package?

Or, consider directing your attention to prospects who've frequented your pricing page more than once over the past month.

A one-size-fits-all message won't resonate with both these groups. However, with some dedication, your CRM can be instrumental in ensuring each segment receives communications that they deem relevant and valuable.

Crafting manually-tracked custom behavioural events

Manually tracked custom behavioural events allow you to specify and monitor distinct activities pivotal to your business. These behavioural events can be linked to contact properties, ensuring seamless integration across all HubSpot tools. To deploy manually tracked events, one would utilise HubSpot's analytics API, necessitating expertise from a developer.

The analytics API, an integral feature of the HubSpot Marketing Hub Enterprise, empowers you to delve deeper into advanced analytics on your website or external third-party applications, thereby furnishing a comprehensive understanding of the entire buyer's journey. Learn how the analytics API works in this article from HubSpot.

The art of contextualisation 

Every buyer inevitably navigates through the pivotal stages of awareness, consideration, and decision-making.

Yet, the duration and nuances of these stages can differ vastly depending on your offering, be it a product, solution, or service. Consider the contrast: a parched individual on a sweltering day will swiftly transition from realising their thirst (awareness) to choosing a refreshing beverage (decision) far quicker than a CFO contemplating new forecasting software for an expansive SaaS enterprise. The former decision might be instantaneous, whilst the latter could span several months if not years.

While the specifics of the journey might fluctuate, one element remains steadfast – at each juncture, customers and prospects will seek content tailored to that particular stage.

To illustrate, before a CFO becomes cognisant of your forecasting software's existence, they must identify or acknowledge a pertinent challenge. Equipped with a problem to address, they will search for solutions that could encompass an array of choices – from adopting a novel tool to wholly outsourcing the predicament.

Crafting campaign triggers aligned with the buyer's journey

Reflect upon the tailored content prepared for potential purchasers at each journey stage. By triggering emails that disseminate this content according to their current stage, you guarantee that what they receive resonates with their prevailing challenges and requirements. To optimise this, step into the shoes of your buyers and ponder their specific needs at every juncture of their journey.

Awareness

Knowlegde article: "The Ever-Elusive Time: Why CFOs Always Seem to Run Out"

Consideration

Downloadable guide: "Strategies for the Modern CFO: Enhancing Efficiency"

Decision

Case study: "The Forecasting Solutions: How Companies X and Y Navigated Their Challenges"

Tagging your prospects in your CRM based on their journey stage ensures they encounter content aptly aligned with their current phase. Avoid overwhelming your potential buyers with intricate details when they recognise a problem.

Persist in delivering timely, pertinent, and invaluable content that gently draws the buyer closer rather than aggressively pushing your solutions upon them.

By adeptly segmenting your audience, you guarantee the delivery of context-rich communication, nurturing them toward better conversion outcomes.

Leverage innovative content for contextualised messaging at scale

HubSpot Smart Content empowers you to devise and deliver varied content based on predetermined criteria. Your emails, landing pages, and CTAs can alter their display based on your information about a prospect or contact.

For instance, instead of laboriously curating and sending context-tailored content to prospects by hand, allow your HubSpot pages to respond intuitively to their preferences and necessities. Draw from your CRM data to present content and recommendations relevant to the awareness, consideration, or decision-making stages, effortlessly customising your website's content to resonate with each phase of the buyer's journey.

Identifying the right prospects for your messaging streamlines administrative tasks and amplifies conversion rates, facilitating greater revenue with minimal friction.

Personalising your approach with HubSpot 

With HubSpot, you can tailor messaging based on standard or bespoke properties — essentially, the diverse data points you gather about your contacts.

Today's personalisation involves more than merely emailing someone by their first name. While this might have been a novel touch two decades ago, the contemporary consumer is well-versed in tech and data.

True personalisation entails dispatching apt messages promptly, ensuring they're couched in the appropriate language, tone, and context.

Consider this scenario: You receive an email that addresses you personally. It's a pleasant touch, but perhaps you've already encountered a few similarly addressed emails that day. Anyone with even a smidgen of knowledge about online marketing can discern an automated email a mile away.

But imagine if, just a month before the renewal of a product or service you've availed of, you get an email that resonates directly with your unique needs or challenges.

You'd want your prospects left pondering: Was that email automated or genuinely personalised? While we recognise that such precision is achievable through a HubSpot workflow set to contact decision-makers a month before their renewal, the recipients feel valued as the content hits home at the perfect moment.

Delineating between contextualisation and personalisation can be nebulous. A more straightforward way to discern it might be:

Segmentation

Who are we addressing?

Contextualisation

What message are we conveying?

Personalisation

How do we present the message?

Contextualisation ensures you engage at the right pace, avoiding pushing too much too soon. Meanwhile, personalisation guarantees that prospects perceive your communication as directly tailored for them, arriving precisely when they're most receptive.

Remember, while clients appreciate contextual messaging, it shouldn't become overbearing. They desire personalised insights that are timely, helpful, and valuable.

Leverage custom properties to acquire company information on your leads

HubSpot offers many data points to collect on every prospect, from their name and address to their email interaction history. This wealth of data allows HubSpot to enhance your understanding of groups and individual leads.

However, as HubSpot serves a broad range of industries, from SaaS consultancies to animal feed distributors, they can only provide many generic properties. Fortunately, with custom properties, you can create bespoke data points tailored to your unique requirements.

Your CRM is your catalyst for growth

Maintaining a tidy and accessible CRM can boost sales and enhance customer satisfaction.

By segmenting your target audience, you can precisely identify which groups of prospects should receive tailored messages, ensuring they engage with relevant content.

You can optimise conversions throughout the funnel by ensuring your messaging is contextual and tailored to the specific stage of a prospect's journey.

Taking personalisation to heart means viewing your prospects as individuals fostering trust and credibility with your brand. Demonstrate to your prospects that they are valued by grasping their challenges and offering timely, useful content and solutions.

Harnessing CRM triggers for hyper-personalised communications

Your CRM is a treasure trove of demographic details that can significantly enhance the personalisation of your communications. Here are several suggestions using distinct data points to connect with your audience precisely when they're most receptive.

Strategies for timely engagement

Tailored recommendations via page tracking

Monitor which pages a contact frequents. This knowledge allows you to proffer specific recommendations akin to email-based remarketing.

Customised chatbots triggered by deal stages

Prompt chatbots to emerge for prospects at specific deal stages. Tailoring chatbots to different steps of the buyer's journey ensures you address pertinent queries timely.

Date-based personalised messaging

Whether it's a birthday greeting, an anniversary note, or a reminder about an upcoming renewal, timely communications bolster engagement using the information you've collated.

Action-dependent workflow delays

Workflows can be set to hold off until a contact performs a specific action, such as visiting a page or filling out a form. This ensures your communications are synchronised with an engaged buyer.

Implementing these strategies, using HubSpot's straightforward yet potent toolkit, can elevate your outreach campaigns, making them deeply personal, relevant, and, in turn, driving sustainable revenue growth.

Customer journey map template

Venturing into customer journey mapping? We've got just the template for you. It encompasses various customer journey perspectives, from the present state to the envisioned future state to the influences of customers' lifecycle stages. The template offers insights for each stage, delving into customer sentiments, content interactions, and guidance on streamlining decision-making processes. If you're set to embark on this journey, secure the template below.