Sorting through endless contacts to find your best-fit leads wastes valuable time and leads to missed opportunities. Then, you’ll need to manage and convert those leads once you find them. How do you ensure nothing slips through the cracks?
An efficient tool can make this process much simpler and more effective. HubSpot's lead management simplifies prospecting and lead management by automating tasks and providing insights to identify the most promising leads.
This guide will show you how to use HubSpot to quickly identify, organize, and follow up with your best leads.
What Is Prospecting?
Prospecting isn't just about finding new customers; it's about strategically identifying those most likely to become loyal patrons.
The goal is to pinpoint companies who genuinely need your product or service. You gather leads from various sources, like website traffic, networking events, or targeted advertising. Then, you meticulously qualify them based on industry, size, budget, and specific needs.
For instance, if you offer project management software, ideal prospects might be mid-sized companies lacking workflow tracking tools. You can research and target leads that match this profile, maximizing your sales efforts.
Why Does It Matter?
80% of unqualified leads never convert into sales. However, companies excelling at nurturing leads generate 50% more sales-ready leads while spending 33% less.
Prospecting focuses your sales efforts on the "good fit" leads most likely to convert. It's a strategic, short-term investment by sales reps to quickly identify, qualify, and usher promising leads through the sales pipeline.
96% of prospects also research before talking to a human sales rep. Prospecting involves inbound and outbound methods to find and attract leads before engaging with a rep.
This process translates to booking more high-potential meetings and demos, ultimately leading to a higher conversion rate and longer customer lifespans.
Prospecting Dashboard in HubSpot's Sales Hub
The prospecting dashboard in HubSpot's Sales Hub is the central command center for all your sales activities. It provides a holistic overview of your prospecting efforts, allowing you to manage your daily workload from one convenient location efficiently.
What Is the Prospecting Dashboard?
The prospecting dashboard is a one-stop shop for your sales team, streamlining their workflows and increasing productivity. This tool allows you to review your goals, track progress, execute tasks, and seamlessly monitor your schedule and sales feed.
These are the must-have features of HubSpot's Prospecting Dashboard that can help you optimize your prospecting:
1. Activity Tracking for Comprehensive Insight
The dashboard automatically tracks all interactions and activities with your leads as your sales representatives engage. It ensures that your sales pipeline remains up-to-date and accurate at all times.
With this feature, you can gain valuable insights into each lead's progress, allowing your sales team to focus on closing deals without manually updating records.
Let's say a sales rep sends an email to a lead. The dashboard will automatically log this activity and update the lead's status accordingly. If the lead responds, the dashboard will reflect this engagement, providing a comprehensive view of the lead's journey.
This level of insight is invaluable for sales managers, who can confidently report on the team's performance and pipeline health using the most up-to-date information.
2. Efficient Task Management for Productivity
The prospecting dashboard presents each sales representative with a personalized summary and progress bar, displaying their daily to-dos. This feature lets your reps immediately jump into their work without delay, boosting their overall productivity and efficiency.
A sales rep starts their day with a clear list of tasks they should complete. They can quickly prioritize their work and tackle each item without wasting time searching for their next action item.
3. Sequence Status Monitoring for Strategic Engagement
Stay on top of your sales sequences by monitoring their status directly from the dashboard. This feature allows you to track the progress of your sequences and ensure that your leads are engaged strategically throughout the sales process.
For instance, you might have a sequence designed to follow up with leads who have expressed interest in your product. The dashboard will display each lead's current step in the sequence, allowing you to identify any bottlenecks or opportunities for further engagement quickly.
4. Lead Categorization for Targeted Interaction
The dashboard categorizes your leads based on their status, such as new, attempting, connected, or recently engaged. This categorization helps you prioritize your efforts and tailor your interactions with each lead, ensuring a more personalized and practical approach.
Imagine you have a list of new leads just added to your pipeline. The dashboard will group these leads, letting you quickly identify them and initiate the appropriate outreach strategies.
Similarly, for leads that have recently engaged with your company, you can prioritize follow-up activities to nurture them further down the sales funnel.
Understanding Leads in HubSpot
Before using HubSpot's lead management capabilities, we should understand what leads actually represent. This will help us optimize our processes and metrics.
Clarifying the Relationship Between Leads and Contacts
In HubSpot's system, leads are not separate records from contacts. Instead, they are a specialized way to label and track a subset of your contact database—those contacts who are considered prospective buyers for your product or service.
This integrated approach provides a seamless experience where all lead and contact data lives in one place.
For example, let's say you have a contact record for John Doe, who first subscribed to your marketing emails.
Initially, John would just exist as a contact record. However, once John takes an action indicating buying interest, like requesting a consultation, you can designate him as a "lead" to focus nurturing efforts.
His core contact profile hasn't changed, but he has now been added to the "lead" status.
How Contacts Earn the Distinction of Being Leads
So, how do specific contacts get designated as leads? HubSpot allows you to set the criteria.
You can do this by setting up lifecycle stages automatically triggering the lead conversion when a contact reaches them.
For example, you could create a "Marketing Qualified Lead" lifecycle stage in HubSpot. Any contact that moves into that stage, either manually or via automation rules you define, will simultaneously be categorized as a lead record in addition to being a contact.
This allows you to build intelligent hand-raisers into your sales pipeline without manual effort.
Mapping Contacts' Journey from Stranger to Advocate
The lifecycle stages for leads let you model and analyze the entire prospect journey from initial interest through to becoming a brand advocate. You'll map lifecycle stages to milestones like:
- New Lead
- Attempted to Contact
- Qualified to Pitch
- Closed Won
- Potential Upsell
Each stage transition tracks progress and can trigger automation, such as internal notifications or follow-up tasks. Automation like this can save sales professionals about 2 hours and 15 minutes daily.
For instance, once a lead reaches the "Qualified to Pitch" stage, an integration could automatically create a deal record in your CRM for a sales rep to work.
HubSpot's visual lead management tools let you fully customize these stages to match your unique sales cycle and internal terminology. You get incredible visibility into where each lead stands and data on conversion rates between phases.
Exploring the HubSpot Leads Section
After understanding how HubSpot categorizes leads, it's time to get hands-on with the primary interface for managing and interacting with these pivotal sales prospects.
The Leads section is your central hub for managing and nurturing those valuable sales prospects:
Navigating Features and Tools for Lead Management
The Leads section within HubSpot's Sales Hub serves as your command center. Here, you'll find tools to view, filter, and search your full lead database. The main interface lists all your leads, their current stage, last activity details, and more contextual data.
You can customize the columns to surface the most pertinent lead insights. From this view, you can also quickly create or update lead stages and properties. Tabs allow you to hone in on leads needing attention, like those newly created or moved to the qualified stage.
Getting Started with HubSpot Leads: Step-by-Step Process
HubSpot gives you a clear, focused, and prioritized system for managing your sales pipeline if you know how to use it. To get the most out of your Leads section, follow these simple steps:
- Activate Lead Management: Navigate to Settings > Data Management and enable lead management.
- Define Your Sales Stages: Create clear lead stages that mirror your specific sales cycle phases.
- Set Lead Qualification Rules: Establish criteria for automatically classifying contacts as leads based on their lifecycle stage.
- Create Leads (Bulk or Individual): Bulk-import leads or create them individually from the Contacts view for ultimate flexibility.
- Leverage Powerful Filters and Views: Utilize filters and custom views to track lead progress effectively.
- Automate Lead Stage Updates: As you log interactions (emails, meetings, calls), HubSpot automatically updates the lead stage, ensuring data accuracy.
The Bottom Line on HubSpot Leads and Prospecting
Prospecting and managing leads is crucial for any business looking to grow sales. But sorting through piles of contacts to find the best-fit prospects can be a huge time sink.
That's where HubSpot's lead management tools come in. With features like the Prospecting Dashboard, you can easily track all your lead activities, prioritize follow-ups, and visualize each prospect's location in your sales cycle — from one convenient place.
Using HubSpot's automated lead tracking, sequencing capabilities, and intuitive categorization, your sales team can laser-focus their efforts on the most promising leads—no more missed opportunities or dropping the ball on hot prospects.
Best of all, HubSpot puts powerful lead management in the hands of any business. Whether a solo entrepreneur or managing a whole sales force, these tools simplify identifying, qualifying, and nurturing your ideal customer from first touch to closed deals.
Partner with Origin 63 to Unlock HubSpot's Prospecting Power
Are you struggling to manage leads and drive more sales with HubSpot effectively? Don't go it alone. The HubSpot experts at Origin 63 can help you implement proven lead management strategies using the Prospecting Dashboard and other tools.
Our team will work closely with you to optimize your sales processes, set up automation, and provide training to your team.
With our guidance, you can fully utilize HubSpot's capabilities to consistently identify high-value leads, nurture them effectively, and increase conversions.
Contact Origin 63 to supercharge your prospecting with HubSpot.
