CRMs have a reputation of being disliked by salespeople, who view them as an administrative burden that prevents them from doing what they do best, sell!
However, when used correctly, a CRM can be a powerful tool to enable and drive the sales process. HubSpot’s CRM is one example of a user friendly solution which can really help salespeople to do their jobs.
In this episode of The SME Growth Podcast, Dave Parry and Richard Buckle from Wellmeadow continue their discussion on why HubSpot’s CRM is a great solution for salespeople who stereotypically dislike the software. This is part 2 of 2 on the topic (if you haven't listened to part 1, listen here) and this time discuss the benefits of automation in the sales processes, such as using canned responses, sending reminders and notifications, and automating tasks throughout the sales pipeline. They also highlight the importance of data analysis and predictive analytics in driving decision-making and working efficiently. Finally, they discuss helpful tools and plugins available to integrate with a CRM. Below you can find a summary into the three mentioned plugins, OrgChartHub, Geomapper and Fathom, or you can head straight to the episode.
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Find out more about what we do at www.wellmeadow.co.uk
You can listen to the full episode here
OrgChartHub is a powerful integration designed to map the organisation structure of a business to give you visual insights into buying roles, relationships and key stakeholders - directly viewable in HubSpot's Company panel. The plugin also includes Activity Heatmapping to understand how each person at the business is interacting with your business. It makes it simple and easy to identify any gaps in communication and ensure all key members are involved. It is very easy to set up and will have a pretty good guess at the organisation structure based on their own AI tool (using job titles). You can also customise the views to show different HubSpot properties on the cards in the chart.
Also created by the same people that created OrgChartHub, Geomapper is a great plugin to boost geographical understanding of your customers and prospects. It can help you plan efficient trips, design localised campaigns or help with territory management. Using HubSpot address properties and accessible via contacts or companies, Geomapper is able to filter which companies or contacts are located where and plan a route to achieve the most time effective journey. This is an impressive tool, designed to save time and boost efficiency and visually illustrate geographical reach.
Fathom is your AI assistant to save time on note taking and follow ups after a meeting. Once connected to your CRM and meeting platform of choice (Zoom or Teams), Fathom will record the meeting and produce not only a transcript of the meeting, but also a highlight summary (generated by AI). The next trick is where it automatically updates the contact, company and deal records in your CRM with the recording link and a copy of the meeting summary. You don't even have to open up HubSpot for it to happen. It's a real time-saver and much more comprehensive than quickly taken manually notes you scribble after you hang up.
Want to listen later? Head to Spotify, the episode if also available to listen on Apple Podcast, and click here for all other available platforms.
Please note: Whilst all transcripts are double checked for accuracy, they are transcribed via Otter.AI so may contain errors.
David Parry 01:41
So hello, and welcome to The SME Growth Podcast for another week. And this is episode two or part two of the series that we started last week talking about why salespeople actually like a CRM, HubSpot CRM. Traditionally, we come across lots that just see it as a big monster to feed with information. So I'm Dave Perry from well meadow and joining me to continue our journey on that explanation is Rich, Richard Buckle.
Richard Buckle 02:10
*Speaks High Valyrian*
David Parry02:20
You're making that up, I don't believe a word of it, one of these days
Richard Buckle 02:40
I'll meet someone and someone will come in a robe or something from Valyria
David Parry 02:45
Okay, so part two. So last week, we covered a few things. So a quick recap. And if any of these interests you, and you haven't listened to last week's podcast, then we plan about that go and go listen to it and see what we were talking about. So we talked about the plugin for Outlook or Gmail and how it effectively brings a CRM system inside your email client and how useful it is. We talked about hotspots, magical powers of being able to identify hitherto anonymous cookies. So you know, what your users are doing, where they'll be on your website and stuff like that, which is great. We talked about how you can get people to book meetings with you and how that tracks who they are as well. And for the whole meeting tool colour integration. We did talk about about the Lead Forensics equivalent within HubSpot, which if for no other reason helps people justify the cost out of HubSpot, because they can stop paying for forensics if they are, and the customisability and some of the conditionality for how you set up views. I waffled on a bit about task management, because I find that quite useful and helping salespeople to prioritise their tasks and get through loads. And I think we've finished up on sending quotes sending documents out and being able to track not only that they've been opened, but how many seconds you spent on each page
Richard Buckle 03:56
And we touched on the Qwilr integration.
David Parry 03:59
That's right, which we're using a bit more and more. So that was last week, even touched a bit on the app as well, which probably a whole new episode on the app we could do. So we did say at the end of last week that we would cover a little bit about automating emails going out, especially when you're trying to get somebody to respond to you for the first time that some can text, some of the uses for automation. And we've got quite a few of these things, both for just helping you do your job and for helping analysis of what works and what doesn't. You have to come up with that. Talk about calling and how you use HubSpot to make the phone calls or make it through HubSpot, and then some third party plugins. All right. strapped in ready to go for that.
Richard Buckle 04:41
That's good. That's good.
David Parry 04:43
So this one is something I talked about with emails, they call that sequences. Have you played around with much of them?
Richard Buckle 04:50
Not had a huge, huge play with it. But it's it's one of those things where I think it's probably more of your outbound and cold calling almost
David Parry 05:03
Yes, converting a cold prospect to someone who's talking to you, it certainly saves a lot of time. And it makes sure it's happened. Because you know, it's like if you've got someone you try and track them down, you email them and didn't respond, you mail them again. And then you kind of forget about that. And as you've probably had quoted to a million times, it takes on average, insert your number here, but 7 or 10 emails before someone responds, I'm not sure where that data comes from and, and how true it is, there must be a high variation on it. But it's certainly true that I in my experience, have finally cracked and responded, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10 emails into a thread. If I haven't just deleted the thing and marked it as junk
Richard Buckle 05:40
I think the thing with sequences as well, isn't it, it's not just the emails, this might might be like, Okay, the first two emails and the next thing is to go and connect to them on LinkedIn. And then the next thing is maybe try and give him a phone call. And it's, it's that kind of, and then maybe it's another email, it's the kind of cumulative effort isn't it to try and warm somebody up.
David Parry 05:59
And I've noticed as well, and you've seen them inbound, so I start to spot them now when other people are using them, they get they change tone very cleverly. So they might start off quite professional. Hello, I hope you don't mind me contacting you, but I've got this and you might be interested. And the second one is just in case you missed it, you know, I just thought I bumped this to the top of your inbox again. And then I'm not sure if you're ignoring me or not. And then by the end, they just get, you know, quite humorous back
Richard Buckle 06:24
Or when they start the line with re, and then it's like I replied, something I must have.
David Parry 06:30
Yeah, that's really cheeky.
Richard Buckle 06:32
Nice try.
David Parry 06:33
Yeah, not buying that one I try. So sequences, it's only available if you're one of the sales seats in the system, so not everyone can use it. It doesn't suit everybody. It's a kind of a style thing. But like you say, if you're trying to get that stranger to you to finally respond
Richard Buckle 06:48
I think it would work well, if you were maybe if you're collecting, say going to an exhibition or show or something and you were collecting a lot of business cards or email addresses that type of thing. To manage that process of building the relationship. Something like sequences could be really good. I think it also works well if you've got a larger sales team if you're on a high volume of prospects you're trying to reach because if you want everybody to go through a similar process, have setting up a sequence can be quite a good way of making certainly standardise these things.
David Parry 07:19
If you're a big team, or you're doing lots of them. The other neat feature about it is that as soon as somebody responds, it stops the sequence. Yeah. So if you've racked up 10 different messages getting increasingly humorous, slash desperate, slash annoyed, whatever it is, your style is, then it stops it when they finally take the bait. So that sequences thought was useful. The other thing I use for all sorts of different reasons is what HubSpot calls snippets. But it's effectively canned text. So you can type in anything from a word up to 5000 Word document. And you just trigger it with one click
Richard Buckle 07:52
In old fashioned money, Magic Minutes money that was called Help Text wasn't it? For those listeners that use Magic Minutes.
David Parry 08:00
A rarefied community of experts and knowledgeable wise people who use the Wellmeadow inhouse meeting management software. Yes, hypertext snippets, same thing. Yeah. It's a bit like AutoCorrect. We talked about that in one of our automation episodes or the AutoHotKey. I use it though, as I say, I've got several bits of whole paragraphs in there. And I can just insert that into my emails. And it's accessible on the phone. If you're using the app when you're writing an email or in the browser, or in your Outlook client.
Richard Buckle 08:30
And for things, it's things like repeatable phrases like I don't know, lead time or something, isn't it? I think you can, you can personalise and customise the snippets Can't you see that doesn't have to be just the text, you can bring in. If you had a kind of, I don't know, a lead time field that was maybe 14 days. And then for another product, it's 30 days or something, you can bring that snippet in and depending upon the contract that will either say, seven days or 30 days or whatever. Yeah, it's very flexible in that sense. And seen it used a lot for things just like contractual terms that need to go into a quote, or T&Cs
David Parry 09:07
Or block text, you wouldn't want to put it in your standard, or you call it you know, any follow up email the text there with your signature on it, you wouldn't want to put in there, but you want to put it in when you choose to. Well, I used it a bit when we used to get inquiries, a lot more for renting desk space in offices on a co working basis of inquiry. I just had a canned response. Yeah, this is where you go online, look at some photos, contact me if you're interested. And it just saves you from having to write a load. I used it as well for speculative job applicants, pointing them to the careers page on the website and thanking them for their interest, that type of thing. Or even people just trying to sell me stuff that I'm not interested in, you know, being polite about it. Just say the same to all of them. So yeah, snippets quite handy. Just speed you up writing new emails. Maybe that's less valuable than some of these other ones though. So I want to talk a bit now about the automation because HubSpot is at its heart, a bit of automation software. It's a database with automation on the back of it, isn't it? Yeah. Now I know a lot of that functionality is used it for by the marketing teams to do things when people respond to a webpage or download or whatever. But it's also useful for salespeople. And one that I've used it for recently is just on all the open deals, if the closed date is coming up in the next seven days, it sends me an email just to say, You got to deal here with the close date at the end of the month, you might want to revise that, because if you haven't closed it now, you've only got seven days to do it. And I found that very useful to make sure I avoid that problem that I think probably all CRMs have have dates in the past. Which are the predicted close dates, so a good bit of housekeeping. What other things you've used it for?
Richard Buckle 10:46
Well, you can automate the whole, I suppose it's a slightly separate thing. But you can also automate the whole pipeline. So you've obviously got different deal stages throughout the pipeline. And maybe at different stages, you need different things to happen. Someone needs to be informed, or maybe someone's got to sign off on a technical spec. Or maybe you want to let everybody know that you won to deal or you want to send a feedback form out , when you've lost a job or something, whatever the context is, all of that can be automated with the pipeline, it just takes out so much overhead. Now you do, I find more times than not people resist automation in the pipeline, I don't know quite why, because a lot of that stuff is sort of, you just want the answer the whole process of going through and getting it but it's it is all there. And it is something that could be probably more widely exploited.
David Parry 11:34
So imagine every time you move a deal to the contract sent stage or whatever you call that in your pipeline, you might want to ping off an email to finance to get ready for the fact we might win it and maybe do a credit check on them or something or, or when you've won the deal, send an email to find that to open the account on the accounting software, or wherever it may be.
Richard Buckle 11:52
Or even Yeah, or even just letting people know, I mean, we had one client a while back to me where it was almost like the board meeting would be the place where the sort of the design team would would learn what was going on.
David Parry 12:03
Yeah, thanks for telling us.
Richard Buckle 12:05
So you could have something, contract sent, everybody gets an email to say, these are the details, this looks like it might drop in six months or something.
David Parry 12:12
Yeah, and this is the person who enters the deal, If you want anymore information, give them a ring. The one I've used it for, I think I mentioned last week about lapsed customers. So if I've marked a deal as closed last, in six months on, I send myself an email through the system automatically to say, Oh, you lost this deal six months ago. And the reason I do that is because quite often the reason for not proceeding at the time, and the reason I closed it as lost was just the timing wasn't right, or it didn't have the budget at that point, or it was the wrong time in their budget cycle or whatever it may be. Now, it may not be that you've remembered to put a task in it may not be appropriate to. So it's often a good prompt to say oh, by the way, six months ago, we had a chat, you know, it wasn't the right timing, then just I'd ask is it worth another chat now? And okay, you're gonna have a reasonably low hit rate, but it's such a low effort thing to do. and it flushes it out.
Richard Buckle 13:02
So cool. And it's amazing how much stuff actually ends up in that lost column for you know, either just through laziness or through just can't be bothered to chase something up, or, like you say, but wasn't the right time budget wasn't available, yet, circumstance wasn't right. So actually having a mechanism to just say actually, it's not really, you know, lots of things aren't truly lost in the sense unless it's a time bound offer is it.
David Parry 13:28
And it's easy when you're busy. You know, I know that you could set yourself tasks using any other software, even Outlook tasks or something, you could set a task when you send a quote, for example, or remember to dress up in three days. Now that is easy to do within HubSpot, and you click it you say remind me in three days. But if you automated it, you're absolutely buttoned braces, you could say after a week after I've moved something to the proposal sent stage. If you haven't heard anything back, there's no activity, send me an email. If something's something needs to be pushed, so push it. So it's useful all that type of thing. Just think through how could I slick it up, make lots of things happen while I'm asleep.
Richard Buckle 14:03
I think most of us are much better at responding to something done to somebody. So if you get that email saying, Hey, I got the email now. You know, it's been six months since we spoke, but we're in a position of Oh, right. Okay. Yeah, that's the automations done that. I'll respond. Yeah, the likelihood of me remembering something that happened six months ago.
David Parry 14:21
The other day, I even set up a task for in the future about long way in the future. I think it was a six months hence, type thing, because something had cropped up in the conversation where why there was a reason why I would want to bring up, I can't remember what it was, but in six months time, and I effectively wrote the email for six months time in my reminder to say send an email saying this. And then when I get the reminder, all I got to do is copy and paste that into anything and are more likely to do it. As opposed to just getting an email saying compose an email, think about it. I remember where you were, you know, if I'm busy, I might more likely forget that. So that's good. All sorts of automation you can do around that.
Richard Buckle 14:58
Did you want to talk about push counters?
David Parry 15:00
Well that's interesting because it's, it's still a version of automation, something that automation can do. Now, I think I'm right in saying that Salesforce has that particular functionality out the box, a push counter, it's just one of the features it has. And pushed count is how many times if you change the close date of an opportunity or a deal. Now HubSpot doesn't have it out of the box. But it's very easy to build a very simple automation on it, just say that every time the close date changes, increment a property called push count, by one. And the reason we do that is partly long in the tooth deals, if it just happens to have always been an in the future thing, and it was expected to close a year after talking about then fine, push counts can be low. But if after 12 months, you've changed the date 12 times, probably one month, every time something's wrong, right? They're just not closing. Either you're not very good at getting information about our qualified this is, or someone's jerking the chain a little bit. And we that is one of the many things that we tried to collect to help us with analysis. So is that a good opportunity to talk about somebody else's work we've done before?
Richard Buckle 16:04
Perfect segue. So yeah, so we've done, we started quite a big project internally around, let's call it AI, but it's not really AI it's more machine learning.
David Parry 16:17
Machine learning is part of AI
Richard Buckle 16:19
Regression analysis on, on just trying to understand what what factors influenced a deal that was either won or lost. And trying to look back through all the data within HubSpot, and say, you know, was it the, the location of the company? Or was it the push count, if the push count gets to five is the, what's the probability of the deal being won, does it diminish and drop off or, and all these other factors and looking at that, so actually building some of these, you know, having some workflows to collect the data within HubSpot, like the push count can then be quite powerful in terms of being able to analyse further, you know, further down the line and say, Can we start to actually get some predictive analytics out of this as to what behaviours should we be changing? Now, we're doing something at the moment where we're using HubSpot scoring, which is, you know, it's a similar type of thing you're attributing points to certain interactions or demographics or behaviour properties that you're, you're sort of designing that, but then the system is collecting all of those things. And then you can drive a lot of the automations off those points. But you could also then look back at it and do that analysis and say, Well, okay, we know that if a if a prospect gets to 80 points, they're 10 times more likely than if someone gets to 40 points to close a deal or something. So a lot of that stuff, again, involves thinking through what it is you want to do, building the automations into your sort of marketing or sales processes. And then having that data available to do that analysis.
David Parry 18:02
One thing I think we learnt with that as well is having the data, the most up to date version of the data wasn't enough. And because you're doing the analysis, after you know whether a job has been won or lost, what you really need to know is what state was that opportunity in six months ago, three months ago, or just when we first heard about it, and you've overwritten that data? Now, I know that the audit trail within HubSpot will tell you if you looked at it, what was that value a long time ago, but it's not easily accessible for analysis. So it's good to run a little automation that says when a deal is a month old, capture this particular set of information and put that there. Yeah. And then maybe when it's two months or three months, I'll do it again. So you've got something you can then go back and say, How did how did this deal evolve through time? Yeah, how many emails did we get back from them? What speed did they respond with? How many times have we revised the quote or whatever. And the push count is just one of those.
Richard Buckle 18:54
Another thing, I suppose another piece of analysis that we've we've used automation to help is around looking at your kind of funnel conversion rates. So you've got your various stages through your deal, pipeline or funnel. And you might want to know what your conversion rates are between each stage. Now, unless that deal has been through each stage in HubSpot, it doesn't the reporting doesn't quite add up. You leapfrog a stage or two. So you know what, what you could do is manually go through and move each deal through each stage
David Parry 19:28
Or have a rule you only ever move it one at a time
Richard Buckle 19:31
But given that, you know, that that sort of thing can fall by the wayside, having a workflow in the background that that manages that if you know if a deal was they just skipped market and knock it back and give it a date and at least then you're getting your conversion ratios to the process.
David Parry 19:48
Yeah, that's good. That was useful that helped a client. Yeah. Good. Okay. Couple more things that are native and then we'll finish up with some third party plugins. So calls we mentioned calls. When I did that task bit last week, because if you have a task to do call it pop it up. So the point of this is that with the Pro and Enterprise versions, you get certain number of minutes each month where you're able to make calls through HubSpot. Now, again, it's not because it's cheaper, because clearly most call plans, it's all inclusive calls anyway, these days. The point is that you can do it through the browser. No, actually, you can divert it through your phone as well. And it'll call your phone and connect you but it's a lot quicker if you just do it through the browser using the HubSpot calling. So you get the call, you click on the say, I want to call them, maybe there's only one number that goes straight through, you'll just start dialling it straightaway. So you've got the headset on anyway, because you're doing Teams calls and whatnot, or it's time to grab, you have the call hang up, it tells you when you had it, how long it was just typing any notes you've got. But if you want to, you can get it to transcribe the call. Assuming you tell the other person you're recording the call, if you want to record it. And then it's that so it makes it very easy to go back and listen to a previous call when you're going to call somebody again.
Richard Buckle 20:55
And you can search for keywords. Yeah, if you did have a particular keyword or you know, did so and so mentioned the quantum flux generator.
David Parry 21:07
You missed you skipped the key benefits of that. And I've seen this use and they talk about it a lot on the coaching of salespeople. So if you are a sales manager, Business Manager, you can pick up some of the calls from some of your team driver, look for good examples to showcase and share with others, or to find some areas where somebody hasn't picked up their training or rushed a bit or something and give them a bit of feedback. So yeah, that's good calls. And you can do that through your phone as well. If you want to make the call through HubSpot calling on your phone, it'll just divert it through the internet instead of using the call plan. And then it records the fact you made the call, which is good. And now the integrate the other in already inbuilt one is integrated dashboards. I think that's worth mentioning.
Richard Buckle 21:51
Yeah, so you've got quite a lot of flexibility around dashboard design within HubSpot, and you can bring there's an awful lot you can bring in generate your reports put them into a dashboard. But it's quite a neat feature in being able to connect it to third party data sources. So it doesn't have to be something that's residing within HubSpot, you could connect to Google Sheets, or you could bring in data from elsewhere into your
David Parry 22:15
even a web page. If you want to include the FTP page on exchange rates or something,
Richard Buckle 22:20
whatever you wanted to do. So that that can make your dashboards a little bit more. I don't know like digestible, maybe just bring in information that you need that is naturally going to sit within
David Parry 22:32
well, it saves having to design Power BI, or whatever people use. And it's got the similar functionality. And if you click on a bar in a bar chart, or a dot, it will then pop up a modal window will pop up window and give you a list of what makes up that piece of data, which you can then further click on and drill down. So pretty interactive, 3d
Richard Buckle 22:49
Interactive, I think just as an aside is just one of the things we're playing with at the moment. It's just trying to make the dashboards a little bit more like a story. And just try and talk people through the kind of lead gen process with, you know, much clearer headings, and what are we trying to achieve here and rather than just have a you know, photographs of you that your HubSpot dashboard, not oftentimes, it's just like so much data in there you can we can't see the wood for the trees. But just trying to step back a little bit and give a bit more space talk people through come up with that story as to, you know, kind of organising. Where would someone start?
David Parry 23:25
Listeners might remember we did a podcast once called marketing is a process. That right, where we talked about the Wellmeadow Growth Generator model we use, and that very much talks about the journey that somebody takes from being a stranger through to a customer and then an advocate as a process, so you're telling our story. So if you laid your dashboard out, accordingly, you can put the headings in and give a bit more flavour. Okay, they're all good in both stuff. We wanted to finish on three particularly good plugins that we found. And it's flattering for them, I suppose. But two of them come from the same developer. They just seem to really hit the nail on the head of what is useful for salespeople. And I've got to say when I've shown these to salespeople that are new to HubSpot, even though it's not technically actually a HubSpot feature. And you could use this as a plugin to Salesforce or maybe Pipedrive or something. It's it's flippin useful. And so I cover those two to start with. One of them is called OrgChartHub. And it allows you to map out the organisation chart the reporting structure, if you like, or one of your customers. It does a pretty neat, it's well integrated, it's you can access it through the contacts or the company or the deal, and it pops up a little window showing your chart. The clever bit about it is that when you first want to do that for a company, it will go through database and find everybody with the same email domain, which could start or company name, and it will also use what he calls a bit of AI but I think it's more simplistic than that. But it tries to guess their onboarding structure. So if somebody's called the CEO Who puts his or her name at the top. If somebody's called director, they then report to the CEO, you can imagine how it works. And if there's a finance director and a finance manager, who makes them all reporting correctly, but there'll be loads that it hasn't got perhaps, or it's got it wrong, but it's very, very easy to just click and change what they all are.
So that's pretty neat anyway, but what you really want to use that for is a to understand who all the key players are in this organisation, I've got the stakeholders mapped out. So you can flag each one as saying, right, these are decision makers, a blocker influencer not involved at all, so you've labelled everybody up as to where they are. And then they've got this really eye popping feature, which is a bit of eye candy. But people always love it, which they call heat maps, click the heat map on switching between either marketing or sales activity. And it will show you in blobs of red and green and varying colours, where it has the activity happened on the org chart, and it overlays it. And if you can see that all you're doing is talking to the buyer, but not the user or the finance people, or in some cases, health and safety, legal purchasing whatever else it may be, you can see where your gaps are. So if you're trying to do an account based selling activity, and you've missed some of the key steep stakeholders, it's very prettily presented to you and you can easily act on it. Very, very neat. Very clever,
Richard Buckle 26:13
Then you can start tailoring your content then can you and things like that, and outreach
David Parry 26:17
It's just saying that it's so bloody obvious I need to ring that person. Yeah, well, that's a blind spot. Great for coaching and your sales manager, go into somebody's org chart of account they're dealing with now is the last time that anybody had any interaction with this person that's in their organisation? So from the same developer, Geomapping, did I show you this one the other day showed about that?
Richard Buckle 26:39
I think, yeah, you mentioned it.
David Parry 26:40
So it's got a nice sort of two way integration, this one it's quite clever. So you start off by you go into the same again, context, company deal or whatever, pick your companies. And you use a filter, which is written the same way that HubSpot has written so it's quite clever. They've made it so they're familiar with it. So based on all sorts of properties, which is probably more geographical, but it could be are their customer or prospect, or are they a big spender, or a small customer are they complicated buying process, whatever it may be, you choose your filters. And then you build a number of lists within your mapping programme. So you can choose which ones to plot onto your map. And it's of the world but you can zoom in to where they all are. So you can have red dots for prospects, green dots for customers, yellow dots for X customers, purple dots for people I want to go and see if I'm passing whatever it may be. And it will allow you to route planning on it. And also the two way bit is you can geofence any area on so if you've got a sales territory, or just over the UK, or you're going to do an exhibition in Germany, you draw a dotted line around an area, it grabs all the people in your database that are in that area. And it allows you to re import it back into HubSpot as a list. And once you go to the list, you can send them an email or do whatever you want, it's pretty neat.
Richard Buckle 27:55
What's the company called?
David Parry 27:56
So that is the same company as the OrgChart people, but it's called Geomapper. That's pretty good. I like that I was talking about the other day. If you're living in the Midlands, and you're taking a trip to Edinburgh to go and see a customer or going up for a show or something and you want to know who else is in the area, then straightaway look it on a map who's enroute if you're driving? Yep. So that's pretty neat. And once again, salespeople like the idea that I'm out on the road, who am I nearby?
Richard Buckle 28:20
Does it solve the travelling salesman problem?
David Parry 28:23
It almost does. If you select a number of locations, it will optimise the route for you
Richard Buckle 28:30
The travelling salesman problem is a long running. I don't know what it is conundrum? Yeah, conundrum.
David Parry 28:41
But it is a source of humour.
Richard Buckle 28:44
There was a moment about six months ago where we thought that ChatGPT had solved it. got very excited about it.
David Parry 28:51
But it turns out hadn't. So it probably only done it. In fact, he was worse than the way HubSpot does it At least HubSpot comes up with the right answer. But I think it works it out using a brute force method of just trying all the options possible and giving you the shortest route. Whereas ChatGPT, not surprisingly, was blagged it and came up with a very convincing incorrect answer.
Richard Buckle 29:10
So Orgchart and Geomapper, very useful.
David Parry 29:12
So I've saved the best for last in a way because all salespeople hate writing, meeting notes, visit reports, whatever it maybe. And these days, we're doing so many meetings on Zoom or Teams, that it's become a lot easier to record a call. Record a Zoom call or Teams call, that's fine. But nobody really wants to be able to wait through you know, let's say half an hour even our transcript even let alone the actual video and voice recording. It's just too much. So there's an app and there are several like it but the one we use is called Fathom. It's free, believe it or not, for unless you're going to the team plan. It automatically joins your Zoom meetings, it automatically notifies the other members of the meeting that you want to record it and gives them an opportunity to object if they don't want to. It sends out out the link to the recording afterwards with the transcript. But most importantly, it produces its own AI summary of the meeting in five or six bullet points even if it's an hour long. And it links into HubSpot automatically. You've you've linked the two pieces of software together. And it will put that AI summary of the meeting and link to the full recording in against all the people that you're meeting with. So I don't even open HubSpot, I have a meeting with someone. And I just know that the summary of that meeting is against that person. And they've got a copy of it. Incredible. And once again, whenever I've shown salespeople that who are used to having to just jot down a few key points are what the meeting was about. The thought that it's just taken not only taken that job away, but it's given them a much better version, and automatically put into all the people that need it, and you've sent it to the other side Unbelievable.
Richard Buckle 30:47
And the AI summaries are pretty sensible on it. Yeah, it works well, it's not a kind of random collection of words.
David Parry 30:52
If it's put it into, say, five or six bullet points, it puts you a timestamp. So if you want to go and listen to that, in full, it takes you straight to that point of the full video recording with the transcript underneath it and all that. So you know, the the fact that it's doing a recording and a transcript, and even the AI summary isn't so amazing these days, there's a number of apps out there, although lots of people aren't using them. But the fact that it integrates into HubSpot natively, and the record is already updated. It's just, it's just incredible. Very, very useful. So I thought I'd, those last three, I must admit are the ones that are turning the most heads, but and they are all third party plugins. But when you combine that with what HubSpot does anyway, out the box, yeah, part of its inherent functionality, and
Richard Buckle 31:33
Combine that with the CRM, and then the functionality around the sales and marketing to you know, that level of intelligence and efficiency, it's just
David Parry 31:42
so what we've tried to do there is really dispel for those that are still on the on the dark side, if you like thinking that CRMs are all evil, and only there to get yourself beaten up by your manager for they are there actually to help you do your job if these properly. In fact, it's probably a good test of a CRM. Does it help you sell more? Or is it just there to waste your time
Richard Buckle 32:03
Get those commissions
David Parry 32:05
Hit your targets get your Commission's and so if you do know salespeople that are still waiting to be convinced, then you've put them into this direction. And then we talk about maybe doing a video series on each of these.
Richard Buckle 32:17
Yeah, I think we will. I think we're going to do something on the website shortly where we'll be just actually, you know, rather than us talking about it actually showing and demonstrating some of this stuff. So that people can know sort of a picture's worth 1000 words and
David Parry 32:32
Show how it works and how to set it up. Maybe
Richard Buckle 32:35
Yeah, if you've got it yourself. Yeah. Do all that. Clearly, if you need a hand,
David Parry 32:42
you know where to go, you know, area area. Okay, good. Well, I know that took two episodes of our podcast to cover but that was quite a good list of things that salespeople have said to us that they quite like about the system. Good. So thank you again for listening to The SME Growth Podcast, these two episodes on why salespeople like HubSpot CRM. So if you know any salespeople that you think might be wanting to listen to this, or at least should be, please send them a link. And if you know anybody generally in business that might be interested in listening to all the various topics that we talk about in our podcasts, then please share a link to it as well. And for your own benefit please follow it on Spotify or Apple wherever you listen to your podcasts and click the little bell icon so you get notified when a new episode drops. So thanks very much again for listening and good luck with your business.
If you're interested we have some great blogs and other podcast episodes on CRMs or specifically HubSpot. Have a listen to our podcast episode Why Every Business Needs a CRM, for a great overview of how a CRM can benefit your business as a whole. Or learn more about some of the functions of HubSpot with our blog How to Send and Automate your Emails with HubSpot or HubSpot vs WordPress: A Comparison.
As we've said before, we are a HubSpot Partner, so if you would like more information on using HubSpot for your business, get in touch!