The Prospects tool is one of my favorites from the HubSpot Sales suite. It allows users to gain insight into those people visiting their websites and to use that information in a variety of strategic ways.
Interestingly, the most recent State of Inbound report from HubSpot revealed that 38% of salespeople struggle most with prospecting. Without a doubt, this tool is meant to make their jobs a lot easier – it's just a matter of effectively using it! If you work in sales or business development, and prospecting has begun to feel like a chore, this post offers a few quick tips and strategies for success leveraging the HubSpot Prospects tool.
Before you can dive into the tool, you'll need to find it! Recent HubSpot platform changes have made finding the Prospects tool a little less intuitive. To get there, navigate to Reports > Analytics Tools > Prospects.
The Prospects tool also started limiting shared data around the time of GDPR implementation in May 2018. This post has been updated to reflect these changes.
Tip #1: Identify companies ready for a sales touch.
Being able to view all the companies who are visiting your site is enlightening! The Prospects tool allows you to sort and identify visitors in several productive ways. I recommend creating views based on your sales strategy. Views are created by selecting contact properties that align with your goals.
For example, I like to focus my sales efforts on our primary buyer personas and ideal company size. I created and saved a view that included all contact properties that align with qualities of our target buyer, including industry, job role and the company's number of employees. I then enabled revisit notifications in the Customize tab, so I’m alerted any time these prime contacts are on our website. This image illustrates what this view looks like in HubSpot.
Another example of identifying prospects via a customized view is to sort by territory or state. For instance, if you are responsible for driving sales in Michigan, you’ll probably want to track all viable visitors from that state.
Tip #2: Perform on-the-spot research.
The Prospects tools is a perfect place to determine if a company is worth pursuing. Directly from the Prospects dashboard, you can preview key metrics about any company: pinpoint what pages they’ve been viewing, see the length of time for which they’ve visited your site, etc.
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With a click of a button, you can also quickly check them out on LinkedIn for contacts you might know who work there or other company traits. If you decide they're a business worth tracking, add them as a company in the HubSpot CRM, and start integrating the other tools into your sales activity.
Tip #3: Find related prospects.
HubSpot's prospecting tool uses an algorithm to identify similar companies to the ones you're tracking. So while researching your visitors, you're also able to scroll down to the "related companies" and follow the same research and business development step described above. To be more selective with your time and research, only view recommended companies based on your best matches. To cast a wider net, use more liberal criteria.
We’d love to hear how YOU are using the HubSpot Prospects tool! Let us know in the comments below. And happy hunting!
