HubSpot CRM: Making Sales Easier

At HubSpot, we looked at the way salespeople were using CRMs, and we found a lot of places where the CRM was adding extra work to those salespeople, where the CRM was getting in the way of their process.

We knew that we loved HubSpot on the marketing side of things, and so it was definitely worth exploring what it could do on the CRM sales side of things.

With HubSpot CRM, we wanted to build a system that sales reps actually wanted to use. And the way that you do that is, is by reducing the amount of work that sales reps have to do in order to use the system and increasing the amount of data that they can get out of the system.

With HubSpot CRM, we see that our salesmen are going in armed and ready for battle. They can already see the dialogue that's occurred with that customer. They're seeing the content that they've consumed. They're seeing how they've transitioned through the funnel, what's made a difference and maybe what hasn't, so that when they go in contextually, they're able to start at where that customer's need lie, start at the interest point that has immediate benefit back to us and obviously value to the customer. That's what it's all about.

So with most CRMs, the focus is about actually manually inputting all of your interaction points into the CRM. With HubSpot CRM, it's actually the opposite. As a salesperson, I have to do very little or even no data entry whatsoever, and the system is actually giving me information back. And because they both run off the same inbound database, everything in the HubSpot marketing platform, like website visits, recent tweets, and other interactions, are all available in HubSpot CRM.

And so as a sales rep, I have that information. So immediately I can call them, maybe see if they have questions about that report, download or schedule that demo that they're interested in.

I can call right from inside the CRM, and when I make that call, it automatically gets recorded. So I can see my history of every email, every note, every interaction, every phone call, and it automatically gets put into my timeline.

I can follow up with an email without even opening up my email. I can just send it from that contact record. And all of these tasks seem so small, but they take up a lot of time. And so if we can do email and phone calls without even clicking out of that contact record, we're saving a lot of time and putting it to more valuable use.

CRM is an important decision, you know, and the hope was that we would see some meaningful metric changes in the metrics that were important to us, that lead conversion ratio, that sales productivity cycle. And that's what we've seen. HubSpot CRM has shown us that they are the tool that can get us to where we need to go.