One of the many benefits of conversational marketing is its ability to accelerate your sales cycle. After all, it is built for and used by both your marketing and sales teams to drive pipeline and generate revenue. So knowing how to use the two in coherence with one another is critical.
Regardless of whether you’re using automated chatbots, your sales development reps (SDRs) as live agents, or a combination of both, it’s important to identify who your qualified prospects really are. Elsewhere, we’ve classified the prospects that visit your site into six high-level categories. Each one has a different intention, and each can be broken down into more targeted lists.
In order to identify where your visitor fits into each of these classifications and then adjust your sales acceleration strategies, you’ve got to rely on your HubSpot database to know who is on your site and instantly route these qualified prospects to chat with sales.
Steps to Strengthen HubSpot Integration
Make sure your Hubspot instance is well integrated with your conversational marketing platform using these steps:
- Send chat data into HubSpot. Set up your integration so that new leads and data captured through your chat is synced back into the contact details in HubSpot for tracking and follow-up.
- Build conversations based on target lists. Bring in your HubSpot active and static lists into your conversational marketing platform to target your best prospects with chat the moment they arrive on your website.
- Use HubSpot data to personalize chat greetings. You should take advantage of the power of personalization by greeting HubSpot contacts with custom messages based on data at their account or contact level. Sync your HubSpot fields into your conversational marketing platform to make this happen.
- Employ HubSpot sales routing. Use HubSpot’s existing routing rules to route and alert the sales reps who own the account so they can jump in for a conversation.
- Use HubSpot engagement data to fuel conversations. You should be able to easily tap into Hubspot engagement data within the same view as your chat to start relevant conversations. For example, did visitors recently attend a webinar? Ask them how it was.
- Automate post-chat workflows in HubSpot. Build HubSpot workflows to automate the data sync between your chat platform back into the CRM. This includes all of your chat activity, the handoffs, and sales conversations so that you can easily access it later.
Seven Sales Acceleration Strategies Using Hubspot and Conversational Marketing
Now that you’ve integrated your conversational marketing with HubSpot, how do you get those high-quality leads from your site to your sales team in real time and generate more pipeline?
Well, HubSpot can also be used to assist and accelerate your sales cycle when it’s added to your conversational marketing platform — such as ZoomInfo Chat — and its chat flows.
Sales success comes down to one thing: your speed to connect. The faster you can connect your active prospects on site with your sales team, the better you can beat your competition and enable your buyers with the information they’re looking for. To help you combine your conversational marketing platform and HubSpot, here are seven strategies that we have identified as necessary to implement.
Speed to Lead
Marketers want more prospects raising their hand to speak to their sales team. But unfortunately, these are short-lived opportunities. Between the demo requests, contact form submissions and pricing inquiries, prospects lose interest quickly. This means it’s up to you and your team to shorten the time frame it takes from piquing the lead’s interest to getting in contact with them. Speed to lead stands on the notion that the quicker the average response time is, the more leads you can connect with.
Too often or not, leads are a missed opportunity because of a slow initial response time. According to the Harvard Business Review, if SDRs don’t respond in five minutes, the probability of establishing contact reduces by a whopping 400%.
ZoomInfo’s go-to-market approach requires our SDRs to respond to hot inbound leads within 90 seconds. As a result of this effort, we book, on average, 6,500 demos every month.
You can use conversational marketing to bring chat into speed-to-lead response times. For example, any time HubSpot leads visit your high-value pages (e.g., pricing page), you can have a chat box pop up and ask if they’d like to speak to someone that can help them with pricing.
Once you master this strategy, you’ll leave more leads wanting to talk.
Advanced, Real-Time Routing
If the right leads aren’t being connected to the right agents in real time, consider your efforts lost. It’s another branch of your speed to lead.
A lot of conversational marketing platforms have integrated an advanced grade routing feature, which allows you to route your most qualified buyers to SDRs that can engage with them on the spot. As soon as you qualify visitors based on your HubSpot data, have the right agent jump in and take the conversation to the next step.
You can be as specific as you want with your routing rules. Maybe your larger leads get routed to your enterprise team or your target prospects are routed to your account executives (AEs). Knowing who is in charge of which type of lead will make it a seamless experience for both the lead and the rep.
Qualify and Generate Leads 24/7
Chatbots were designed as a second line of defense to your team. It’s a 24/7 benefit of adopting a conversational marketing platform on your website.
It doesn’t matter if your agent is not available on site to chat. Use your chatbot to hop on and qualify your leads outside your office hours so that no lead is left unattended. Then, when your reps become available, they can get in contact with these leads and continue the nurturing process. Once your chatbot collects a lead’s information, the data is stored in your HubSpot CRM for your team to reference in lead follow-up.
Combine Forces with Forms to Connect Faster
Forms are a powerful tool to connect and a great way to collect key information from your prospects.
Too often, prospects lose interest after submitting a form because it takes SDRs too long to initiate contact (see speed to lead above). However, by integrating your forms into your chat, you can initiate conversations the minute they click submit. The information they submit allows you to profile and qualify your leads on the spot, and in exchange, offer up your AE’s calendar to push the process forward. Leads are less likely to drop off now that you’ve started a conversation with them.
Deliver Personalized Content to Leads
Personalized content falls strategically in line with visitors who are on your site to consume blog posts, podcasts, videos, and guides.
They want all the information they can get before they can make a decision on whether they will consider your company. But how do you know what they have seen and what they haven’t? With HubSpot’s CRM, you have endless data available at your fingertips.
For example, use HubSpot to view visitors’ past browsing behaviour and which pages they interacted with the most. Take that information to build persona or solution-based content recommendations. Once you identify the prospect on your site, have your chatbot offer up more recommended content. Make sure to collect their information and store it back into your CRM for future opportunities.
Deliver a VIP Experience for Target Accounts
Give your target accounts the VIP experience on your site. Your sales and marketing teams have been keeping track of these accounts for a while, waiting for the right time to flip them into closed deals.
So, it’s time to roll out the red carpet for these accounts, which starts by removing your bot and alerting your sales rep and or account owner immediately. Thankfully, HubSpot will already have their information when they logged on, so the minute they are on site, your agents will be alerted.
Start the conversation off with a personalized approach. Surface all your HubSpot data related to the account to fuel your conversation and make their experience as effortless as possible.
Nurture Open Opportunities
Open opportunities are an important piece of your sales funnel. As buyers in an active sales cycle, how you engage with them can make all the difference. It’s just as important to use your available resources to initiate contact with these prospects, connect with them, and nurture the deal.
Track leads, create an active list of deals, and filter the high priority prospects from the rest to actively target your account-based marketing opportunities. With HubSpot’s CRM, you can then create conversation templates for your open opportunities and route them directly to the account owner to save time for both parties. This way, you can also connect with any new contacts in the account that visit your site and continue engaging with the buying committee.
Lastly, use your account data to identify whether it’s a new account or leads your team is already in contact with so you can pick up the conversation from there. If it’s a new lead, make the introduction and continue the sales cycle. Anything and everything is valuable here to strike interest, and keeping the conversation going is a good way to keep your open opportunities continually engaged.
Sales Acceleration Adds to the Customer Experience
Conversational marketing has come a long way from just chatbots. By aligning our sales, marketing, and customer experience efforts, you can target and engage with customers on a larger, more personalized scale.
The above listed sales acceleration strategies, done in combination with HubSpot’s features, are crucial so that more opportunities are added to your pipeline.
By removing the friction between you and your leads, your connection becomes stronger. Conversational marketing solidifies communication and removes that friction to create an efficient and seamless experience for your visitors and your team.
ZoomInfo customers can already integrate with HubSpot with ease, and adding ZoomInfo Chat into the mix can increase prospecting success.