The HubSpot Sales CRM has loads of great features, but putting them together to really rev up your productivity isn’t always obvious. In this post, I’ve accumulated some great HubSpot hacks I’m using in the sales and marketing process.

If you have a tip, idea or hack that I haven’t covered (and there are plenty) please let me know so I can add it to the list. You’ll get full credit.

Here are the hacks in this post:

1. Use meeting booking links – they work
2. The “I’ll Call” email template and process
3. Automatically Remove Competitors From HubSpot Workflows
4. Use Personal Embedded Videos for Cut Through
5. Use Sales Email Click Throughs to Understand Engagement
6. Use Queues to Blast Through Action Items
7. Send One-to-One videos to everyone in a meeting
8. Add a “Next Step” property to Deals

Use meeting booking links – they work

Not so much a hack in the true sense. More a “please use this feature” cheer.

When I first started using the HubSpot CRM my HubSpot account manager recommended I use the meeting booking links in emails to request meetings from prospects. Honestly, I was pretty skeptical – I didn’t think customers or prospects would use them to book meetings.

I could not have been more wrong.

Result!

They work and they work well. Given the choice, people use them to book a time directly in your diary because it’s easier than playing the old phone tag game.

The meeting links are also HubSpot aware, so the data goes straight into your CRM. Plus, they act like HubSpot forms, which means it allows you to connect their CRM record to the content they are viewing on your site.

The “I’ll Call” email template and process

Use this script to increase bookings even further: (This is one of my HubSpot Snippets)

If the person is the least bit interested in your offering, it lets them know you’ll call again and gives them the option to make that call at a time that suits them. Win-Win.

If they’re not interested, it triggers them to respond and let you know they are not interested. Also win-win, because you can cross them off your list and not waste their time and your time following up.

Automatically Remove Competitors From HubSpot Workflows

I don’t know about you, but I hate it when a competitor converts on our website and is automatically dropped into our lead nurture process. We’re giving our very best content to our competitor.

However, using this hack, you can nominate whole companies as competitors and then automatically remove all of their staff from our campaigns.

This video tells you exactly how to do this.

Use Personal Embedded Videos for Cut Through

I don’t need to tell you about email overload. So how do you achieve cut through in your prospect’s inbox? By being different and relevant that’s how.

One way to be different is to send a personal video embedded in your email. For HubSpot Sales Professional, HubSpot has integrated free Vidyard access right into the email sending system.

Nice.

The novel video element increases engagement and delivers that cut through in a quick and personalized video. Two benefits in one package.

Here’s what you need to send to maximise that cut-through

For new prospects, after you’ve done your research on their business, send a 100% one-to-one embedded video. See this great example from Yaniv Siegel.

Bonus tip: Vidyard lets you know when and how often people view your video – so you know who is engaged with your message.

Use Sales Email Click Throughs to Understand Engagement

HubSpot records opens and click-throughs on both Marketing Emails and Sales Emails, so make use of that data in your sales process.

Of course, using the HubSpot Chrome extension you can see immediately when someone opens or clicks on an email but that doesn’t help much if you’re away from your PC. But because the data is recorded, you can also set up a simple contacts report to show you exactly who is engaging with your sales emails.

Note: any email you send from either the embedded email system or as a Sequence is a Sales email.

So, create a Contact report you can view anytime, I check it each morning, to see who is engaging with my sales emails.

In the Contact List, the filter you’re looking for is: “Recent Sales Email Open Date”

Of course you can mess around with the columns in the report to get you exactly what you need, and add more filters.

While you’re there at the Contact list, why not make a few more standard filters:

• Recent conversion date: for new prospects to let you know when they last downloaded a piece of content from the site.
• Recent last website visit: for prospects and customers recently engaged on your website.

Use Queues to Blast Through Action Items

Now you have a list, you need to try the HubSpot Queue feature to blast through your contact actions. Once you’ve tried it, you’ll be amazed at how much you can get done in a focused burst of action.

I particularly like it for “hour of power” calling or emailing blitzes.

First, you assign a Queue type to the Tasks you create in HubSpot. You can easily create your own queues types.

Then you simply “Start Queue” from the Sales Tasks page to bring up each contact in turn, action it and move to the next task in the queue.

Check out this quick video I made of exactly how to do it.

Bonus tip: Create High-value and Low-value queue types so you can focus on High-value tasks (or prospects) when you don’t have enough time to do everything.

Send One-to-One videos to everyone in a meeting

You know how it goes, there are five or more people in the room for the presentation but only one or two of them take all the airtime for questions and feedback.

So, use Vidyard to send a personal video message to each person in the meeting asking them if they have any other questions.

It’s fast and personal so you can build a relationship with all players at the meeting, which is especially important for B2B sales.

Hat tip to Kieran O’Connor at HubSpot for this nice HubSpot CRM hack.

Add a “Next Step” property to Deals

Head off those endless questions from your manager: “what’s happening on that deal you were talking about last week”. At the same time give yourself a way to quickly review your pipeline for high priority actions by adding a property called “Next Step” to Deals.

Then add it to your Deal view.

Now your manager knows exactly what’s happening on each deal without having to ask you.

Bonus tip: Use Sales workflows to auto trigger an email to yourself (or your manager) if there are no changes to a Deal Stage in an expected time-frame, e.g. x number of days or weeks.