3 Ways to Help Your Salespeople Automate ABM with HubSpot

It’s a fairly simple inbound process that’s worked for many companies for years:

1. A contact in your database interacts with your website’s content for several days, or even months either on their own or through automated lead nurturing. 
   
   
2. They finally submit a contact form or sign up for a free trial – which then notifies your sales team.
   
   
3. A salesperson is assigned to the account, and they schedule their first conversation.
   
   
4. On the call, the salesperson uses the original form submission data to inform the conversation—kicking off the official lead to salesperson relationship.

But why not start building that critical relationship with the salesperson from the moment they enter your email database? Why wait until step 3? Imagine how cultivating the lead's relationship with your salesperson early on could improve your chances of closing a deal.

Let's revamp the above process to reflect this concept...

1. From the moment the visitor becomes a new contact in your database via a form submission, they're assigned a salesperson (a.k.a. HubSpot Owner). The assignment will have to be predetermined by your organization's account-based marketing strategy (keep reading for examples). Every time they interact with your website’s content, their HubSpot Owner receives email notifications (a.k.a. Lead Notifications)—providing consistent insight into the lead’s interests every time they visit the site. This also applies to contacts you've manually uploaded to your database who subsequently visit your website via email (even without having filled out a form).
   
   
2. As the lead is nurtured, all the emails they receive automatically come from their HubSpot Owner. If they download an Awareness Stage Offer, the email thanking them for the download comes from their HubSpot Owner. If they're enrolled in a lead nurturing workflow, all the emails come from their assigned HubSpot Owner. Once they’re ready to talk, all they have to do is reply to the email. The sales person doesn’t have to lift a finger until the lead raises their hand.
   
   
3. If the lead does submit another form—on a Contact Us page, for example—they would already be assigned to their Hubspot Owner, so that salesperson would immediately receive an email notification. They could then set up the call as usual.
   
   
4. On that call, the HubSpot Owner would be well prepared for the conversation because they would already be familiar with the lead’s interests from the Lead Notifications they'd been receiving. In turn, the lead would already be familiar with the respective HubSpot Owner because they’re the only “contact” they’ve had with a human from your company. An otherwise warm sales call will now be piping hot! 

If you like the sound of process number two, you’ll be glad to know that it can be set up in HubSpot Professional or Enterprise—no extra add-ons needed; just a little elbow grease.

Tip #1: Assign HubSpot Owners to Accounts

First, add your salespeople as HubSpot Users so that they can be recognized as potential HubSpot Owners.

Next comes the most important part. Determine your best way to assign HubSpot Owners to accounts. If you already have a system for assigning accounts internally or through a CRM, you’ll want to match that system in HubSpot using Workflows. You can assign HubSpot Owners manually, but our goal is to have this work automatically behind the scenes.

Let’s say your leads are assigned by territory. Your workflow logic might look something like this:

If the account's State/Region is part of the Northeast or Mid-Atlantic region, then assign them to HubSpot Owner Erick Garcia.

Once you build your workflow, you’ll want to clone it to create one for each salesperson.

This workflow logic assumes you have either collected the State/Region information through a form submission, manually uploaded it, or used HubSpot Insights. Your workflow setup will vary depending on the lead and company information available and the systems in place to collect that information.

Tip #2: Personalize Your Emails to Come from the HubSpot Owner

After you’ve set up your automatic account assignment workflows, you’ll want to personalize your emails to come from the right HubSpot Owners.

Go to Content > Email in your HubSpot portal, and pop into the editor of the email you would like to customize. In the Email Details, change the From and Email Address to the HubSpot Owner using owner.fullname and owner.email shown below.

Scroll down to the body of the email to personalize the email signature. In the email signature area, click Insert and then select Personalization Token. Select HubSpot Owner as the Category and customize the signature with the tokens available. Always set up a default value for each token in case a lead does not have a HubSpot Owner. The default value can be a Sales Manager or another human in your company. If you would like to make changes to the HubSpot Owner tokens, go to User Settings.

The tokens below will be replaced by the lead’s HubSpot Owner information.

Tip #3: Turn On Lead Notifications

Now, the easy part. As soon as you set up your lead assignment workflows you can turn on Lead Notifications. Go to Settings > Notifications. Click the Lead Revisit setting for each salesperson. Under “Receive lead revisit alerts for:” click “The leads that salesperson@company.com owns”. Then you’re all set!

Maintenance Is 50% of the Work

Even if you set up your workflows correctly on the first try, things are always changing in the digital world and, of course, in your business. Make changes as needed to your set up. Here's what you may want to consider:

• Did one of your salespeople send you an incorrect lead assignment? This could reveal a hole in your workflow logic. Make the necessary edits.

• Did you forget to include international leads in your workflows because you were initially focused on assigning based on your US territories? Create additional workflows for those leads.

• Are you integrating your CRM with HubSpot? Look at your workflow logic and see if the data integration will impact how HubSpot Owners are assigned.

These are just some examples of situations that could pop up that will help you make adjustments, not only to your workflow logic, but to other settings in your HubSpot portal. If you need some help, reach out! We know HubSpot in and out and we're happy to save you some time and do it all for you, or provide a second pair of eyes before you hit GO on your streamlined masterpiece.