The HubSpot Growth Stack includes a variety of tools to help you capture more high-quality, Inbound Marketing leads and move them into your sales pipeline. Let's take a look at some of these tools - Hubspot Forms, Lead Flows and Messages, and how best to leverage them for your website.
The Power of HubSpot Forms and Lead Flows
These two tools - forms and lead flows - easily allow website visitors to provide their information to you.
Forms collect multiple pieces of information about website visitors and those form questions should be good enough to be used as part of your lead qualification process. Chances are, your website already has at least one form on it - usually a contact us form, and those form submissions flow the data directly into your CRM as contact records.
Lead flows, on the other hand - are simpler than forms, and typically only collect one or two pieces of information, such as an email address. An email address is just enough information for the HubSpot CRM to create a contact record where you’ll be able to see a full history of the pages that person has visited on your website. And if the email address uses their company’s website domain, then the CRM will be able to create a company record full of publicly available information, such as company size, location, and industry. So from just a simple email address collected by a lead flow, the HubSpot CRM can give you a whole bunch of other information about where a person may be coming from and what they might be looking for.
Get Sales To Help With Lead Qualification
Now ask yourself ... Is this a good lead? Is there enough information for you to feel comfortable reaching out to this person? If not, why not? What information do you need to be able to properly qualify these leads? Start working with your sales team and ask them what data do they need to call a lead qualified? Get them to buy into the form questions - they can't have too many fields, so you will need to balance this with conversion rates and a/b testing, but you will be able to increase the quality of the leads coming in from your website this way, and that will ultimately result in a more engaged and happier sales team, able to turn leads into sales.
HubSpot Messages As A Lead Generation Tool
Another tool that helps you capture inbound leads is HubSpot Messages - a live chat tool that's built specifically for sales teams. You can use it to chat directly with website visitors and start building a relationship with them right away.
Live chat is a great way to capture leads because it helps you meet your prospects where they are, without requiring them to fill out a form or ask for help.
Here are some pro tips to help you get the most out of messages:
1. First, put messages on specific pages - The messages chat pane doesn’t have to be displayed on every single page of your website, so you can get strategic here. If you have a pricing page or pages describing your products, you’ll want to be able to chat with people on those pages because that’s where people go when they’re looking to buy. But your blog and homepage? Maybe not the best place to be trying to have real-time conversations. This is a great area to try a little experimentation. Put messages on different pages and see where you have the most valuable conversations, then lean into those pages.
2. Next, customize your welcome message - This is the text that shows up in the chat pane when it appears on the page. For best results, create different messages for different pages. So if you do have a pricing page, and you put a message on it, have it say something like, “Have questions about our pricing structure? I’m here to help!” The more customized you make the message, the more likely people are to engage with you.
3. Next, decide who you want to chat with - For each message you create, you can set the target audience, which controls who the chat pane appears to. You have a few different options here.
You can have the messages pane displayed to everyone who visits your website or just to known contacts — or you can have it display to only people who meet certain criteria, as defined by a list or view. If you aren’t sure what to do, start by showing the message to everyone. If you find that you’re getting more chats than you can handle, you can start restricting it, but starting out, the more people you give the opportunity to chat with you, the more people you’ll be able to help. And the more people you help, the more sales you’ll make.
4. Customize your offline message - You aren’t always going to be available to chat in real-time, but that doesn’t mean you can’t still be helping people. Customize your offline message so people will still want to engage with you. If somebody sends you a message, you’ll receive it in an email so you can respond later.
5. Finally, set your availability - By default, you’ll only appear online if you have the messages screen open in your browser. By setting your availability, you can make it so your visitors can always reach you during certain times of day.
In addition to forms, lead flows, and messages, one final tool that will help you capture inbound leads is prospects.
What About Prospects - Can You Count Them As Leads?
The prospects tool in HubSpot shows a list of companies that have visited your website.
By frequently going through the list you can see who's visiting your website - so favorite any companies you’re currently working with or trying to work with. Then turn on notifications so you’ll be alerted anytime one of these companies visits your website.
If a company that’s gone cold starts coming back to your website, now might be a good time to restart the conversation with them and turn them into a lead.
Or if you see that a company you haven’t been working with has been visiting your website a lot, you can reach out to them and see where you can help. Don’t go for a hard sale — just try to figure out who you need to be talking to and what their situation is. And then find some way to help them with whatever it is they’re trying to do.
So forms and lead flows, messages, and prospects are the main HubSpot tools that will help you find and capture new leads. Experiment with them until you find the combination that works best for your target customers. As you find ways to meet your customers where they are, you’ll find more leads coming into your pipeline, and more sales coming out the other end.
THE BRIT AGENCY is a B2B Inbound Marketing Agency providing Inbound Marketing, Inbound Website Design and Inbound Sales services to companies around the world. We're focused on growing website traffic, qualified leads and sales, using the Inbound lead generation and marketing automation process.
THE BRIT AGENCY is a Certified Platinum Tier Hubspot Partner, a HubSpot CMS and GDD certified Inbound Website Design Agency, a Shopify eCommerce Partner, and a certified "Google Badged Agency Partner". We have offices in Toronto and Barrie, Canada, and Salisbury, UK.
