If you could just read customer's minds to know what they want and how much they are willing to spend on the products or services, you would create the perfect product and meet your sales targets every month. Until you get the superpower to read someone's mind, use HubSpot to track your potential consumers' activity to understand them better. This is quite like reading their mind. Use it to market your product and increase your sales.

Note: Every firm follows a different sales process based on its product category. However, every sales cycle starts with finding prospects and ends with – Wait! The sales process never ends. Read below to know how the sales process is a circle and not a straight line.

1. Prospect

Prospects are important for a business as they are the future potential customers. But, it is tough to identify them. Sales reps agree that prospecting is the most difficult task of the sales process. Well, there are methods available to ease the task a little bit.

  • Look for the age, profession, location, buying channel of your previous customers. If you are in a B2B market, look for the pain points of businesses and companies and see how you can help resolve their pain points and scale up their business. Encourage them to take part in a short survey to find what pain points they have and how your product is helping them solve the pain points. Setting up surveys in HubSpot is easy.
  • Try to find the commonalities between them. People of a particular age group or people from a particular location might be buying your products more often. If company A is your customer and Company B is company A’s competitor, then by the same business category and pain points, Company B becomes your potential customer as well.
  • If you are new to the market, observe your competitors’ customers. You won't have access to their data, of course. But do check their social media channel to see who is buying their products, who are in their connections, their major sales areas, and other things. In an eCommerce ecosystem, see the product reviewers who gave poor reviews and didn’t like the product; those could be your future customers as well.
  • See the demographic of your website visitors, from where you are getting the most traffic. That gives you an idea of you where your brand is getting popular.

This way, you will have a decent outlook of your future potential customer, whether you are in a B2B or a B2C model.

The next step is to segment your target customers.

For example, if you find that people from two different cities are your potential buyers, you design two different campaigns for them. So, when you send a message to them, you can add personalization with the city name in the message. You can also segment them on the basis of their profession.

Example for a B2B model: If you have an Accounts Software that apparel store owners, grocery store owners or Chartered Accountant firms could use, you will prepare separate lists with different types of targeted companies/stores.

Once you find some common traits about your potential customers, you are ready to create your buyer personas. Next time when you search for prospects, you know what to look for.

Doing this will make it easy for you to design the next digital marketing marketing campaign. Targeting the right customers with tailored efforts will definitely increase your ROI and sales.

HubSpot Tools for Prospecting

HubSpot has a tool named 'Prospects.' When you go to Reports -> Analytics Toll -> there at the bottom, you will see the Prospects button.

The Prospect tool by HubSpot lets you see which companies visited your website. It tracks the IP address of each page view. Then the tool searches the publicly available data about the company associate with that particular IP. You get the domain name, first seen, city, postal code, source, and other details. Users choose HubSpot over other platforms because of its detailed profiling of potential customers who you can nurture later.

This way, you get a kick start at your sales cycle as you see which companies are interested in your product and whom to contact first. The report is more detailed than what you get from the Google Analytics tool.

2. Connect

Now that you identified who are your target customers connect with them from any of the following channels

  • Engage with your prospects on social media channels such as Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook. Don't just send a message 'Like our page' or 'follow us.' Personalize it with your creativity. 
  • Reach out to them through a personalized email if you have their email address. Or connect with them over the call. Both the options are available on HubSpot.
  • Check on social media if you have any common friends/ex-colleagues, ask them to introduce you to the prospects. Use any link that you have.

The important thing to note is when you approach your prospects, then don't just push your product or service down their throat. Build a relationship first. They must feel that you understand them and value them.

Ask if they are having the pain points (pain points mentioned in the buyer persona). Whether it is email, phone, or text message, tell them how your company has helped others solve the pain points and can do the same for them. Keep the message concise without the fluff.

HubSpot Tools for Connecting with Prospects

HubSpot has all types of social media modules and tools, phone calls, live chat, and email marketing tools that let you connect with your prospects with personalized messages on your preferred channels.

3. Research

Once you have initiated the contact, let the prospect contact you back, and when they do, prepare a questionnaire to learn about them and their business and how your product can help them. In the beginning, it's all about making a connection. Remember, they are already interested. That's why they responded. Most marketers make the mistake of being pushy salesman at this point. Don't do that.

The research helps you find common ground and see if your company and the prospect are a good fit for each other.

HubSpot Features for the Research Stage

For the research stage, HubSpot offers you several features such as

Free Meeting Scheduling App: This integrated app allows you and the prospect to schedule the meeting at a preferred time.

Social Media Tools: With social media tools, you can engage with your prospects in a personal message and take your conversion further from there.

Email Marketing and Tracking Software: If you are choosing to communicate through email, then HubSpot has a robust email marketing feature in place that tracks every activity and every step of the process. You can even A/B test if you are sending bulk emails. Email Marketing through HubSpot is a whole new ball game.

Sales Email Automation: Automated workflows and task creation/allocation streamlines the process and keeps your prospects nurtured.

Leads Management and Tracking Software: The tool covers the complete sales activities. It not only keeps you updated but also recommends the message you should send and automates the standard procedures. When such a tool and your marketing experience are combined, the odds of you getting good results are high.

Sales Pipeline Management Software: Assign tasks, get updates, add deals, track the progress; you can do all this and much more through Sales Pipeline Management Software so that you never miss a deal ever.

4. Present

At this point, you will be having a decent idea about your prospects, their pain points, and how your product/service/solution can help them. Now you prepare a presentation tailored to the specific business needs of your prospects. Prospects pay more attention to presentations customized to their needs. You can present your product/service in person or send the presentation via email. It could be a Powerpoint presentation, a landing page, or a video showing the working of your product.

Don't say it; show it.

Going by the saying, what you can show in a presentation, show it, don't say it. Have your marketing assets ready. Tell the prospect every reason why they should use your product, why it is better than its counterparts, and how it can improve the prospects' business. All the 'whys,' 'hows,' and 'whats' must be answered in the presentation.

HubSpot Features to Present Your Product

HubSpot shares the best sales deck templates to present your product. However, for giving the presentation, you can either choose a personal presentation session or choose to send through emails. If you choose to send through email, then as mentioned above, HubSpot's email marketing software is available for that.

5. Handle Objections

In the sales process, things don't go as smooth as hot butter on a slice of bread. Be mentally prepared for some major and minor roadblocks. One objection sometimes lets you change your whole game plan in the further steps.

After reviewing your presentation, the prospects will have questions and doubts about your product, or they will just stall you because they are reviewing the products from other companies. The competitors' products might be cheaper than you and offering the same value, or the competitor might be a renowned name in the industry, etc. The prospects will throw such concerns at you. Before they do, ask yourself potential objection questions before giving the presentation. But make sure you answer, keeping their business needs in mind. If the prospects don't find relevance in your answers, you are just handing over the sale to the competitors.

HubSpot Tools for Handling Objections

This also could be done through emails and personal messages as addressing the queries require a standard communication channel on which you were already communicating with the client, and there's only one task at hand. However, these are always updated in the workflows.  

6. Close

Assuming that you successfully answered their questions and dealt with the concerns, you are on the closing stage of the sale. If the prospects give you the final nod on the sale, it’s time to have your legal teams ready the contracts with terms and conditions and other documents. You also update the sales status in the HubSpot CRM so that everybody can know that deal is locked.

If, in case you got a no, then don't push. Walk away from that business, but only for a while. Do call them back and follow up after, let's say, three days or a week. If they are still not interested, you can always ask for referrals. Or, if they had chosen someone else’s product, just slide in a small question ‘May I know what made you go with the product?’ The answer will be very valuable for your product development team.

7. Delight

Ok, you got the deal, got your commission, and then what, the job is done? No! Because the sales process never ends – as mentioned in the second paragraph of this blog.

Imagine you cross all the initial stages in the sales cycles in one go and land straight on the presentation stage? You would like that, wouldn't you? This happens when you get referrals. You straight-ahead book a meeting, understand the prospects' business and offer the product presentation.

If you delight your customers well and serve them with the best of your products and services, you are likely to get clients from them, and the sales process goes on and on.