Contact Management and HubSpot: Keep Qualified Leads Flowing

Table of Contents

1. How to Achieve Alignment Between Marketing and Sales
2. You’ll Need These Things to Develop an Effective Contact Management Strategy
3. Three Steps to Build Your HubSpot Contact Management Strategy
4. Manage Contacts and Save Money with HubSpot
5. Let ThinkFuel Show You What HubSpot Can Do For You

Your contacts (the folks you market and sell to) are the lifeblood of your business, but each point of contact costs both time and money. Doesn’t it make sense to put your budget where it will be most successful?

You might have thousands, even millions of contacts in your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform, but how many of those are really quality leads? After all, your CRM contains the names of:

• Anyone and everyone you’ve ever marketed to
• Anyone you’ve ever sold anything to
• Anyone you’ve engaged with either online or in-person
• Vendor partners
• Employees

Your CRM serves sales, marketing and customer service teams all use the same CRM, so all of these teams have visibility into lead capture, nurture, and conversion.

To optimize your marketing spend, it’s important to align marketing and sales toward the same goals, and a contact management strategy should be implemented company-wide. It’s also essential to have the right CRM for the job.

How to Achieve Alignment Between Marketing and Sales

Sales and marketing sometimes work out-of-step, even though they both have the same end goal of driving sales and revenue. When your marketing and sales teams come together, your company gets top-line growth, sales productivity, and an improved ROI.

It’s a numbers game, sure, but remember that your contacts aren’t just a name, email address and phone number. They are people. Real live human beings who you can build a relationship with. However, before you can give them what they want and need, as well as a big, personalized cyber-hug, sales and marketing must:

1. Make sure both teams discuss and understands each marketing lifecycle
2. Works together to create segmented lists and filters
3. Keep the database clean, with the help of IT, by regularly updating contacts

Now that you’ve got your teams aligned, it’s time to develop a contact management strategy.

You’ll Need These Things to Develop an Effective Contact Management Strategy

A contact management strategy needs filters. One of the most important filters you’ll use is:

Buyer Personas

You know that a buyer of fancy custom-designed retail display units isn’t likely to buy a plastic sidewalk sandwich board, but you keep trying to upsell them with it. This means a marketing messaging that either doesn’t get viewed, and that costs you money. It also shows your customer that you don’t know them very well. 

Buyer personas lie deep in the heart of your marketing strategy. There are five important steps to define your personas, including research, data segmentation, pain point discovery, a tailored approach, and the willingness to experiment.

You’ll use these personas to identify the target audience for each and every campaign. Sales will also be able to use these personas to massage their sales pitch to fit their audience. While personas don’t start out 100% accurate and require monitoring and updating, they are a great place to start. 

For B2B Enterprises, Company Information is a Must

If you sell B2B, its essential that each CRM contact record contain a company name, and that should inform the personas you build for these subsets of contacts. 

Create an Internal Training Program

Now that you have your buyer personas associated with each contact, you’ll have a more comprehensive view of precisely who your company is marketing to and engaging with. 

It’s time to take that information and educate sales, marketing, and customer service about how your CRM works and the contact management process.

3 Steps to Build Your HubSpot Contact Management Strategy

We love many things about HubSpot, but one of our favorite features is the ability to stretch your marketing budget by setting contacts as “marketing” and “non-marketing,” which gives you control over your spend by letting sales and marketing know who they can and can’t market to.

Let’s go over how to develop your HubSpot contact management strategy so things are set up to sell that fancy retailer your latest display ideas that match their standards and their persona. 

1. Schedule Regular Database Checkups

Evaluate your contacts database continually, and remove unnecessary and duplicate data. How often you do this depends on your sales cycle.

• If your sales cycle is less than three months, clean up your database once per quarter
• A six-month cycle means clean up twice yearly
• A sales cycle that lasts over six months should involve a re-engagement campaign every six months

It’s all about nurturing contacts. You don’t want to delete them from your database before you’ve shown them all the marketing love you have for them. The reverse is true, too. You don’t want to keep pining for that sale from an unqualified lead when you could be spending your time on those personas that love you back, and besides, these folks can mess up your analytics!

A healthy database is essential for the warm fuzzies – that feeling potential customers get when they get content that speaks to them. Sales will get nice, warm qualified leads in return that they can move through your sales funnel to conversion.

2. Define Your Database Cleansing Process

A good database makes all the difference. If you’re still using spreadsheets, hey, 1999 is calling and wants its floppy disks back. 

We love HubSpot because it makes contact management easy – you can create a cleanup process and save it within the projects tool. Can your spreadsheet do that? I didn’t think so. 

Here is a typical process for database cleanup that you’ll use on a continuous basis:

• Delete unusable contacts, whatever your criteria, and export or delete bounced or unsubscribed contacts.

• Find duplicate contacts and merge or delete them.

• Take a look at your contact property values and create contact lists and a property value workflow.

3. Time to Align to Propel Growth

Congratulations! You have a squeaky-clean database, you have a strategy to keep it that way, and now you’re ready to develop strategies to drive results. This means when it comes to marketing you must:

Develop a content strategy

You want a framework that delivers the right content to the right targets who you can then funnel into your contact list. Be sure to include a well-thought-out SEO strategy so your content is easily found by buyers looking for your perfect solution to their problems. 

Formulate a Lead Nurturing Strategy

Lead nurturing moves your lead gently and persuasively along the buying journey and delivers the many compelling reasons they should buy from you. This means delivering the proper content at the right time to the right human beings.

Properly Segment Your Contacts

Fuel your marketing ROI with proper contact segmentation. This means creating the right lists to deliver that stellar content you’ve developed to engage, and yes, nurture.

It’s likely that you’ll have to take a fresh look at your current and planned campaigns at this point to drive more results using the intelligence you gathered while updating your shiny new database. 

Manage Contacts and Save Money with HubSpot

You’ve probably guessed by now that we’re HubSpot evangelists. That’s because we see it work for our clients again and again. It also offers improved security, fast and efficient content deployment, excellent SEO and website performance, and the ultimate in cost efficiency. 

HubSpot offers forms, ad management, landing pages, live chat and chatbot builders, the activity of contacts on your website, and email marketing, among other features, including free storage of one million non-marketing contacts. This takes these pesky data files out of the database that contains your quality leads. It also means you only have to pay for marketing contacts. 

If you’re a current HubSpot user, there’s no need to categorize each individual contact – you can use the marketing contacts eligibility flow and a few clicks to identify your marketing contacts. By following a few prompts, you can automatically produce lists of bounces and unsubscribes, and add additional lists and custom filters. 

New HubSpot users can create either a simple workflow or make some fast settings updates for automatic categorization of new contacts for marketing. 

HubSpot makes marketing quick, clean, and efficient, unlike those spreadsheets or inferior CMS you’ve been using.

Let ThinkFuel Show You What HubSpot Can Do For You

We know HubSpot.

How to use it.

How to help you succeed with it.

We have certifications in everything from inbound marketing to sales plan development to sales service. And we’re a certified HubSpot agency partner, which means we hear about any new resources first, putting you ahead of the competition. 

So gather up your spreadsheets and schedule a meeting to talk about how we can grow your business together.