How HubSpot helps drive sales effectiveness across teams

The more a company relies on a few sales stars, the more indebted it gets to them. It’s exactly like being reliant on a couple of crucial clients to manage growth and survival. The bigger the customer base, the easier the cash flow and the possibility of sustained growth.

Most sales reps submit weekly reports on their sales outreach. They broadly cover the number of calls made, the progress made with promising prospects and the ones most likely to convert.

If a large number of sales come from a few star performers, it’s time to check why the rest aren’t as effective. Or find ways to make them more productive.

Sometimes, it could be as simple as automating the frequency with which salespeople reach out to customers. There are points in a sales cycle where the prospect only needs reminders from time to time.

Then, there are stages when salespeople attempt to get a commitment. Knowing when the customer is ready for this conversation is crucial. That’s where HubSpot’s CRM can help recall previous deal histories and highlight the points when conversions happened. Providing great reference points that the rest of the sales team can work with.

Sales effectiveness is a goal to shoot for across the organisation to improve conversion rates and performance.

Help customers succeed

The stages in any sales process are not advanced by feature comparisons alone as much as by customers' feelings about the initial interactions. The more helpful and responsive customers feel about the people they interact with, the more they’ll shift towards purchase.

In products with a long sales cycle, a purchase is as much of a commitment from the customer’s side. And that is reflected in the conversations as well as what’s not being said.

Everyone prefers to deal with responsive companies, whether they are receiving a proposal, approaching and conducting a demo, or providing quick product or feature clarifications.

HubSpot helps move the needle with customers. For commonly asked questions, staying in touch, providing updates, and responding to customers can be automated.

Continuing a conversation is essential to staying at the top of one's mind. The longer the gap between touchpoints, the less likely a customer is to convert. At the same time, there is a point at which customers feel as if they are being hounded. In each industry or even in each company, the optimal level needs to be arrived at – and then sales reps need to follow that as a disciplined practice.

Effective salespeople are not those with the most charm. Sometimes, it is persistence or the ability to sense what customers want even without them articulating it. Even while some salespeople are lone operators, helping them through the intermediate stages can drive up the conversion rate.

Why is sales qualification important to effectiveness?

When done well, sales qualification is important to organizations because it significantly improves close ratios. Without sales qualification, the company risks pursuing leads who aren’t a good fit for the product due to budgetary constraints, organizational challenges, or other factors.

The better the qualifying parameters, the better the conversion percentages. This needs to be assessed and updated from time to time.

It allows sales teams to pursue the leads who are most likely to purchase the product, saving time and energy.

Here are more reasons sales qualification is so important:

• Spend more time on the prospects who are more likely to buy.
• Focusing on a smaller, specific segment of buyers can help the company deliver a more personalized selling experience.
• Learn the ins and outs of the buyer’s challenges and deliver a better solution as a result.
• Guarantee that most sales activities lead to a positive impact in revenue.
• Create different sales qualification processes for different verticals and keep a list of pitches that still feel personalized.

By intentionally qualifying prospects through a discovery call, the salesperson can deliver a highly tailored solution that improves post-purchase satisfaction. 

The discovery call needs to be conducted by a perceptive and experienced caller who knows how to obtain relevant information about companies by speaking to people who matter and who can provide an insightful overview.

When these details are included in HubSpot’s CRM, they provide several opportunities for sales teams to capitalise on.

This step alone can help to build much better traction and ensure that more members from the sales team hit their targets.

Improving Opportunity management 

HubSpot defines opportunity management as the practice of gauging sales effectiveness. According to HubSpot, it's "the process of tracking and managing sales opportunities—contacts who have entered the sales cycle with a demonstrated interest and ability to do business with the company—as they move through the pipeline."

Committing energy, scrutiny, and resources towards opportunity management efforts allows a company to understand potential customers better and prioritize interactions with them based on their business potential.

It also helps determine the best way to approach them based on their demonstrated interest and the stage of their relationship with the company. At the same time, it exposes flaws in the existing sales processes, allowing them to improve interactions with potential customers consistently.

Taking the proper steps to improve how the company manages its opportunities—including firmly establishing a pipeline, encouraging extensive research on opportunities, maintaining and tracking contact, and keeping a holistic view of the sales pipeline to identify room for improvement—can set sales teams up for success and improve sales effectiveness.

Talk to our experts at Blueoshan to increase sales effectiveness across teams by implementing processes and workflows and plugging the gaps.