In old movies, being a salesperson meant knocking on doors and pitching vacuum cleaners face-to-face. Scale was limited by the number of houses one could visit in a set time.
Today, sales teams aren't limited by physical properties. They can Zoom with someone in Asia and, 15 minutes later, close a deal with someone in San Francisco. They can send hundreds of emails with the click of a button.
The internet's scale forces sales teams to manage massive amounts of digital information. They handle dozens of deals, update CRMs after every call, and assess each deal's likelihood of closing. SDRs manage hundreds or thousands of contacts, ensuring each receives proper follow-up without over-relying on impersonal automation.
Effectively managing each prospect and open deal is crucial for good close rates. Accurate forecasting is also important– Strong forecasting can save a struggling quarter, while poor forecasting can lead to missed targets and lost trust from the board.
Recently, Arrows hosted the first (of many!) Happy Customers Festival–in which we hosted three great sales companies (Aircall, Grain, and PandaDoc) to dive deep into how their integrations with HubSpot enable salespeople to reduce manual tasks, accelerate their sales cycles, and improve close rate.
Here’s what we covered:
- Automate and organize the SDR team’s work so no prospects fall through the cracks
- Automate some steps of qualification
- Track previous conversations with prospects and factor that into your qualification
- Identify at-risk deals to improve quarterly predictions
- Auto-generate proposals to speed up the closing process and hit quarterly deadlines
Let's delve deeper into what's possible with great HubSPot integrations and how they work.
Better SDR Follow Up With Aircall
Aircall is HubSpot's top telephony partner for sales. Aircall supports sales and marketing alignment and efficiency. Today’s use case focuses on efficiently following up with webinar leads, ensuring no leads are missed, and personalizing each conversation.
Using Aircall for Efficient Lead Follow-Up
Let's say I'm an SDR, and I've just received a list from the marketing team, pulled from Wistia, with high-intent MQLs who attended a recent webinar.
My task today is to go through this list, call, nurture, and create qualified leads ready for a demo, which will then be handed to our AEs to close the deal.
Personalizing Conversations And Automating Next Steps
The Aircall power dialer can be used within HubSpot to reach out to prospects. As I'm calling, I open the contact record in HubSpot. So I can personalize my conversation because I can see the 360º view of the contact.
If the call goes well, I'll tag it as "qualified," "create deal," or "nurture" if they asked for more info. These tags trigger workflows in HubSpot that update the lead status, rotate the contact within the AE team, create a deal, assign it to a new AE owner, and send a notification. A follow-up email may also be sent to the prospect. This whole process, which could take three to five minutes manually, is automated, saving time.
If a lead asks to be called back in three months, I can tag it as "call back three months," which automatically creates a task with a due date. This automation drives sales efficiency and ensures no leads are forgotten.
Lastly, notes, tags, call recordings, and summaries synced into the HubSpot call log automatically for future reference fro SDRs and marketers who want to work that contact.
Access our step-by-step walkthrough of how to integrate Aircall and HubSpot for better lead follow up here.
Better Deal Qualification With Grain
Next, we explore how Grain integrates with HubSpot to provide a comprehensive view of customer interactions and streamline follow-ups.
Preparing For The First Sales Call
After the SDR talks to your prospect, and the meeting is booked with a salesperson, we can see a summary of the call in HubSpot which gives us insight into the conversation.
The salesperson can also see how the contact has engaged with marketing content historically, and what meetings are coming up.
Live Transcription and Collaboration
During the first demo, Grain creates a live transcript of the call. You can use a standardized template which takes notes and organizes them for you–many people use a template based on a sales qualification framework.
The notes generated from this template are pushed automatically to HubSpot as activity notes–this way the salesperson doesn't have to manually fill in this information in HubSpot after the call.
The auto-qualification notes in HubSpot shows comprehensive coverage of what's been answered by the prospect in the sales process.
Assessing Deal Risk With Reports
Auto-qualification is most powerful when it's combined with HubSpot's reporting and automation features. You can create a report which highlights the deals that are far along in the sales process (say...in negotiating) that haven't actually met all of the BANT or MEDPICC criteria.
Then, you can create automations in HubSpot which sends a slack message every time a deal fits into this category.
Access our step-by-step walkthrough of how to identify at-risk deals in HubSpot using call recordings and auto-qualification here.
Better Document Management and Signature Automation
Once you're ready to close the deal, the HubSpot integration with PandaDoc can reduce the manual back-and-forth headache typically associated with contract review and signature.
During the sales process, we identified that this client would need to be sent an NDA.
And we have an automation built to auto-send an NDA to clients once they reach a certain stage in the sales process–so that AEs don't need to remember to do this, or send manually themselves.
Generating, Sending, and Editing Documents
The HubSpot <> PandaDoc integration is set up so that the details of the HubSpot deal (i.e. recipient, contract start date, scope of work) are pre-filled in the contract. This reduces the need for double entry, maintaining HubSpot as the single source of truth.
As the client interacts with the document, updates are reflected in HubSpot. Changes, like opting into additional services or adjusting start dates, are immediately recorded.
And, the completed document and all associated data are stored in HubSpot.
Access our step-by-step walkthrough of how to sign agreements and kick off onboarding with PandaDoc, HubSpot, and Arrows here.
Integrations Deliver the Scale That Sales Teams Need To Succeed
Previously, sales teams were limited by the number of doors they could knock on. Today, technology has made them limitless, but at the cost of often manually having to juggle a huge amount of data.
Integrating tools like Aircall, Grain, and PandaDoc with HubSpot streamlines processes, reduces manual tasks, and enhances sales efficiency while also improving personalization.
From ensuring no lead falls through the cracks, to automating deal proposals, these integrations give salespeople time back in their days to do what they do best–meet with people…face-to-face.
Next up, the customer success session covers how to automate sales handoffs, improve customer onboarding, and monitor customer health by integrating Arrows with HubSpot’s new customer success workspace.
