The year is 2018. I'm the Marketing Automation Specialist at a great B2B SaaS company. We have an amazing marketing team generating lots of leads and a very motivated inbound SDR team qualifying leads and connecting them to the correct sales reps for demo's. However, I'm working with a HubSpot Marketing & SalesForce toolstack. The SDR's use Salesloft plugged into both systems and with lots of troubleshooting, managing duplicates and old data, various reports with exclude leads with engagement before a certain date to limit our cleanup efforts, recurring sync errors and a hotline to our Sales Ops team we do pretty well. But. The tools we were working with did not make it easier. Fast forward to August 2023 and I'm looking at a live demo of the new HubSpot prospects tool and I'd love to go ahead and enable inbound SDR teams with this new setup!
I'm not going to lie, when I first heard the HubSpot Admin User Group team describe the features and the fact that we now have a lead object to deal with, I was worried. But after reviewing how most businesses use a lead object in other CRM systems I realised it's not an issue with the object but how it's used. As with most things, I think this new feature is very user-friendly and I assume this makes the setup for your sales funnel a lot easier with less room to use it in the 'wrong' way. That doesn't mean you shouldn't think carefully through your process though!
Understanding New Prospects Beta:
New Prospects Beta is a home page for your outbound SDR team that aims to streamline and enhance your business development strategies. The new lead object helps you to streamline your workflow, something that's usually managed through automating lead Status and Stage fields.
In the past I've jumped through quite a few hoops to for example timestamp conversions in order to track valuable 'leads' but reporting on this object will be a lot easier and not to mention ready to go out of the box!
The most important takeaway for me is that it's now so much easier to track my leads pipeline over time and when I review a contact, I can see how they engaged with my organisation before.
Of course it's the week of INBOUND, HubSpot's annual conference and that means lot's of product updates. This is what the full update to the Prospects workspace will look like after this week:
- Prospecting workspace and leads management
- New out of the box lead reporting
- A/B testing on sequences
- New sequences reporting
- Book a meeting for your colleagues
- Book a meeting directly on the website
- Sequences available on mobile
- Log engagements directly from SalesForce
The new Lead object is interesting to me as it gives me easy tracking and reporting out of the box that shows me all meaningful engagements inbound or outbound for the people in my funnel. Of course, there is built-in automation in the leads pipeline that updates the lead status automatically as your lead moves through your sequences.
What I found interesting to hear is that the lead object is helping us keep a record of all the previous lead statuses over time, also when someone has connected with my organisation over time, with different requests and perhaps we spoke about different products.
Now Leads is an object, we can customise them as we do with for example Deals.
The way I like to look at this is like I do with the Campaigns and Quote object. They don't take away from my main objects (Contact, Company, and Deal) but now we have more robust automation, settings, and reporting to see how the humans we sell move through the pipeline.
What does your SDR pipeline and workflow look like? Are you using a third party tool
next to HubSpot and SalesForce? Or do you only work in HubSpot and you've created an SDR pipeline you'd like to replace with a better fit solution? Do you want to clean up early or SDR qualifying stages in your pipeline you'd like to clean up? Get in touch and I'd be happy to chat about your process!
