Preface
Rated as the top-performing customer relationship management (CRM) platform by G2 Spring 2022 CRM Grid, HubSpot continues to help companies win on customer experience. A cloud-based CRM platform built from the ground up, not by acquisition, HubSpot has become a single source of truth for businesses to deliver a best-in-class customer experience.
With four main hubs – a marketing hub, a sales hub, a service hub, an operations hub, and CRM – as well as over 1,000 integrations available through its App Marketplace, HubSpot reduces friction from your customer experience. It seamlessly combines content, messaging, automation, reporting, and data all in one unified platform, making it easier for your teams to adapt and speed up their efficiency in order to improve the buyer's experience.
With this amount of functionality, it can be sometimes overwhelming to know where to begin, and even though HubSpot offers a wealth of resources through its academy, blogs, website, and even natively in the portal, there is nothing like an old-fashioned manual to walk you through the steps from A to Z. For this reason, this book was written.
This book is not meant to be a duplication of the vast output of resources of HubSpot that are readily available to all users; instead, it aims to serve as a guide to help marketing and sales teams understand where to begin, what to focus on, and what best practices to consider when implementing various tools. In addition, the last section aims to help you understand whether HubSpot is right for your business and also discusses some of the terminology used over the years, such as funnel, flywheel, and RevOps, that increased the demand for CRM platforms as companies aimed to scale.
It is important to point out that although we previously mentioned that HubSpot has four main hubs, including CRM, this book specifically focuses on the marketing and sales hubs and CRM. You can choose to focus on any of the chapters you wish or read all of them if you want to learn some best practices or simply double-check any of your previous setups or campaigns.
We do hope that you are able to implement some of the recommendations mentioned throughout the chapters, and we encourage you to share any lessons or tips learned in your reviews or feedback on the book.
Who this book is for
This HubSpot marketing book is for sales and marketing professionals, business owners, and entrepreneurs who want to use HubSpot for scaling their sales and marketing activities. A basic understanding of key marketing terms is required to get started with this book.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Overview of HubSpot – What You MUST Know, explores how to get started in Hubspot and navigate the system. You will get step-by-step walkthroughs of how to set up the various parts of HubSpot correctly and become a system administrator.
Chapter 2, Generating Quick Wins with HubSpot in the First 30 days, explains how to combine the most basic features in HubSpot to generate quick wins in the first 30 days of setting up the platform.
Chapter 3, Using HubSpot for Managing Sales Processes Effectively, shows you how to manage their sales process using HubSpot. From reading this chapter, you will be able to understand which contacts in your database are real prospects and have the potential to close as a customer, and to closely identify which stage in the sales process they are currently in and what's needed to take them to the next stage.
Chapter 4, Empowering Your Sales Team Through HubSpot, explains how to manage Hubspot CRM and Sales Hub for sales teams and managers. You will learn how to use Hubspot tools to create meetings, tasks, and functions only designed for sales.
Chapter 5, Increasing Online Visibility Using HubSpot's SEO Tool, demonstrates how to use the HubSpot SEO tool to get found online.
Chapter 6, Getting Known Through Social Media on HubSpot, explores how to use the social media tool within HubSpot to listen, monitor, and engage appropriately with your target audience.
Chapter 7, Expanding Your Reach with Paid Ads Managed in HubSpot, shows you how to master integrating adverts (LinkedIn, Google Ads, and Facebook) with HubSpot and use this information to drive these visitors further down the funnel.
Chapter 8, Conducting a Portal Audit, examines some of the missed opportunities the marketing and sales team forego when using HubSpot, resulting in poor reporting and understanding of business activities.
Chapter 9, Converting Your Visitors to Customers, explains how to create landing pages, forms, and workflow strategies and nurture programs to engage with your leads and customers. This section will help you create a marketing funnel using Hubspot's lead capture and engagement tools.
Chapter 10, Revive Your Database with HubSpot's Email Marketing Tools, shares tips and best practices for creating emails and sending. You will gain knowledge on templates, sending options, functionalities, and best practices for writing and sending emails in Hubspot.
Chapter 11, Proving That Your Efforts Worked Using These Reports, explores how to create reporting and tracking within Hubspot and identify key trends in your data. You will learn to build custom reports, dashboards, and notifications to keep on top of company marketing goals.
Chapter 12, Inbound or Outbound – Which Is Better for Your Business?, deciphers the benefits of inbound versus outbound and whether the two can co-exist in today's businesses.
Chapter 13, Leveraging the Benefits of the Marketing Flywheel, explains why the marketing flywheel replaced the marketing funnel and how it helps marketers produce more successful campaigns and businesses reach their targets faster.
Chapter 14, Using HubSpot for All Types of Businesses, explains how to use HubSpot for every type of business, such as manufacturing, agriculture, technology, SaaS, and e-commerce.
To get the most out of this book
To get the most out of this book, it is highly recommended to have either a HubSpot Marketing Hub Professional license, a Sales Professional license, or a combination of both. You will also need super admin access to your portal in order to perform many of the tasks outlined in the chapters. You should also have some understanding of digital marketing concepts, such as search engine optimization (SEO), social media, paid ads, or email marketing, as well as some knowledge of sales operations and processes.
If you are focusing on the marketing tools discussed in this book, note that you will need to also have admin access to your social media platforms and paid ad platforms – for example, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google Ads. For the initial setup, having access to the backend of your website and domain provider is necessary. However, if in doubt about how to manage these platforms, it is recommended to work with your IT provider to avoid any issues.
After reading this book, please share any improvements or successes achieved via your preferred social media channels using the #hubspotlessons hashtag so that other readers can benefit as well.
Download the color images
We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots and diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: https://static.packt-cdn.com/downloads/9781838987145_ColorImages.pdf.
Conventions used
There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.
Code in text: Indicates code words in the text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "Set the Invite subject, which can have a personal token or company token in it, so it can read Meeting with [Your Name] + [Company Name / Contact Name]."
Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For instance, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in bold. Here is an example: "The quotation tool is a paid feature of HubSpot Sales Professional and can be found by navigating to the top menu and clicking on Sales | Quotes."
Tips or Important Notes
Appear like this.
Get in touch
Feedback from our readers is always welcome.
General feedback: If you have questions about any aspect of this book, email us at [email protected] and mention the book title in the subject of your message.
Errata: Although we have taken every care to ensure the accuracy of our content, mistakes do happen. If you have found a mistake in this book, we would be grateful if you would report this to us. Please visit www.packtpub.com/support/errata and fill in the form.
Piracy: If you come across any illegal copies of our works in any form on the internet, we would be grateful if you would provide us with the location address or website name. Please contact us at [email protected] with a link to the material.
If you are interested in becoming an author: If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, please visit authors.packtpub.com.
Share Your Thoughts
Once you've read Empowering Marketing and Sales with HubSpot, we'd love to hear your thoughts! Please click here to go straight to the Amazon review page for this book and share your feedback.
Your review is important to us and the tech community and will help us make sure we're delivering excellent quality content.