If you want your sales reps to work smarter, not harder, look no further than HubSpot Sales Hub. Sales Hub is the enterprise-grade customer relationship management (CRM) system that provides a complete revenue picture, featuring everything from top-of-funnel leads to closed-won deals.
But as a sales leader, you don’t just want to oversee the entire sales process; you want to be able to control it and optimize it so your team can close deals as quickly and efficiently as possible. And to do that, you need to be able to edit and customize every element of your sales pipeline.
About Customization in HubSpot Sales Hub
Its virtually unlimited customization potential is one of HubSpot’s most desirable features, and Sales Hub is just another iteration of this capacity for custom capabilities. With HubSpot Sales Hub, users can:
- Easily map specific data models onto the CRM.
- Configure default layouts to better suit team needs.
- Expand reach with UI extensions.
Users can also create, manage, and customize various properties and elements within the system such as records (cards), views, dashboards, and more. A primary objective of HubSpot Sales Hub is to help streamline and optimize your sales process, and it does so by enabling you and your team to customize every aspect of your sales pipeline. Today, we’ll dive deeper into why that’s so important to your business’s growth and offer some expert advice on leveraging customization in HubSpot Sales Hub to maximize that growth.
4 Advantages of Customizing Your Sales Pipeline in HubSpot Sales Hub
One of the greatest benefits of employing HubSpot Sales Hub is its superior data structure and organization of leads. Better data management abilities mean everyone can move through processes faster and finalize deals sooner. This level of efficiency is impressive out of the box, but Sales Hub’s customization potential takes sales team productivity to the next level.
Here are the four top advantages of using HubSpot Sales Hub to customize your sales pipeline:
1. Robust Lead Scoring
Perhaps the most useful feature of HubSpot Sales Hub is its robust capacity for lead scoring. The system prioritizes leads based on the likelihood of closing the deal, which ensures that business with the highest potential is always addressed soonest. This way, sales reps know where to focus their attention and efforts. Plus, HubSpot’s Breeze AI tools leverage enriched data to allow for even more powerful lead qualification and segmentation capabilities.
2. Higher Conversion Rates
Such intuitive lead scoring enables reps to spend more time on the deals they’re more likely to win. By clearly defining the key characteristics of viable deals and identifying the highest-intent buyers, reps know where to concentrate their efforts for maximum conversions. This results in both faster deal velocity and higher TVC (total value of the contract).
3. Easy Follow-Up
Another benefit of Sales Hub’s custom lead scoring is that it minimizes lost business by automating reminders. Depending on where the deal falls in the pipeline, the system will remind your sales team what needs to be done in order to move the deal to the next stage in the pipeline. Automated workflows mean that your reps never overlook a follow-up or forget to check in on a client.
4. User Empowerment
With its superior data organization capabilities, HubSpot Sales Hub makes managing sales data and turning it into closed deals as seamless as possible. The accessible, user-friendly interface offers an out-of-the-box solution that’s fully customizable to your team's skills, needs, and preferences, so users can feel like the system was built especially for them (which it can be!).
Additional HubSpot Sales Hub Advice to Keep in Mind
As a HubSpot Elite Partner, SmartBug knows the Hubs inside and out, and we take pride in sharing that expertise with our readers. So if you’re considering implementing HubSpot Sales Hub for your business, here are a few more tips based on our years of experience with HubSpot tools:
- Run scenarios and audit often. When trying to optimize deal stages and other parameters, running scenarios will offer tons of insight into how much friction exists at each stage. It’s important to execute a sales audit shortly after implementing any changes to see where you are winning business and in what areas your team may be lacking.
- Require demos before progressing. Before moving to contract send, require sales reps to do a demo with the potential client. HubSpot Sales Hub allows you to make this a required field so that the rep must complete the demo before the lead can continue through the pipeline.
- Aim for renewals. When it comes to maximizing sales pipelines, some leaders tend to neglect existing clientele in favor of gaining new business. But being able to anticipate renewals is essential to your bottom line, and knowing when to check in, upsell, or follow up is the key to nurturing existing business relationships.
- Use the mobile app. Everything discussed in this article and more can be performed from anywhere using HubSpot’s mobile app. This capability offers added convenience and accessibility because you don’t have to be at your computer to access or manage your Sales Hub data.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
A common customization mistake we see with Sales Hub users is creating too many or too few stages in their pipeline. Generally speaking, we recommend 6-7 stages in a sales pipeline, but naturally all business models will have different requirements. What’s important is that all deal stages are intentional, relevant, and reassessed often for accuracy and alignment with business goals.
Enhance Your Sales Strategy with Help from SmartBug’s HubSpot Experts
Sales leaders can successfully maximize their HubSpot investment by learning all they can about its state-of-the-art features and understanding how those features contribute to streamlined sales processes. And trust us—there’s a lot to learn! But SmartBug is happy to help by sharing our knowledge and resources with anyone looking to learn more about the benefits of using HubSpot.
If you’re still debating CRM platforms, complete our evaluation to learn whether HubSpot Sales Hub or Salesforce is right for you.
About the author
Stephen Lackey was formerly SmartBug's VP of Marketing and he is based out of Charlotte, NC. His background is hyper-focused on marketing and sales enablement, working at Fortune 500 companies, startups, and other industry disruptors. His marketing degree is paired with an MBA where Stephen seeks to uncover the 'why behind the why' within marketing data to drive top line revenue. Read more articles by Stephen Lackey.