The Short Answer: The HubSpot CRM is not only the place to record your contacts' information, but you can also use it to organize your daily tasks, learn about how effective your paid ads are, and gain valuable insights on how you can improve your sales and marketing efforts.

Research from data2CRM.trujay.com shows that 94% of sales leaders use their CRM for Contact Management, but there is much more to it than that. If you are only using it to store information, you aren’t getting the most out of your CRM. 

HubSpot’s CRM is able to keep track of every interaction your company has with prospects and your existing customers. It can tell you when a prospect lands on your website and what they did when they got there. 

You will also know the exact time and date a prospect opened your sales proposal and how long they spent looking at it. It’s your business's eyes and ears; all you need to know is how to best use your CRM.

Here are 5 tips to make sure you are getting the most out of your HubSpot CRM:

5 Tips for Getting The Most Out Of your HubSpot CRM

1. Take Your Time To Input Any Data

It’s a Basic One, But It’s Too Often Overlooked. 

Your HubSpot CRM should contain every bit of information including your contacts and customers details, deals, and every phone call you make and email you send. 

If it’s anything that could be vital information it needs to be updated in your CRM. The objective is to make everyone’s life easier by having all data in one place. So when one of your sales team is searching for anything they need, it’s right there in your CRM. 

It’s recommended to make calls through your CRM. This way all valuable information will be logged including any notes taken from your sales calls.  

Tips For Using Your Contact Records In Your CRM Effectively:

• Use Contact Records for Individuals and Company Records for Businesses

In your HubSpot CRM, contact records and company records are different from one another. 

Let’s say you work as a B2B sales representative, you will still be speaking to people and not organizations. That’s why it helps having separate contact records for every person that you interact with. 

It’s also important to update your contacts if and when their information changes. Maybe they’ve opted in to subscribe to an email newsletter. In which case, it’s best practice to change their information from contact to subscriber. 

• Use HubSpot’s notes and tasks features

Using HubSpot’s CRM’s notes and tasks features will help you to connect information and actions performed by a contact, prospect or customer, without them knowing anything about it. You can also @mention anyone in your team if you need someone to follow up with a contact.

• Record all inbound activities in your CRM

If your sales team uses G-mail to email prospects or uses an array of social media channels for social selling*, it is best to record all inbound activities in your CRM. That way no vital info will fall through the cracks.

*Social selling is when your sales team uses social media to identify, connect to and nurture sales prospects with the goal of building meaningful relationships. So when a potential customer is ready to buy, they will reach out to one of your sales reps.

2. Get Your Day Started By Setting Tasks In Your CRM

Your CRM helps you to manage your time and use your day optimally. Your sales team is busy; they have people to call, meetings to schedule, and deals to close. It can be challenging to keep track of everything by making a list on a post-it note or piece of paper that is easy to lose. 

You can set up your tasks in your CRM by gathering a to-do list you need to work through, label them according to priority, then move from one to the next without wasting time or energy.   

3. Take advantage of Integration Features

• Website Integration  
  The website integration feature is only available for premium members, but it’s worth considering. When one of your leads visits your website, website integration will tell you what pages they’ve visited or what actions they’ve performed.
  
  You will be able to see how many people have downloaded your content offer on your landing page or subscribed to your email list or blog.
• Advertising Integration
  
  Advertising integration will help you market to and increase your reach to your ideal customers. Data showing the effectiveness of your ads and how many leads came from them is automatically added to your HubSpot CRM. This helps you gain insights about potential customers’ interaction with your ads.
• Analytics Integration
  
  HubSpot integrates with numerous analytics platforms. The data from your analytics platform is automatically added to the HubSpot CRM. It helps you to evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. You can view data in different ways and make sure it’s organized in HubSpot so any member of your team can view it at any time. 

4. Email Personalization 

Using HubSpot’s mail merge saves a lot of time when you want to send out the same email to a section of your contacts. However, if you send the same email to all your contacts, it won’t resonate with everybody, so you’ll need to personalize it. 

So how can you send a personalized email to all of your contacts which addresses their individual goals, interests and challenges, without spending too much time? 

Among the dozens of other tools in the HubSpot CRM is the email template. It’s ideal to create the structure of the main elements of a sales email. The best thing is that you can tailor it differently to each of your contacts. So you can send multiple personalized emails with the help of a template that HubSpot provides.

You can compose emails by adding personalization tokens. An email personalization token is an easy way to identify a customer based on the information they have shared with you.

Let’s say someone called Mark Hopkins, who is a home auctioneer filled in their info to download a content offer. You have now captured Mark’s unique information i.e. their name and their job title.

You can also use static text, which could be, “It was nice to speak with you today…”Then you can fill in the user’s name and their other specific details. 

The email template tool will offer feedback and recommendations, i.e. if you didn’t answer a question or if your email is too long. 

5. Learn from lost deals and identify trends

Losing deals can hit you hard. However, you can use your CRM to take valuable lessons from those losses and do better in the future. 

When you move a deal into the closed/lost phase, record the reason why you lost that deal. To do that you need to review all the touchpoints that were associated with that deal. By noting the reasons why you lost that deal, it will help you improve your sales efforts and your coordination with other departments so you can avoid making the same mistakes in the future. 

Abigael Donahue writing for HubSpot gives the following example:

“Maybe you’re losing a large number of deals to a certain competitor. Sales enablement content from Marketing on this player can arm you with the right responses to position your offering more effectively against theirs.” (7 Ways to Get More Out of Your CRM by Abigael Donahue)

Also,take a look at your engagement data. Perhaps a large section of your contacts is not engaging with your emails. Something is not working; either you are targeting the wrong people or not in the right way. 

It's also best practice to listen to sales calls, take note of prospects levels of interest during the conversations. Were they keen to learn more, or couldn't they wait to get off the phone? Use this info to make changes to how you approach these calls so you can do better in the future.

Our Bottom-line: Your HubSpot CRM is one of the most useful tools in your marketing arsenal; it helps you organize your daily tasks, send personalized emails that engage your contacts, and tweak and improve your marketing and sales efforts.