How to Close More Deals with HubSpot
James from Porton shows how their document automation tool works inside HubSpot to speed up quotes, contracts, and e-signatures. The demo walks through the integration and answers questions about features and pricing for sales teams.
Foreign bit of background of who I am. I'm James, one of the co founders of Porton. I'm currently in Scotland at the moment but we're the company's based out of Sydney, Australia. So depending on your age. I am very close to the Harry Potter train at the moment. So that Harry Potter train when they're going to Hogwarts or if you're a little bit older, I'm very close to where Braveheart is filmed. So that kind of just a picture where I am in the world, that's where I am. But I'll be returning to Sydney later this year which is nice. But yeah, shall I go ahead and share my screen and get stuck in?
Yeah, let's dive right in.
Awesome.
Looks good.
Great. Thank you so much. So today I wanted to talk to you a little bit about how to close more deals with HubSpot and in particular creating faster sales cycles. So just going to go into a little bit of a few slides then go into giving you a little bit of a demo, the more interesting bit I guess. But just to set the scene I guess there are a few different options to close more deals in HubSpot. You can implement sales process and automation, more lead management and personalization, or enhance your team collaboration and analytics. This is all with an unchanged sales team size or not increasing your lead volume. These are the kind of ways that we could close more deals. In particular, I want to speak a little bit about the sales process and automation side of things. So HubSpot is fantastic at this. Like it's got loads of out of the box capabilities which make this great sales hub. Obviously we've got the quotes, got E signatures, got payments, got workflows to link all that stuff together and this is really fantastic. And if you can build the right workflow and the right setup with HubSpot then that is definitely the best way to go. But sometimes there are these, these are great for simple processes, but maybe there's a little bit more complexity in your organization or maybe there's something just a little bit more bespoke that people are requesting from your team that you can't quite work out how to do. So a couple of examples of this is like the line item automation based on rules right now is quite difficult and customizing quote content and format of those quotes, like adding custom properties into the quote, is also pretty hard at this point. So because of these reasons, maybe the organization still actually has a few templates that are either in Doc format or a presentation or even a spreadsheet. For things like proposals, quotes and contracts. And if this sounds a little bit like you, then maybe you're hearing things, which is things like this from your sales team or from other members of your organization. That switching between HubSpot and the quote templates is driving crazy. There's gotta be a faster way to do this. Really over asking legal for approval to draft our sales contracts. I'm gonna miss my numbers this quarter. Or switching between HubSpot and sales templates is driving me crazy. It's taking too much time and I've got client calls to make. So we all know that a sales function is quite a demanding beast. And demanding beast for a very good reason. They are the growth driver of an organization and they bring in all the money and sometimes that makes them quite a squeaky wheel. And if HubSpot's tools don't fit your process, maybe you're looking at alternatives. And one of the big things here is going to a CPQ tool. And these tools are very expensive, very complex and maybe you don't need the whole functionality of a tool like cpq. So what I'd like to share with you today is the other way that we could link up those templates that we mentioned earlier to HubSpot and automate the process and keep your sales team and your organization using HubSpot in the HubSpot interface and not having them switch tools all the time. So I'm just going to jump out of this and go into this present the demo. Sorry. So just to give you another little like hint of what I'm talking about, I'm talking about files which look like this, like quote template. Make a copy, please copy this, don't edit this, replace all the yellow text with stuff from HubSpot. This stuff is really, really. This drags the sales team down. This isn't good. What I want to share with you is how we link documents like this to HubSpot. So this is portent. This is the tool that I've co founded and, and it essentially connects Google Docs and Slides and even sheets now to HubSpot to make things like contracts, quotes, proposals, lots of different types of documents and it makes them seamlessly and people really like it because you have all the formatting tools available in Google Docs right here in portant. So in this example we're taking information from HubSpot and we're putting it into a Google Doc. And as I mentioned just before, people like it because you can see all the formatting tools available in Google Docs is available within Portent. So you can format this document to look exactly the way you want it to look. And the other thing is that if you already have templates which you're having to fill out, those templates can just be imported directly in by clicking changing the curse of the live. That way that you can select a new file and display it and sorry, select your existing template and get set up really quickly. So in HubSpot we have all these HubSpot properties on the right hand side and this is anything connected to your deal like contact companies line items. And when I want to insert something I just click on the copy button, insert my cursor in the document and then paste it in. And as I mentioned it has all the formatting tools available. So if I want this to go in with bold formatting, I just select that and select it be bold and then that data from HubSpot when the quote gets created will be inserted with the same format. Now there are a few other things that we we have important is the possibility of adding line item tables into documents. This is really important for quotes. We want to add in multiple line items into this document. Say if we have four different types of products that we want to quote for. Portent will extend this table in this section here by four lines and then it will put a new row for every product which is going to be added to this quote. And the other thing which I don't know if depends on how familiar you are with the line item site, there are different properties for calculated fields and some which are not catered for it. It's a little bit complex but to cater for that Portent has calculated properties like we are summing line item net price. This isn't. You could actually take the deal total for this but this is more of a demo. But for total discount. There isn't actually a field for total discount in HubSpot. So we sum all the line item calculated total discounts together to give you a total discount for this quote. So this is how it works. Now you can run things important like we could go into the source, pick a deal and then run it. But as I mentioned before, we want to keep people in HubSpot. We want to keep people in the in the ecosystem within the sales hub. So on the right hand side we have a CRM card where Portent is displayed and you can click the actions button and you can click to run the quote template. What this is going to do is it's going to show you what the quote looks like. It's Going to show you all the objects which are connected to the quote and then you can start the automation. And what portent is going to do now is it's going to take all the information from this deal, all the connected objects to and properties, send it to that template, make a new version of an output document and then send that back into HubSpot. So we'll update the activity feed and we will upload the document here. You can see that we've got a PDF if we open it just here and you can see if we zoom in, you can see that that table has been extended to four rows and it contains all the information that we need in this. In this quote. So this can be automatically sent to the contact on the deal or you can have the attachments updated and then the sales rep can go in and download that or email them from the deal itself. So it can be as automated as you want it to be. Maybe I think a lot of the time you want 95% automated. You still want to keep that kind of personal touch. So Portant can cater for that too.
James, you've got a question. Can it go in the file Property instead?
So HubSpot, if you know how to do that using the API, please let me know. I don't think there is actually a way that they've opened up the file section. We actually do a little workaround. You guys are probably quite familiar with the Arrows team and so we're speaking to Arrows about how they get attachments in and you do it by. You see this note here? This is how we get the documents back into HubSpot. There isn't actually a way. I don't believe. If you know a way, email me.
Chad says he's going to hit you up.
Okay, awesome. That'd be cool. So this is great and it's a very simple workflow, but maybe we want something a little bit more complex. Maybe after the quote we actually want to send out a contract. Now we're also important have a way to deal with esignatures all built by ourselves. And what it enables you to do is add these placeholders into contracts where we want to request recipients to sign the document. So you can add up to four different contexts to sign the document and you can also request them to add data at the same time. Like maybe they want to select a checkbox and accept the set terms or enter a little bit more information in the text field. Now in the same way we can run these automatically from. Sorry, we can run these via the CRM card in HubSpot. So I could click on this actions and then run the sales contract and it's going to do the same thing again. It's going to pull up the example of the document. This has a little bit more information in it. You can see just verify everything's correct and then if I had multiple recipients or contacts attached to this I could select who the recipient is in this one I've actually just got myself and then start the automation. Now the cool thing that's happening here is that portant will use your Gmail account to send the signature request. So I'll get information, I'll get this in my sent folder. It'll be a request to sign the document and that will be contained within my Gmail and it will also be in the activity feed here that I've requested the document to be signed. On top of that there is portent custom fields. So if you can see here on the left hand side we've got document links, we've got the document signings status, we've got PDF, we've got the signing link. So if I click on this you can see that this is our signing portal. This is what it looks like. We, we can see all the information within the document and then when I want to sign it I just put my signature in, insert it and agree and then the field is going to be updated to say that the document status is signed. Now if there are other people that need to sign the document that will automatically be requested and a signed copy of the contract will be uploaded to the attach the attachments again. So that's how you can keep your team in HubSpot and you can keep them creating the contract just by a few clicks of a button. But if there was a way that you wanted it more automated, we also have the ability to add these workflows into or use the HubSpot workflows to trigger a document to be created as well. In this section we've got how to automatically generate a quote. We have a deal stage which is Generate Quote and then it's going to run the quote template. You can build this as complicated or as simple as you want it to be because we just rely on HubSpot's awesome Workflows tool. So when you're in the deals, if I move this deal into Generate Quote it's going to start running here. You'll see some, if we call it in time you see some green dots of it running and then the quote being generated. And the other really great thing about how deeply integrated we are with HubSpot is because we've got all those document. So excuse me, because we've got all those document statuses being saved back into HubSpot. You can also have great reporting on the contract stages, how many have been sent, have been signed. That's as complicated as you want it to be. This is just a simple one where I'm showing you the signed the signatures, requested and completed documents and we can jump in if there's any questions, we can jump back into this. But essentially this is how we can start to connect these document and presentation templates to your HubSpot portal. So you can start to automate maybe part of the process which you didn't think could be automated at this stage without going to some more complicated solution. So thing which I like to share is that definitely, Definitely, definitely, if HubSpot is sufficient, stick with HubSpot. It is way better to stay within their ecosystem and use all their tools if it meets your sales process, but if it doesn't and you need a little bit more customization, we have built this, we're really passionate about document automation. All this stuff is actually built and all the features are built on user feedback. So everything that I've shared with you today is other people within the community asking for things and us going out and building it. We're really keen on this and explore alternatives before you go for the the big Goliath of cpq. And in short, I think that's how I would recommend to automate some of the documentation processes within your HubSpot sales process.
That's awesome.
Thank you very much.
We do have some questions in the Q and A, but if anyone has any additional ones, I'm going to let you go ahead and go add those and upvote them. I definitely, I like how simple it is, but powerful and effective to be able to get that part of the process right in HubSpot. You know, HubSpot's tools are good and they're growing and they're great, but this is a nice enhancement to those and being able to actually get out of spreadsheets, get out of PowerPoints, get out of docs and, and make sure that your team is able to follow that process very seamless. Seamlessly is, you know, right up my alley. So, you know, I'm gonna love it. Awesome. All right, I'm gonna sort them over here to this most important. Okay, let's see. Does Portant offer two way signatures for statement of work templates?
Two way signatures.
So like A resign or a counter sign. I'm guessing that's what you rob. If that's not true, let me know.
For like, for the, like the client and for the company to sign the same document. Yes. Yeah, we. We offer that. If it's something different, please let me do.
Great. Are there any checks to confirm that all fields that are used in the template are populated or available in HubSpot? For example, say a deal is associated with a contact and the quote uses a contact's phone number, but the contact's phone number is not known. What happens, an error warning or admission.
So by default, by default, if there was no information in there and there was nothing that checked it before, what portant would put in is nothing. It wouldn't put in something which looked like an error. It would put in blank. I don't know a better way of explaining that, but it would put in nothing. The tag would be deleted and you would have the document in the review step. Like when we're creating these documents, you can. Let me just go into this. You can add review steps to these workflows. So if I go back in and run this sales contract workflow, I'm just going to quickly start this one. What this will do is it'll add a review stage which will hold the documents here. So you'll be able to check that all the information is included. You can either have a check that says that the workflow won't run before all the information is included in this source. We could add a source filter condition that said we couldn't run the workflow unless it had all the information like the phone number that you mentioned. Or you can do it here. When I refresh this, you see that this has now got an action button where you can approve it. If I click on this, it's held in this Google Doc stage which is editable. So if I just wanted to edit it and then go back in here and approve it, it would then have you. You then have that like, you know that thing that I was saying before like automate 95% of the document and then leave that last five sent for people to edit. You could also use that as a check step.
Awesome. All right, let's see. I resorted them because I saw some more come in. Etsy is Porton is Google workspace only. No, Microsoft 365.
Tomorrow we are releasing. This is quite a good time actually. Tomorrow we're releasing exporting to Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel. Those document types will be able to be uploaded into the Attachment section. So if you're at Microsoft House you will be able to see all the file types that you want. The engine, what I call the engine, the processing engine of Portent is still built on Google Workspace until next year I would say. We're planning on building a Microsoft engine for next year but essentially all the outputs from your workflows can be in Microsoft file formats.
There was a question in the chat, does it also deal with OneDrive?
Not yet.
Okay, good to know. Always good to know. Let's see, what are the basic differences between Portant and a full CPQ tool?
The basic differences is simplicity. Like we're essentially automating the creation of a document which can have custom information in it. So there, there is customization that can come to that. But maybe the CPQ would have more guardrails around keeping people constrained to, to only selling a certain product. That's something we can't cater for. Discount rates can be catered for through like an approval stage like that a certain person is allowed to discount a certain amount like that can, but probably not to the same extent as a proper CPQ tool. So if you're hearing things like that, probably worth going up to the CPQ level but for adhering to or enabling a little bit more complexity or a little bit more customization medium level, I'd say port's a really good solve for that.
Awesome. How has client reception been with a document tool outside of DocuSign Panda Dropbox sign any hesitation at signing a document that isn't widely recognized. Does this meet requirements to capture sensitive information? The two parter so yeah, I mean.
Battling incumbents in every space is tough but what we have done is provide parity with these tools so you have a complete audit trail on your e signing when the document is signed, there's a complete audit trail of IP addresses when the document is accessed, a unique code for that specific document. So security wise we're on par with the majority of owners of companies requirements and for, yeah for back for like we haven't heard anything too, too negative about, you know, switching between. A lot of people switch between PandaDP to port because of the the ability for the template to be customized exactly as that company wants it to look and maybe they're feeling constrained by the. So the thing that which we hear is that they're glad to be able to have the document look exactly the way we want it to look but maybe we just don't get any of that feedback because the people who are excluding us and going to the other tools. I don't know, maybe we just don't hear about them. So can't answer 100% honestly I guess on that.
Sure. Let's see. Perhaps I missed this at the beginning. You can only insert deal properties or all properties available.
All properties, all custom properties, all custom objects, anything connected to any and. And the other cool thing that you can do. So let me just go in here so we can fetch all HubSpot properties here. So these are everything that's connected to the deals at the moment. And we can also run this off deal. We can run it off contacts, companies, tickets. Yeah.
And meetings.
Meetings, yeah. So something which we. We added this for a user and this is probably going to evolve to custom objects. So we're going to keep deals, contacts, companies and tickets as like our primary set of objects to run deals from. And as soon as you want something a bit more custom, that meetings is probably going to go into custom objects. But at the moment available. So it is there.
Gotcha. I think that's what Shell was going to ask. So I. Well, yeah, what about this?
Any connected meetings to a deal can all go in. Definitely.
Awesome. Very, very cool. Can we connect different versions of a template for branding or different business units?
Yes. Yeah. So you're not limited to the number of templates that you can create or workflows you can create. You can create as many different ones as you want if. Yeah, you can. You can just create. You can duplicate this workflow and then change out the document. And the other cool thing is you can add as many template files in here as as you want. So you could have a workflow generating like five documents at the same time. Maybe it's like an onboarding pack. After you've sold certain widget, it needs three different types of onboarding documents to be sent and customized. You do that too with spreadsheets as well. That's just been released like in the last two weeks. People are excited that one see.
Will it send the email for signature from Outlook with the release this year?
Yes, it already does this. So if I go and open up here, we can request signatures from Gmail or we can change this to Outlook here you just need to sign up and connect your Outlook or your Office 365 account which will allow you to connect Outlook. So all signature requests will be sent from Outlook. You can then go back into this workflow. You could then send emails via Outlook as well.
That might be why you're not hearing any of the complaints, because it's coming Directly from someone rather than just from a system. Yeah, let's see. Kara says. What about multiple approvals? Like is a deal. A deal has a low margin and has to run through two approvals, two people to approve the quote from the sender's end. Would you be able to do some sort of automation for that?
Yeah, please get in touch about this because we are starting work on it after Inbound. It's our first big feature that we're going to release in Q4 this year. So if you have feedback on this kind of workflow, keen to get you involved in the. In the beta group and yeah, you'll get first access to it.
Awesome. That's great. Someone asked about pricing. I just dropped the link to it in on the chat so that you can access that as well. If you want to talk to that James, you're welcome to do that.
Free to get started. Free plan forever. As soon as you start using a little bit more volume, you go on to the pro plan. So free plan includes 30 documents per month and the Pro plan is 2000 documents per month for 49 bucks. And then as soon as you want to share amongst an organization or a team of more than one person, you're looking at our team plan, which is $129 per month, which includes five users. So it's not 129 per user. 129 with five users included. And then everyone on top of that is 25.
Sunny wants to know the connection to quotes. Is it the comments section? Can you use the comment section from Quotes?
No, we actually. The whole thing that we've built. It's an alternative to quotes, I'd say.
Gotcha. Perfect. I actually think we got through all the questions. Let's see what. What's going on in the chat. Who are the users who are signing and. Or those. Let's. Let me read. Let me read that whole sentence again. Who are the users like those who are signing or those making the workflows or all.
Oh, for the team plan. Yeah, it's everybody who. So if I was in here and I needed to click this button and generate a document, I need a license. But people sign in the documents. No, that. That's not. That's not. They don't need licenses. They can just use that portal free and sign. Sign away.
Awesome. Thank you. It does. I'm not seeing any more questions from anyone. If anyone has anything else for James, you're welcome to come on and chat. Or if you want to put it in the chat, that would Be fine as well.
Cool.
I love it. James. I'm excited. I I do a lot of document signing on on my side so I appreciate anything that makes it a little more streamlined and less me having to put it from one place to another.
So just got one from Jesse. Do signers need to create an account before they sign? No, they don't.
Oh awesome.
Yeah.
Is it possible for you to show the sign the signing what the UX of the signing looks like?
For sure. Share screen again so this is what they would land on and then you can view the document. So real simple. We try to keep it as simple as possible. It looks great on mobile as well. And then when you want to sign, click add a signature. We can type it, we can upload the signature. Most people just draw it, insert and then agree. And then this success page can be customized as well. So you can have dynamic forwarding to different pages as well. So the experience can look very custom to what your brand is. So you can upload a logo for the signing portal and you can change the color of that. You know that blue bar at the top that could be your. Your brand's colors as well.
Awesome. Let's see Karina put a question other use cases they see onboarding or use it earlier in the sales process like presentations. Have you seen anything anybody using it like that?
Yeah. So proposals, presentations. Yeah it's quite big for for us quotes seems to be the biggest contracts quite large too. But the big growth one and the thing which I think will grow with the. What's it called the customer success hub anyway where the customer health score is going to come in after inbound is quarterly business reviews. People are going crazy for making the quarterly business reviews using portent because that is a really annoying document that people having to make with an organization. So that seems to be what the the theme of the inquiries that are coming to me right now. Qbrs.
Curious on the signer experience. Is the URL brandable custom domain or subdomain?
Not at the moment.
Not at the moment.
Sorry.
Sounds like you need to try it out Nick and then ask James later.
Definitely send me like send me an email because we'll we have a few people requesting that and more people that request it the quicker gets made.
Sense.
Yeah. Thank you.
Yeah, for sure. I missed Kara's with the future of multi approvers will there be a comment section? So the first person would sign and write in the comments and then the comments would send to the next person who needs to sign. Just thinking about a streamlined handoff yeah.
We can definitely incorporate that as something which we haven't actually considered. So. That's awesome.
Yeah, for sure. I love it. I don't see any more questions, James. I know. I, I always appreciate something that makes my life as an admin easier and I'm sure the rest of the admins do for sure. Thanks. Yes, thanks. This was great. I'm gonna put in the, the survey for today, so definitely make sure you fill that out guys and let us know if you have any ideas or if you have any thoughts on today's. My job here is to always make sure that I'm bringing any time, any tool or resource to the hub, the admin hug so that you're getting everything that makes your life easier. That's my only job in life is to help the admins be better admins and not have to work so hard.
The last thing Diana was I'll be inbound so I'll come to the meetups and yeah, come and ask me a question if you, if you want to chat in person.
Yeah. I'm going to put actually all the links in here and I'll put them. I'll make sure that they're in the follow up with the recording. So everyone has all of the links to all of the different meetups. There will be quite a few of them so that if you. I know everyone. The biggest thing from last year was I was in a session, I couldn't make it to the meetup. So my answer to that is let's have more. And here we go. Hopefully that's enough. Hopefully you're not sick of me.
It be great.
I'm excited. Thank you James. I really appreciate it guys. I will make sure this gets sent out as soon as possible and I will catch you all next week.
Thank you so much.
Thanks James. Bye guys.
Cheers.
It.
