Every sales leader and Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) I’ve spoken to this year has told me the same thing: They are all laser-focused on maximizing seller productivity. Revenue per employee is suddenly the highest priority metric in every sales organization.
Sales teams are also struggling with tech fatigue. In the last 5-7 years, we’ve seen a proliferation of sales and marketing technologies. When times were good, companies spent heavily to adopt the latest software and automation tools. But now, sellers and managers have to use dozens of different tools just to get their job done.
On top of all of this change, we’ve also seen the massive growth of artificial intelligence (AI) technology over the last year. Sales leaders now have a mandate to understand how to use this nascent technology to drive more performance and productivity.
Amid all this change, sales leaders have had to develop new strategies and techniques to support their teams. In this blog, I’ll show you how to use Outreach’s integration with HubSpot to maximize seller productivity.
Specifically, I’ll show you how to:
- Accelerate inbound workflows
- Strengthen your outbound muscle
- Leverage AI to make data-informed decisions
- Manage opportunities
How to accelerate your team’s inbound workflows
For the last decade, inbound lead generation fueled growth for companies around the world. But starting about a year ago, inbound pipeline began to dry up for many sales organizations.
The reasons for this slowdown are obvious if you read the finance section of any newspaper or talk to frontline sales leaders. The new push for “efficient, profitable growth” is forcing many companies to cut budgets across all departments.
The result: Fewer leads coming in via your website each quarter.
In this changing environment, it’s more important than ever to increase your win rates and deal velocity. You can use Outreach’s integration with HubSpot to do just that.
Using Outreach and HubSpot together gives your reps all the information they need to maximize their odds of closing a deal. On a single page, they can see a lead’s job title, source, most recent interaction on our website, and much more.
The integration also helps your reps prioritize the right deals. For example, if a prospect that fits your ideal customer profile downloads an ebook, Outreach will enter them into a sequence. But before sending the email, it will prompt your rep to personalize the email. For a big whale, this time is well worth the effort.
Conversely, if an individual contributor—that is, someone who doesn’t have much buying authority—fills out a contact form, Outreach will enter them into an outbound sequence and use data from HubSpot to personalize it. This automation saves your reps time, without sacrificing quality.
The integration also gives managers a birds-eye view into each rep’s pipeline. With rich inbound data from HubSpot, you can see which deals are most likely to close and which ones need action from a rep. This helps you coach your team on where to spend the most time in order to boost seller productivity.
I’ve come to think of the integration like this: HubSpot is your system of record and Outreach is your system of action.
How to strengthen your outbound muscle
The current economic climate has forced many teams to develop or strengthen their outbound muscle. The frontline leaders I’ve spoken with this year have all told me that it’s not enough to rely on inbound today.
Using HubSpot and Outreach helps you and your team make decisions quicker and collaborate across accounts.
For example, say one of your reps tells you that they wanted to focus on the banking vertical—you would be able to check response rates in that sector and confirm it was worth their time. Then using data from HubSpot, your rep could quickly identify a list of accounts that fit within their ideal customer profile. They could then tailor an outreach sequence based on recent news in the banking industry.
Within a few hours, your rep would be able to execute a new sales play.
Additionally, say one of your reps told you that they wanted to invite prospects within a certain persona to a webinar. In the old era of sales, this would have taken all day. But with Outreach and HubSpot, it only takes a few minutes.
How to use AI to make data-informed decisions
If you’ve read a newspaper this year or spent more than five minutes on LinkedIn, you know that AI is everywhere. With all the headlines and hype, it’s easy to get distracted by shiny objects. But in order to succeed today, it’s important to cut through this noise and seek productive AI capabilities.
One such productive use of AI is Outreach’s Sales Execution Report.
As any seasoned sales leader will tell you, it’s not enough to just tell reps to “Do more.” This is what I call Lazy Coaching.
Saying, “My team just needs to work harder,” may be true, but as a leader, you need to be able to root out the actual source of what's inhibiting someone from being productive. Outreach’s Sales Execution Report allows leaders to form specific, tactical next steps.
The Sales Execution Report uses AI-based insights to help sales leaders understand the outcomes their outputs are driving. Within this report, you can compare timeframes, teams, and users to understand the differences between top performers and their peers.
You can also see an aggregate view across the whole team. Predictive AI shows you where your sellers are going to finish the month in terms of meetings booked so that you can change course early when it’s needed.
As an example, say you recently created a report to compare the outbound results of two reps. You noticed that over the last month, they both sent the same number of emails, but one rep booked 50% more meetings.
If you were a Lazy Coach, you would have told the lower-performing rep to send more emails. But clearly, volume didn’t explain the difference in outcomes.
Using Outreach’s AI capabilities, powered by data from HubSpot, you are able to discover that the low-performing rep spent most of their time emailing individual contributors. The high-performing rep, by comparison, spent most of their time emailing more senior prospects.
Rather than tell your rep to work harder, you could coach them on how to work smarter by spending more time with the right prospects to get back on course and hit quota.
How to manage HubSpot opportunities in Outreach
One of the most useful capabilities in Outreach is the ability to understand the health and risk of your pipeline at a glance.
Using AI to surface risks within opportunities
As a sales leader, one of my top priorities is helping my team know what deals to focus on and how to assess risks in their pipeline. Outreach helps me do that without wasting any time.
Outreach uses both descriptive and actionable inputs to give every opportunity a score.
Descriptive inputs are data points that can be used to compare a deal to other opportunities in your pipeline. If my rep just closed a deal with Coca-Cola, for example, Outreach would give an opportunity with Pepsi a high score.
Actionable inputs use all the data from your workflow to score opportunities. For example, if a deal has been sitting in the same stage of the pipeline for a couple of months, Outreach will give that opportunity a low score.
HubSpot and Outreach sync bi-directionally in real-time, which means that anytime you get new information on a deal—let’s say a prospect emails your rep and mentions a competitor late in the sales cycle—the health score is updated.
Over time, you can develop your own way to make sense of these scores and prioritize accordingly. If an opportunity has a score of anything less than 70, I see that as a red flag and know to discuss the deal with my rep.
Using templatized joint-evaluation plans
In my sales career, I’ve learned that deals require accountability and collaboration on both sides to close. At Outreach, we use the MEDDPICC methodology to help us collaborate with our prospects and develop mutual success plans with them.
Our team built a mutual action plan capability in Outreach to prevent that all-to-common situation where a CFO comes in at the last minute and kills a deal.
Over the last decade, we’ve learned that the best way to prevent deals from going off the rails at the last minute is to collaborate with our prospects to document the entire sales process together. At the beginning of a sales cycle, we invite prospects to customize a template of all the steps they’ll take in order to evaluate our platform in a joint mutual action plan. This mutual action plan doesn’t end with a contract signature though. It’s a vital resource throughout the entire close process.
This culture of transparency ensures that there are no surprises, like a last-minute security audit, at the end of a sales cycle.
Increasing effectiveness in the moment with real-time call enablement
One of my team’s favorite Outreach capabilities is Kaia, our AI-powered virtual assistant.
My reps work a lot of deals every quarter. They have to keep track of hundreds of details, action items, and product capabilities. It’s a lot to manage. Kaia helps make sure that our reps always feel supported and have the answers our prospects deserve.
You can think of Kaia like an AI-powered coach whispering in a rep’s ear helping them handle objections and say the right thing at any given moment.
Recently a prospect asked one of my reps how our product compares to a feature that one of our competitors launched that week. Ordinarily, this would have been a hard question to answer. But Kaia showed this rep a few talking points that helped move the deal across the finish line.
See how Hubspot + Outreach can help you create and close more deals
It’s one thing to read about AI capabilities and advanced outbound workflows. It’s another thing entirely to experience it for yourself.
Book a demo to learn how Outreach can help your reps thrive in the AI era of sales.
