5 Best Ways to Optimize HubSpot Sales Hub Starter

The HubSpot Sales Hub Starter program provides sales teams access to a comprehensive, easy-to-use CRM platform. Sales Hub works to seamlessly integrate and streamline your business’s operations, allowing you to track and manage your sales process easily. 

It’s software that grows with your business. Sales Hub Starter is HubSpot’s most affordable tier. 

Here are five key ways that companies can optimize their HubSpot Sales Hub Starter platform. 

Deal Pipelines

With the Sales Hub Starter platform, you can create up to two deal pipelines with customer stages.

Maybe you need a pipeline to track new customers and another to track post-sale upsell or cross sell opportunities. Perhaps you have two different products with entirely different sales cycles.

In either case, you can track the progression of two pipelines based upon your unique process.

You’re also able to automate administrative tasks and leverage powerful insights into the health of your pipelines.

By optimizing your deal pipelines, you’ll be able to take advantage of three additional features:

• Sales Management Playbooks: Sales Hub Starter offers several playbook tools to help your business manage sales. These include call scripts, positioning guides, and battle cards. 
• Quotes: The pipeline allows you to quickly generate branded quotes to move through the process efficiently. 
• Sales Analytics and Reporting: With this platform, you’re given complete visibility into your sales analytics. It centralizes your data in one location so that you can easily track your sales process and performance from start to finish.

Basic Automation

HubSpot is known for its automation prowess. For the Sales Hub Starter, you can take advantage by using automation to enable task notifications. 

Most businesses find this kind of workflow incredibly useful, as it removes the need to track their processes manually. 

It’s also great to help streamline prospect follow-up, build consistency throughout the sales cycle, and ensure required actions are completed on time during the sales cycle.

Perhaps a gift card needs to be sent to a prospect after they schedule a discovery call or an email needs to be sent to an account manager when the deal closes.

Another benefit you can do with Sales Hub’s basic automation tool to route and rotate conversations or leads to the appropriate salesperson.

Mandatory Field Updates

As your prospects move through the deal pipeline, you may want to require certain information to be captured through each stage of the sales cycle. 

For example, in order for a contact to be moved from marketing qualified lead (MQL) to sales qualified lead (SQL), you may want to require that the primary decision maker is identified, involved, and interested in your product or service.

Through HubSpot, you can add custom properties or fields to contacts or companies. Once they’re created, you can make those properties or fields required in order for the contact to move from MQL stage to SQL stage.

This drastically helps with data integrity, helps reinforce a consistent sales cycle, and ensures key objectives are followed as the prospect progresses.

Email Templates and Canned Snippets

HubSpot provides easily reusable email and snippets to be made for a time-saving and more scalable sales process. You certainly understand an email template, but you may be wondering: what’s a snippet?

Snippets are short and reusable text blocks that can be used in emails, chat, or documentation. Within HubSpot, you can use the snippets shortcut to insert that text block quickly.

They’re especially useful to answer common questions or produce frequently used information in an email or live chat conversation.

It’s important to note that email and snippet templates are capable of including personalization tokens to ensure you’re addressing the prospect with a personalized touch.

Here are some template examples you may want to include in your sales cycle:

• Meeting Follow-Up: Create templated emails to send to prospects upon the completion of each meeting in the sales cycle that summarizes the call and identifies clear next steps.
• FAQ Snippets: Obtain a list of the frequently asked questions your sales reps hear and put together a repository of snippets to answer those questions in the future.
• Onboarding Emails: Onboarding emails are an efficient strategy for familiarizing new contacts with your business and its operations. 
• Hand-off Emails: Don’t forget about the application of templates for internal use. This is hugely beneficial to ensure consistent hand-offs. Work with your onboarding teams and customer success teams to identify the information they need when they take over a closed deal. Create a template that ensures you’re providing those teams with the proper information to get off to a strong start.

Meeting Scheduling

With HubSpot’s Meetings functionality, scheduling meetings has never been easier. No more long email threads trying to identify when everyone’s available. 

Simply send your prospect or customers a link to a meeting you’ve created in your HubSpot platform. 

Once the individual receives the link, they’ll be able to see your availability and quickly schedule a slot that works for everyone.

The Meetings tool integrates with Gmail or Office 365. 

Here’s a quick look at how and why it’s so beneficial:

• Scheduling Flexibility: Prospects can schedule time with multiple people using a group meeting link. This allows them to compare schedules and find a time that works best for everyone. 
• Email Synchronization: HubSpot meeting tools can sync to your Gmail or Office 365, making your schedule even more visible to prospects. 
• Calendar Embedding: HubSpot makes it easy to link your calendar to your platform and embed it directly on your website. This enables prospects to quickly find and schedule appointments at a time that works for them without having to consult with you first.
• Calendar Link Sharing: It’s extremely easy to share these Meeting links. You can include them in your email signature or use shortcuts to add a Meeting link to an email or chat. 

Key Takeaways

HubSpot’s Sales Hub Starter is an excellent solution for new businesses looking to grow and scale efficiently. Even though it’s the lowest tier offering, there is plenty of power within it to stand up a robust sales team.

When you’re first getting started, focus on setting up and optimizing these five components:

• Deal Pipelines - Up to 2 pipelines
• Basic Automation
• Mandatory Field Updates
• Email Templates and Canned Snippets
• Meeting Scheduling

At Revvy, we understand that it can be challenging to optimize Sales Hub Starter for your unique business needs, but we’re here to help. Feel free to reach out to us today to learn more about HubSpot and how to use it to maximize the investment for your business.