Hubspot CRM Features That Define Your Sales Culture

How does tech improve sales culture?

Your sales team has a big burden on their shoulders--growing your business.

If you don't support them with good sales tech, you're not showing them a very strong commitment to helping them succeed. A CRM is an absolute MUST for businesses investing in growth.

But not all CRMs are the same.

This is especially true if you're talking about Hubspot's Sales Hub.

It's an all-in-one that ties your digital experience with the tangible. It provides valuable insights into customer behavior as well as functional tools that obliterate tedious activities such as data entry.

After personally implementing the Starter, Pro, and Enterprise platforms for dozens of businesses (including my own), I have come up with a top 10 list of Hubspot CRM features that every growth-minded sales culture should have.

Inbound vs Outbound

Before I get started, let me emphasize that my background spans both outbound sales and inbound, but I have spent the last 8+ years of my life focused primarily on inbound. The programs we implement as a growth agency are built on inbound sales methodology, but we also incorporate outbound. The idea is to create a single environment and set of processes to simplify your sales world as much as possible.

And the reality is that even outbound leads can be redirected with inbound methodologies. Having the right tools and appropriate features in place play big roles in whether you succeed.

You can read more about inbound sales culture (and how Hubspot supports it) HERE.

Hubspot is a strategic investment

I've used many CRMs in my day, from AS400 to Salesforce and what feels like "everything in between." To me, they all felt about the same, serving approximately the same service... which was to provide management with insight into sales behaviors and a tool for managing.

Blech. What salesperson wants that?

Hubspot (fka "Sidekick") broke this model by putting the salesperson first, management second.

It was a philosophical decision, which made the features it offered a reaction to sales behaviors. This is important because when you're setting up your system, it's not going to function quite the same as your past systems.

You can learn more about how it compares to other CRMs HERE.

Top 10 Features for the Chase Sequence:

When leads convert on a form for the first time, so begins the chase sequence. This involves all of the efforts that a sales person makes to turn that lead into an engaged prospect (typically committing to an hour-long discovery call).

1. Marketing integration - an absolute must in order to provide sales with behavioral insights
2. Pop-up notifications - Shorten response times with real-time clickable notifications
3. Research online button - Find prospects online to gain context with 2 clicks
4. Email templates - Reduce time spent in emails while providing insights for growth hacking
5. Self-service scheduling - Eliminate calendar back-and-forth and integrate with marketing
6. Tasks - Never miss a followup opportunity with a hot prospect
7. Smart email send times (Pro or higher) - Send emails based on machine learning and ai
8. Automated emails (Pro or higher) - Set up sequences to chase long-play prospects
9. Desktop recording (Pro or higher) - I use it multiple times a day... it's SO effective
10. Predictive lead scoring (Enterprise) - Elevate your most valuable leads with machine learning
    
    Honorable mention: Chatbot and Messenger, contacts added automatically by emailing, calling (with automatic recording), automated internal communications
    
    

Top 10 Features for Deal Management:

Once a lead has agreed to go through the sales cycle with you (typically via committed discovery meeting), the role of the Hubspot CRM changes, and so does the importance of its features.

1. Pipeline tool card view - An easy way to see and manage your pipeline
2. The left sidebar of custom fields - The perfect place to embed your discovery script
3. Line items - Templatize your service and product costs and revenue
4. Zoom integration - A must-have for those discovery calls
5. Group Meetings - Same awesome self-service scheduling tool but with multiple calendars
6. Email templates using personalization tokens - It pulls directly from your embedded script!
7. Deal stage requirements - Create guardrails to ensure sales properly qualifies deals
8. Forecasting - Measure the value of your pipeline at any given moment
9. Contract software integration - Autopopulate content and track engagement
10. Deal stage automation - Keep your pipeline up to date even when sales gets lazy

There are a lot of features to consider when implementing the CRM, and it's important you build it around a strategy. We created this ebook to help you tackle that as well. CLICK HERE to download the Hubspot CRM Implementation Guide: