The Sales Manager’s Cheat Sheet To Using HubSpot (And How Data Entry Can Help Your Team Hit Their Numbers

Running a sales team is a bit like juggling flaming torches.

In the world of sales management, you need to do 3 things at once, forever:

1. Create and manage leads and deals (effectively and efficiently)

2. Keep sales aligned with marketing strategies

If you can pull this off, it’s exhilarating. 

But juggling the flaming torches for a few minutes isn’t enough – you need to keep all 3 things running across time. 

And if you don’t equip yourself to do so – both with software and with actual processes and operations – sooner or later, your sales pipeline will crash and burn.

In this article, I’ll explain why you need to focus on these 3 core tenets, and then I’ll outline some hard action items you can implement inside your CRM (as soon as today) to get the ball rolling. 

First off, we need to bring “lead management” down to earth: 

How To Navigate The Lead Management Labyrinth

One thing we all know, even if we won’t admit it:

If you aren’t effectively managing leads, you are placing a direct handicap on your ability to close new business.

This goes double if you’re running any sort of marketing or client acquisition campaign.

And rather than give in to the temptation to overthink this entire scenario (and jump straight into massive automation workflows, AI tools, or similar so-called “hacks”), the best way to fix your lead management is to focus on the basics. 

No matter which CRM you use, you are equipped with everything you need to get an advanced chokehold on the basics. Do not take this for granted. 

Lead scoring. Segmentation. Knowing your customer's journey, mapping it out, and keeping in touch with them every step of the way. 

These simple steps will always outperform any fancy “shortcut” or AI tool when it comes to moving leads to Closed Won. 

Once you have an effective lead management system in place, it will become far easier to sort out the next problem (without having to backtrack too much): 

Bridging the Sales-Marketing Divide

Once you have a handle on the actual processes behind managing leads, you can start to evaluate how aligned your sales and marketing processes are. 

Are you getting a lot of junk leads? Your top of funnel may need work.

Are prospects qualified…but not quite ready to buy? Middle of funnel marketing may need attention.

And so on and so forth. 

Setting up a good lead management infrastructure will position you to make informed decisions when it comes to the sales/marketing feedback loop. 

And if you can keep these two worlds in sync, you can set your sales team up to close more deals (faster) without creating chaos in the form of unqualified calls or misaligned messaging. 

After these fundamental structures are in place, the real work begins:

Evaluating Your Sales Team’s Performance

Before you improve your sales process (and close more deals)...

You need a clear picture of what’s working and what isn’t. 

If your lead management is in check, your sales and marketing processes are aligned, and your sales team is positioned to sign new business without any bottlenecks beyond their control, it’s time to start evaluating performance. 

But what does “evaluating performance” even mean?

The answer to this question will vary depending on your specific business, but there are a few basic action steps almost anyone can take, implement, and benefit from – right now. 

So, you know you need to manage leads, keep sales and marketing in line, and evaluate our sales team – and you need to do all of this across time…

But where do you go from here? 

A Simple Action Plan For A Positive Sales Management Feedback Loop 

The first step toward improving your sales team as a whole: Installing a positive feedback loop in your sales process.

And the fastest way to do this is to create concrete processes around logging activities. 

I’m going to walk you through a simple process to get this started. This will be in the context of HubSpot, but you can extrapolate this to any CRM on the market. 

There are several key data points you can collect when it comes to sales meetings:  

• Description: This is a text box where you can manually add any relevant notes about a particular call.
• Type: Is it a setting call? Sales call? Follow up? Edit these and figure out which types work for you.
• Outcome: These are static inside HubSpot – connected, left message, left voicemail, no answer, wrong number. But you can create custom ones too!

Now, this activity data can show up inside HubSpot many ways:

• Integrations with other tools, where this data is transferred to HubSpot automatically. Think power dialers and texting tools
• Using HubSpot directly for calling 
• Integrating calendars (very important to have calendars connected to your CRM)

Basic integrations and connecting your calendar only take a few minutes to set up, and I recommend you get this done now for every relevant team member. 

The other main source of logged activities is retroactive logging, or simply going back and filling out the data later. 

And in general, you will have two types of team members:

1. Those who log data as they are doing the action – i.e. adding a call outcome right when they finish up the call
2. Those who set aside 20 minutes per week to update all of their call info 

Both of these are ok – the only downside for the second type of person is their data entry may not be as fresh in their mind as it otherwise would be. The most important thing here is to have an actual process and incentivize your team to follow it.

Inside HubSpot, I highly recommend you REQUIRE the call outcome. 

This means your team won’t be able to log an activity unless an outcome is known. 

You will also want your logged activities to be automatically associated with Contacts and Deals. This way, you will see all relevant data no matter where you’re looking inside HubSpot.

So, what you’re going to do right now:

1. Check into which of these activities are already being logged

If you’re seeing a lot of “no value” in these areas, this is also useful. You can now see who isn’t logging data (and which data they aren’t logging). 

You can bring this back to your team and make sure you have a concrete process in place to gather this data.

There is a lot more you can do inside HubSpot when it comes to logging activities and collecting data to inform your processes…

But these are the big levers you can look out for in terms of sales meetings. 

By implementing a simple activity logging process, you’ll get a clear picture of your lead management, a solid “read” on whether your marketing and sales processes are aligned, and hard data on whether or not your sales team is hitting KPI.