Gaining Context of New Leads in the HubSpot CRM

In this week’s Soapbox Weekly Hack, I explain how I use the HubSpot CRM to gain context of new leads in order to have more meaningful, impactful and effective conversations. The HubSpot CRM is an effective tool to understand a lead's timeline, conversion and interests when analyzed correctly.

In my sales process and in our kickoff sales enablement training session with our customers' sales teams I pay attention to these key filters in the contact's activity log:

Original Source

First and foremost, I gain an understanding of the original source of the contact. The original source is where this contact came from or was created. Some examples of sources include:

Organic Search
Referral
Social Media
Email Marketing
Direct Traffic

As you can tell, the conversation that you have with a referral compared to someone who was generated from social media efforts is going to be much different, so it is important to have this in mind before engaging with them.

Lifecycle Changes

A lifecycle change is the date and time that the Lifecycle Stage changed. For example, a contact's lifecycle stage changes from a lead to an opportunity as they make their way through the sales funnel.

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By analyzing this information we can have a clear picture of the pace that this contact is traveling through the sales funnel as well as, most importantly, what surrounding interactions they had with our company which contributed to that lifecycle change. This could be a number of different things so understanding what, or who, contributed to the change is extremely important. Due to this, we always want to have the lifecycle change filter checked in the Activity Log as we begin to dig deeper into Interest Related Filters and Sales Related Filters.

Interest Related Filters

After analyzing the original source and making sure that the lifecycle changes are visible in the activity log I find the following 5 filters the most helpful in my process for gaining context on the client's interest:

Call-to-Action
Which Calls to Action the contact has clicked and expressed interest in exploring.
Email tracking
The name, date, and time of an email that was opened or clicked.
Form Submissions
Forms completed on the website. This is usually associated with a Lifecycle Change and Lead Conversion.
Marketing emails
The marketing emails that were sent to the contact. This is most helpful when viewed alongside email tracking to get a better picture of the content the contact has engaged with.
Page views
Website pages that the contact has viewed along with the date and time.

Sales Related Filters

When gaining an understanding of a client's potential prior interaction with the sales team or sales content I utilize the following activity log filters:

Calls
Calls in the HubSpot CRM can be manually logged if done on a separate line. However, you can also call a contact from right inside of HubSpot. This information will be automatically saved inside of HubSpot along with a recording of the call to be able to review later.
Sales Emails
Automatic tracking of emails sent to the contact by the sales team. This entry tells you the Status (Opened or Unopened), the number of opens, and the number of clicks for each sales email the contact received.
Meetings
Referencing the date, time, and important notes of prior meetings with the contact.
Sequences Activity
After a contact has been enrolled in a sales sequence you can view a summary of the automated sequence to quickly determine which steps of the sequence the contact has already experienced.