As sales and marketing technology becomes more effective and more affordable, B2B sellers are increasingly using it in their business development efforts. But many aren't realizing the benefits that this technology has to offer.

As a HubSpot Certified Agency Partner, we work with businesses to help them use sales and marketing technology to make their business development processes more effective. Which is an important concept to understand - sales and marketing technology should be used to make your processes more effective. It's counterproductive to build your business development process around the capabilities of your software.

Most businesses start seeing the value of a well-designed sales and marketing technology implementation when they use it for 3 primary purposes.

HubSpot makes your business development process more efficient

Most of us don't have the luxury of devoting all of our time towards getting new customers. We have existing customers we need to service, we have to manage our businesses and we have to find and develop employees to serve our customers. 

One of the most important uses of HubSpot is to help focus your business development resources on high-probability opportunities. We use HubSpot's marketing automation in our business to qualify leads based on demographic criteria. You will note that the lead generation form at the bottom of this blog post asks 3 questions that relate to:

• The industry in which the person works
• The role that they play in their company
• If they are a HubSpot customer

We take the responses to those 3 questions to identify people that we think we can help. We also look at the IP country of the prospect because we primarily work with US businesses. By using HubSpot to qualify inbound leads, we focus on the 25-35% that fit our target market criteria.

We also use HubSpot to be more productive in our business development process. Here are some of the ways we do that.

• We use HubSpot sales email templates to communicate with our customers and prospects. We use templates as a starting point - it's important to modify your templates to personalize the situation. For example, you might want to modify your template to say, "It was nice to meet you at the CyberSecurity summit yesterday." With Gmail and Outlook 365 integrations, you can use the templates in your normal workflow.
• We use HubSpot sequences to consistently communicate with prospects. We're able to send a series of emails over time and schedule tasks like reviewing email engagement and scheduling calls with a consistent process.
• We use the HubSpot meetings tool to allow people to book time on our calendars without the back-and-forth that keeps meetings from getting scheduled.

HubSpot can make your business development process more effective and productive when deployed properly.

HubSpot Sequences Analytics

HubSpot gives you greater insight into your prospects

We spoke above about using HubSpot to identify marketing qualified leads. We do this by prioritizing inbound leads based on demographic criteria.

The next stage in the qualifying process is to apply the human touch to determine whether the lead is sales qualified - whether the circumstances justify investing additional time and resources on that lead. The first part of that process involves reviewing the person's LinkedIn profile and company website to get a better idea of the potential business fit.

But HubSpot captures important information that will help you understand the prospect's potential interests and motivations. For example, HubSpot identifies:

• Which of your website pages the prospect viewed
• Which blog posts they read
• How many times they've visited your website
• Whether they've opened or clicked on the emails that you sent them

By using this lead intelligence, you can create more meaningful interactions with your customers and prospects. You can view a short video on HubSpot's lead intelligence features directly below.

HubSpot helps you provide consistent messaging to your prospects

A well-thought out business development process defines your target markets and a strategic way to communicate your value to those target markets. When you're small, consistency is naturally part of your communications because a small number of key people are delivering the message.

But as more and more people get involved, it's important that everyone is communicating consistently to the marketplace. Your target market should hear the same message, regardless of whether Bill or Susan delivers it.

Let me give you an example from our business. There are many terms for what we do - inbound marketing, digital marketing, internet marketing, etc. We have chosen to use the term inbound marketing. There are a few reasons for doing so:

• We don't want to dilute our SEO results. We will rank highly for inbound marketing and not highly for digital marketing. If someone is searching using the term inbound marketing, it's likely a good fit for us.
• We are a HubSpot Certified Agency Partner and want  to associate our brand with HubSpot. HubSpot invented the term "inbound marketing", so that's what we want to use.

When we talk about the side of our business, we want everyone to use the term "inbound marketing", regardless of the medium. By using email templates and pre-defined sequences, we know that we will be communicating consistently with the marketplace. When we direct them back to our website, they will get the same message. When we're talking to people at networking events, we use the same terms. 

HubSpot can help you provide a consistent message to your customers and prospects.

HubSpot is a great tool for professional services businesses, but it needs to be implemented and used properly to support your business and its processes. If you'd like to talk about how make HubSpot work for you, schedule an evaluation with us.