You've hired the right people. And your product is superb. But you're struggling to meet your sales goals in your next stage of growth.
Diagnosing the problem within your sales strategy (the people, the process, and the plan) requires in-depth investigation, which is time you don't have right now. And where would you even start?
Try starting with sales sequences with HubSpot.
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Yes, something as simple as sales sequences can start to elucidate gaps within your strategy as well as generate the quick wins you need to re-spark your pipeline.
But what is a HubSpot sales sequence?
Sales sequences are automation flows specifically built for sales to schedule emails, calls, and tasks for your sales team.
With the ability to enroll 50 contacts at a time, your team can kick off new or existing processes in bulk. With built-in un-enrollment triggers like “booked a meeting” or “replied to email” you can rest easy knowing you aren’t removing the human element of sales while ensuring your team is set up for consistency and momentum.
Plus you have actual reporting on how your process is working.
Here’s one of our favorite examples:
We're big fans of how HubSpot's Sales Hub allows you to design and report on sales sequences. (That's how we run our own business!). Check out a few of our favorite views in sales sequence reporting here:
Overview Report:
Email Detail Report:
But you don't have to have Sales Hub to keep reading about the magic of sales sequences and what they can do for you.
There are five core problems sales sequences can start to illuminate that may not have been obvious to you. Keep reading to take it all in. (We promise we’re not a mole inside your company observing these problems. These are common within companies experiencing the friction of growth.)
But if you're already sold on sales sequences and just want to make yours irresistible, jump here to learn how to be tactical, helpful, and, above all, human.
If you polled your sales team, they would undoubtedly have differing opinions on how often communication should be sent, what kind, and what should be included for prospects and leads.
Personalization is a strength of your sales team; their ability to be specific and intentional is a main reason why you hired them – but with everyone doing things a little differently, you are leaving some efficiencies on the table.
But, building consistency in timing, frequency, messaging, and type of communications is important to running a well-oiled sales team.
Consistency in sales comms means everyone is following your brand’s best practices for communicating with your ideal customers.
This consistency has bigger payoffs outside of your sales team, too. Successful client onboarding, product implementation, and other customer engagements start with consistent expectation setting in the sales process.
When your service team trusts sales are setting the right expectations with prospects, they get to be excited about getting new customers, not overwhelmed. It means every prospect, lead, opportunity, and customer is set up for success with your team equally.
Sequences, like all automation, help create this consistency without stripping sales teams of their autonomy for personalization (to whatever degree you wish).
When was the last time you had a pipeline review or checked in with a rep about a prospect and heard, “Oh I haven’t checked in recently…I’ll do that today.”
Nightmare fuel.
To build or maintain momentum (or velocity or all of those physics terms we love to use in sales), we need to carry over that consistency we talked about above.
It’s very difficult to forecast or plan when some reps seem like they are able to close deals so much faster, but not others. Now, some quotas, territories, or products may have a different time to close, but let’s assume we are working on an otherwise level playing field here.
When your sales team has variable communication timelines, your pipeline will inevitably move at halting intervals.
Having a reliable cadence for sales communications can help you create this level playing field, a baseline for reporting lead quality and velocity, and build upon that consistency that we all know is so critical.
Think emails, calls, tasks, and more, on a schedule, timed for the prospect and their goals, the stage they’re in with your sales team, and your urgency.
When you establish a regular cadence of follow-up you can be sure that there will be consistent lead nurturing, engagement, momentum and closing.
Sequences can build these universal cadences with guardrails AND areas for personalization (plus the tools you need to track usage and outcomes).
In this case, gatekeeping may not be malicious! Great resources simply may be unknown to other teams if they aren’t regularly working together.
When marketing creates awesome documents, digital assets, persona-specific marketing campaigns, messaging updates, aka “the works,” do those pieces all make it back to sales in a way that’s easy for them to start using right away?
When the sales team starts to flag trends in pain points, closed lost reasons, decision-maker priorities and more, does this insight roll up to the right people?
When you or your sales leaders report on specific emails or campaigns or call snippets or key phrases, do you always share those insights back to marketing to inform ICP development, marketing messaging, and more?
When your service team takes over, can they see the communication history to understand the context and expectations of the relationship so far?
Sales sequences, and HubSpot in general, provide access across all teams and levels of management to resources and reporting, so each team’s work can inform the other’s. This might even save you a meeting or slide deck (or hundreds).
How many times a week do you think your reps send nearly the same email to multiple prospects manually? How much time do you think they spend task-switching just to do a replica table process? How much time would you guess they spend typing, dialing, and clicking rather than processing your opportunities’ goals and needs and crafting the right experience?
Simply writing out communications and scheduling meetings can quickly fill up a time card. Admin time that is spent setting up outreach eats into the time potentially spent in conversation with your prospects and leads.
This puts a strain on your sales managers too.
Sales leaders must function as task managers instead of coaches and strategists.
Setting up a sales sequence cuts down on the finger work, so your team can do more brain work - strategizing, connecting and nurturing.
Emails are scheduled to go out on time and reminders nudge your team to send other communications such as a LinkedIn message or a phone call. Think of all the time setting up calendar reminders that immediately evaporates!
When communications are sent through individual email accounts with all the variables of tone, timing and content, it is next to impossible to objectively weigh what works and what doesn’t.
Here are a few scenarios and questions to help see if this applies to you:
Sales sequences and their reporting tools create context of which email subject line gets the most opens, which message gets the most meetings booked, or which communication style gets the best response rate.
Sales sequences allow you to collect data on what messaging, timing and platforms work best to get a desired response.
This information is generated automatically (again less finger work), so you and your team can pivot to continuously optimize the process to get the best outcome.
Now that you’re aggressively bobbing your head and thinking to yourself, “Yes, that’s me! Those are my problems!” Let’s get you ready to deploy sales sequences and how to make them impactful from the start.
We have some ideas we commonly use with clients when they are looking for places to save their sales team time from manually typing out the same email or scheduling repetitive tasks or following a standard cadence with their leads and opportunities.
Have you ever heard the saying, “Just because you can doesn’t mean you should”?
Take that saying as your philosophy when approaching sales sequences.
Sales sequences do not replace personalized communication with prospects and leads. In fact, your sales sequence should not be made up entirely of pre-written, stock emails.
Let’s get down to brass tacks.
In this example, you’ve noticed that there is a big drop-off in your pipeline from booking the first meeting to the second. As sales leaders, your hunch is that we aren’t following up quickly and often and that the team may not be using the right message when that follow-up does happen.
*Disclaimer, we can all agree that it is best to book your next meeting while you still have a prospect on the line but for those cases where that doesn’t happen, here’s a good flow.
Remember, if the prospect takes your desired actions, this flow will automatically stop.
In every step in the sales sequence, think through how this will make it easier for your lead to make a decision - more information, more connection, more resources, etc.
As we discussed previously, the lack of gatekeeping will allow your marketing team to provide updated content for your communications copy, so your recipients are getting the best your company has to offer from valuable resources.
Space out each step in the sequence based on the action you’d like the prospect to take, the urgency of your sales cycle, or the types of communications scheduled.
Sales sequences don’t have to be (and shouldn’t be) composed solely of emails as you saw above.
It’s important that no matter what channel you’re using, it’s coming from a human’s perspective, tone of voice, and care.
Delivering value doesn’t have to be stale. Supplement the informational goodies with a human touch:
Even if you work in sales you can use marketing strategies to make your communications stand out in the inbox or feed.
Unify people, process and planning to accelerate sales growth... That's SalesOps.
Sales sequences should be in your arsenal of tech stack tools to make your life easier, but that's just one piece of the puzzle in creating a sustainable sales strategy that succeeds.
Long-term success comes by pairing a fantastic CRM with skilled sales reps and a stellar process that builds experiences your prospects won't forget (in a good way).