5 Underused Features of HubSpot Sales Hub That Boost Sales Efficiency

Your CRM is crucial for so much more than maintaining good relationships with your customers. A well-dialed CRM, such as HubSpot, can not only help you manage relationships with customers but also streamline internal sales processes to maximize growth. Beyond understanding your buyer’s journey, and after integrating all the applications you use to collect and analyze data, what else can you do to make the most of your CRM?

With an incredibly user-friendly interface that helps your business scale while providing a comprehensive user experience, HubSpot has so many tools that can help you boost your sales efficiency that you may not know about all of them. 

Let’s dive into five sales tools that are included in HubSpot Sales Hub and can help you organize, analyze, and better manage your sales pipeline to meet sales goals and keep deals on track.

1. Quota Attainment

With this HubSpot Sales Hub feature, you’ll be able to see a high-level overview of your own quota goals, from individual reps to specific timelines. Within your HubSpot dashboard, quotas can be done monthly, quarterly, semi-annually, or annually. Set quotas by rep and by time period to track their attainment and better plan your next course of action.

Being able to monitor quota attainment with their own parameters allows sales leaders to set goals for appropriate pacing for everyone from new sales reps to your most seasoned team members. With fluctuating timelines, deals pushing and pulling, and ramp-up periods for new team members, monitoring your quota attainment will help keep your team on track.

2. Your Deal Pipeline Waterfall

Every deal you have has a close date—but those often change. Your deal pipeline waterfall allows you to track deals pushing, pulling, increasing, or decreasing in real time. With fine-tuned tracking, you can quickly adjust to changes in deals and make up the difference. For example, if a deal is closing earlier than expected, client services team members can adjust their internal timeline to be ready to work sooner.

This feature allows you to identify and analyze where you started at the beginning of a month and compare it to where you stand at the end of the month to make sure you’re still on track. In conjunction with the quota attainment feature noted above, you can make adjustments to make sure deals are on track to close and reps are meeting quotas. With deals getting pulled or decreasing, you can make adjustments as necessary to stay aligned with your sales goals.

HubSpot also allows you to break information down by who owns a deal. That way, you can identify trends and patterns. For example, it’s common for junior sales reps to create—and push—deals too soon, which may cause a backlog of deliverables or products that need to be delivered faster than usual. Your deal pipeline waterfall allows you to track the cadence of anyone’s deals and turn data into an opportunity for coaching.

3. Cards

Cards can be found in your deal pipeline. There are two ways to view your deal pipeline: by board or by list. When you’re viewing a board, you are viewing only your deals, displayed on cards. 

In HubSpot, you can modify the cards on your board to display deals that have been completely inactive for a specified number of days. That way, sales leaders can see which deals haven’t moved and need extra attention.

Managing the status of your deals is critical to keeping things moving at a pace that aligns with your team's sales goals—and to keeping important deals from stagnating or even pulling entirely.

4. Requirements to Progress to the Next Stage

Within HubSpot deals, to go from discovery to initial recommendations to onboarding, you need certain pieces of information. 

For instance, many organizations have what’s called a BANT criteria: budget, authority, need, and time. You can typically open and create a deal if you have one of the four. You can’t win a deal, however, unless you have covered all four of those criteria. 

With this feature, you can require different steps and stages before moving deals can be moved to the next stage. This creates speed bumps in your process to keep deals from moving too fast. That way, deals don’t prematurely move through the pipeline, and your sales team doesn’t have to backtrack. 

5. Meeting Type Oversight

You know your sales team is constantly meeting with clients—what if you could use data about the nature of those meetings to help keep sales on track? 

Without this feature, HubSpot will simply indicate how many meetings a member of your team has. But there’s a toggle switch in your HubSpot portal that allows you to modify and create different meeting types to better understand the stage your sales team members are in with each individual client. You, as a sales leader, can learn when your team has had an initial call, demo, discovery meetings, contract discussions, kickoff meetings, and so on with their clients. 

With specified meeting types, you can keep track of what types of meetings your team has at a more granular level to ensure everyone is aligned and on track with your sales goals.

Dive into HubSpot Sales Hub with SmartBug

Of course you want to make the most of your investment in HubSpot to see the biggest possible returns year over year. Even once you’ve identified all the tools at your disposal to maximize sales opportunities, you might need additional help to maximize growth. SmartBug Media’s team can help you create and implement content and sales strategies, as well as make the most of the tools at your disposal for an amazing CRM experience. Chat with us today to see how our team can help you take your next steps toward growth.

If you’re looking for the perfect CRM for your needs, we’ve got you covered there, too. Both HubSpot Sales Hub and Salesforce have great reputations, and we can help you identify which will meet your specific needs.