101  HubSpot Features to Create ROI.

We have been asked the same question countless times:
“How does my business get the most ROI out of HubSpot?”

If not that question it’s, “Is HubSpot worth it?”

In an effort to answer both of those questions, we have worked tirelessly on this resource for you. You can easily scan this article or use the table of contents to jump to the desired section.

Either way, if you have questions about anything in this article or about HubSpot in general, feel free to email, call or even Tweet us at Impulse Creative.

Let’s get started with the most important part of your marketing: measuring your numbers.

Table of Contents.

• Reporting
• Reports Home
• Advanced Reporting
• Sales
• Starting Conversations
• eCommerce
• Marketing
• Lead Generation
• Lead Organization
• Lead Nurturing
• Team Productivity

Reporting

Dashboards

Marketing Dashboard

The marketing dashboard is where you can easily see the marketing metrics that are most important to you as a marketer. The right metrics are needed to make smart decisions as you move forward.

Use the marketing dashboard to see data points on items like:

• Marketing Performance: See your new monthly sessions (visits), contacts and customers. Look at the data in a variety of date ranges, as well as compare data against historical dates.
• Top Landing Pages: See your top five landing pages as well as the total views and conversion rate of each.
• Top Emails: See your top five emails and the click-through percentage of each.
• Email Performance: See emails sent, opened and click percentage for that month or a custom data range.
• Top Blog Posts: See your top five blogs, based on total views.
• Blog Performance: See your blogs published, by views, subscribers and RSS subscribers.
• Landing Page Performance: See landing page conversion percentages, views, submissions and new contacts.

One of our favorite marketing dashboard reports is the Contact Performance report.

It shows total contacts generated, how many are leads versus marketing qualified leads and— best of all— the number of customers.

New customers mean we have created revenue, and can, therefore, report the return on our marketing efforts through HubSpot.

Pro Tip: Make sure you have added your Persona Report to the marketing dashboard. Segmentation is one of the most powerful parts of your inbound strategy.

This marketing dashboard is completely customizable to your needs, meaning each report can be resized and moved to the position that you wanted to be in. Want to focus on your personas? Drag them up to the top and resize that report to be full screen.

Web Analytics Dashboard

The Web Analytics dashboard is an easy place to spot check things like bounce rate, time on page and pages viewed. It does a great job at helping you visualize areas of your analytics that you may want to dive deeper into with Google Analytics.

Some areas you might want to explore include:

• Sessions
• Sessions by source
• New visitor sessions by source
• Traffic metrics
• Engagement metrics
• Sessions by country
• Device breakdown

One of our favorite reports within the Web Analytics dashboard is sorting the sessions engagement rate by source. Essentially, it lets you diagnose your weakest link and then head out to fix it.

You can use it to look at data points like:

• Bounce Rate: Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page. This is super important and should be under 70%.
• Average Session Length: The longer folks are on your site, the more trust they may gain in your products and or services. A good goal for this is over two minutes per session.
• Page Views Per Session: This is closely tied to session length. Are they reading one, two or 10 pages? How easy have you made it for your visitors to consume and find more content? A great goal on this one is 2.5 pages or more per session.

If you know certain points that you want to hit, you can create a “go fix it” matrix. For bounce rate, aim for below 40%. However, if something is between 40% to 70%, there’s room for concern. While anything 70% or higher, give it a big, fat red flag.

That means, if you see paid search has a 37% bounce rate, for example, do nothing. If social media has a 48% bounce rate, you may to go back and look at what you are saying and where you are pointing your community. Is the messaging consistent?

Maybe your organic is sitting at an 82% bounce rate. You realize that is terrible right?

You should be screaming, “Oh noooooo!” Call the SEO 911 hotline right now!

Run and fix those meta descriptions to be more contextual to the actual page they are pointing to. Many of you might even be new to the importance of custom meta-descriptions. No worries, just reach out, we can help get you up to speed.

Sales Dashboard

The sales dashboard is the Mecca for ROI. It helps you to dive into reporting the revenue that all your marketing and sales efforts will provide this month and for months to come.

The HubSpot Sales Dashboard helps you easily see sales data like:

• Total Meetings Booked
• Activity
• Deals Closed versus Goal
• Deal Forecast
• Sales Performance
• Deal Forecast

Sales Pro Dashboard

Take your Sales Pro add-on to the next level and report on your efforts and actions with insights around:

Meetings: See things like total meetings booked, upcoming meetings and even meetings booked by specific sales reps.

Calls: Want to know the average call duration? There is a report for that! You can also get visualization into total calls, calls per rep and even call outcomes.

Sequences: One of the most powerful parts of the Sales Pro tool is adding in an element of automation. We will talk about sequences in a deeper level later but, for now, you should know you can report on sequence enrollment, sequences replies by step, sequences reply rate and even reply rate or meetings rate.

Documents: Are you sending out documents to your leads or customers? Of course you are! However, do you know anything about their interaction with your document after you send it? If you are like most companies, the answer to that might be no.

With documents, you can report on items like:

• Top Documents: Quickly see what your top documents are and the visitors, unique visitors and even the amount of shares your document got. Boom!
• Document Summary: You also have access to the documents summary report, this report gives you an overview of how your shared documents are performing, and a top documents report, which shows your most popular shared documents. That way, you know what to use over again to be successful in the sales and or marketing process.
• Messages: Right now as the time of creating this page, there are no reports for messages but I am sure they are coming in the near future or may even be in your HubSpot portal as you read this.

“My Home” Customizable Dashboard

As if all the other dashboards are not enough, you can also create a completely customizable “home” dashboard for a mix of top reports like sales and marketing. It’s a healthy mix of what any user might want to see on a daily basis—versus going to individual dashboards on a weekly basis.

If your metics start to slip, the home dashboard will reveal the metrics you want to see to immediately fix what needs fixing.

Competitors Dashboard

The competitors dashboard gives you an easy look at what your competition is doing versus your own efforts. You can easily see things like marketing grade, traffic rank, linking domains, MozRank and several more important data points.

Sales

Lead Intelligence

Being the best sales rep comes down to a couple important elements. Maybe one of the most important: understanding your potential customer. With HubSpot Sales, you get the lead intelligence that, until now, your company may have not had at its fingertips.

Contacts

You know that contacts are the people that come to your site, fill out a form, need help and eventually want your product(s). But, what do you know about them? How can you communicate with them in an amazingly human way?

Filters

Filters allows you to find the right type of people that you want to have a conversation with. Want to talk to everybody in your database from New Jersey? Want to find everybody who has read 30 pages of your website? Or absolutely need to know how many people have downloaded a certain form? There’s a filter for that.

Use Filters to save yourself time and have the contextual conversation that will help you sell and market better as you move forward.

Feed

Your contact feed is the all-in-one place to find out what your contacts have been doing. Easily see if they have viewed pages, downloaded offers, opened emails, clicked on call to actions and so much more.

The feed should be used by every sales and marketing professional to truly understand who they are about to engage with in either content or a conversation.

Prospects

Inbound is all about having the right conversation with the right people. But what if you run out of people to actually talk to? That's where your Prospects tool comes into play. Instead of engaging freezing cold leads, you can now at least deal with lukewarm leads, meaning people who have visited your website.

Once you engage with really warm leads, who have not filled out a form on your site, look for people who have visited the site and have high page view amounts, or that have visited key pages in the sales and marketing funnel.

HubSpot Insights

HubSpot Insights gives you the intelligence available via third party providers. Want to know where your contact is located? Sort by country, state, or city IP. What about their social accounts? If they use the same email for social as they do for your form conversions, that information will be pulled into their contact record for you. As you prospect, there will be company insight information at your disposal as well.

Activity Feed

Every marketer dreams about an all-in-one location where they can see who has opened their emails, visited their website pages and so much more. Now, that dream is a reality.The HubSpot Activity Feed helps you truly understand when or when not to engage with your potential customer.

Documents

Are you tired of sending document to your leads and not knowing if they have even viewed them? Wouldn’t it be great if you knew what page they looked at most in your latest proposal? HubSpot documents will help you out. Easily track opens, time on page and more.

Organization

With so many moving parts to your inbound strategy and so many HubSpot tools to help you complete the tasks, you need to stay organized.

Luckily, HubSpot has created a set of tools designed to help you stay organized while optimizing your time spent communicating and creating those special moments with your contacts and customers. They’re right in your portal.

Snippets

Snippets is great for those bite-size pieces of conversation that you have to type over and over again. Save countless time using snippets to answer frequently asked questions, answering internal questions and much more.

Have that answer down pat? Then turn it into a snippet and easily add it to any email or message moving forward. Want to let the team know what you talked about on your call but want to save time? Turn your call actions and next steps into HubSpot snippets and make those micro-conversations faster than ever.

Templates

While snippets are great for those micro-messages, templates have a more macro strategy. Build out entire emails for your marketing and sales process. Then, when it’s time to send that email, respond in seconds versus minutes.

Pro Tip: Create your templates with about 80% complete, leaving around 20% for customizable content. Also, make sure you’re using personalization tokens where they make sense.

Sequences

Now that you have your HubSpot templates up and running, it’s time to build the sequence that helps you compress even more time out of your day. HubSpot sequences allows you to take a set of templates and build out an automated set of emails, tasks and other sales and marketing pieces.

Sequences will allow you to have a conversation over time that will automatically stop when the contact takes action to have a real human-to-human conversation with you. It’s like your own personal sales autopilot.

Tasks

It can be all too easy to have many irons in the fire and forget something. With tasks, you will get those reminders in a very fluid way. Your HubSpot Tasks tool will be that pleasant pest in your inbox until you complete the task or adjust the due date.

Tasks have the ability to take you from being an unorganized trainwreck to a sleek, optimized selling machine.

Meetings

Have you ever played the “are you free game?”

“Are you free on Monday at two, four or seven? Nope, but I am free at five and six. Oh, that’s my son’s band recital. How about Tuesday at …”

I am sure you have been there. Now, with HubSpot meetings you can optimize your time by just sending your contact or customer a link to your calendar of available time. You can either do this right in your inbox or, you can send them to a page on your website where HubSpot Meetings is easily be embedded.

Meeting Types

I’m sure all of your meetings have different purposes. Do you want to know how many internal meetings versus sales meetings versus training meetings you have? Easily report on what meetings are most effective or are sucking the life out of you.

Okay. Maybe they’re not sucking the life out of you— because you love what you do— but, you need to be able to optimize the time spent on meetings. HubSpot Meeting Types helps you to do that.

Messages

When your contacts or customers visit your website, they want to find what they are looking for, fast. With HubSpot Messages, they get a direct line right to you and your team. Easily transition from them looking for an educational article to adding value on the topic to, “Hey, can you call me?” in minutes.

Messages links us closer to the humans we are trying to have conversations with by removing a lot of online communication barriers.

Product Library

When it comes to closing and creating deals in the HubSpot CRM, wouldn't it be great if you could easily add the products or services you sell to your deals? Of course it would. That is why HubSpot created the Product Library functionality.

Of course, you can name and describe your products. Heck, you can even give it a price. But where it gets really cool is being able to set it as fixed or recurring costs, as well as cost per unit and term length. Instead of typing all this out over and over again, it is just a click away and completely reportable.

Teams

Teams is a new addition to the HubSpot tool on the service side. Right now, you can share list, templates and other information with sets of folks who are on your “team,” but many changes are to come.

Sales Process

Every company needs a great sales process. The only problem is, that’s not where it ends. Once you have a great sales process, you need to map that to your HubSpot pipelines and deal stages.

Pipelines

Your pipelines are the ways that your company can generate revenue. As an example, we have an agency pipeline, a speaking pipeline, workshop pipeline and so on.

This makes it very simple to the report on what side of the business is bringing in the most or the least amount of cold, hard cash!

HubSpot allows you to easily create multiple pipelines so that you can have a set of custom deal stages depending on the needed sales process for the products and services you provide.

Deals

Your deals are literally where the revenue rubber hits the road. This is where you put all the information about a contact: company, product or service, pricing and whatever other relevant information you need. HubSpot deals are easily drag and droppable across the board of deal stage options that you created.

Calls

As a sales manager, having the ability to go in and listen to historical calls with the mindset of optimizing the sales process is priceless. As a sales rep, being able to listen for action items or to-dos, after the meeting is over, will keep you organized and help you not drop leads or let tasks slip through the cracks. Making calls inside your HubSpot portal is just smart.

Call Types

Call types allows you to segment the amount of time you spend on call. Why is this important? All calls were not created equal. If you know you are spending 70% of your time on discovery calls, yet only 10% on closing or demo calls, this means you may have a top-heavy funnel.

It will also help us see into the future a bit. If this month we have 70% discovery calls and the following month we map those calls to closing calls, we know the sales process is working like a well-oiled machine.

Notes

Notes are just what you think they are: notes you can leave for yourself and your team in the sales process. One great thing about notes is, they’re searchable. You can tag your teammates in the notes if they need to be part of the conversation, or are part of the process. You can also use snippets in your notes to save precious time in your day.

Starting Conversations

Not all conversations are the same and not all companies need to collect the same data.

While HubSpot does a great job of getting you the properties most companies need to have in forms and to start conversations with your visitors, leads, and customers, they also give you several ways to collect info and keep track of your most qualified and precious leads.

Custom Properties

With custom properties, you can ask exactly what you need to ask, when you need to ask it. One of my favorite things to do is combine custom form properties and dependent form fields for a great form process.

Custom properties can be single lines of text, dropdowns, selectors and even file uploads or date pickers. Your imagination, a little time and some HubSpot know-how will take your lead conversion efforts to the next level in no time.

Form Field

Form fields are custom or built-in properties enabled for use on the front-end of the site in forms. These can be for the contact us page, blog subscribe and, of course, your landing pages. But, not every property needs to be on a form.

Non-Form Field

When you are creating a custom property you can choose whether to allow it in forms or not. Why would you not have it in forms? Maybe it’s a contact property, company property or even a deal property that you want to use as an internal trigger for a workflow.

Or, maybe you know you have a call in which you ask three or four specific questions and you need a place to hold that data once you get the answers. Make sure you are using non-form fields to power your team, sales and marketing processes.

Property Groups

With all these properties and custom properties being created, you need a way to stay organized. This is where property groups come in handy.

Make sure you use the default groups for contacts, companies, deals, social, as well as create new ones, so you can find the info you need fast. Try creating a property group for specific survey style forms or even for strategies like second smart questions.

Not sure what that is? Tweet @impulsecreative and ask about it. We will send you some information that has the potential to blow your mind!

Workflows

One of the most powerful parts of HubSpot is its workflows. Yet, it’s also one of the most confusing and intimidating tools for HubSpot users.

With workflows, you can do lead nurturing like a pro. Change hundreds of contact properties to thousands, in an instant. You can create tasks, assign contact owners, send text messages, internal and external emails, use webhooks… in other words, you can do a ton with workflows to streamline your internal and external communication and organization.

eCommerce

For years and years, we’ve dreamed of HubSpot creating an ecommerce portion to their platform. While this has yet to happen, they have done several exciting things when it come to selling your wares online.

Connect To Shopify

Yep, you just read that right. Connect your HubSpot portal natively to your Shopify account. With this integration, you can start selling like the big boys.

Imagine having the ability to understand your customers at a deeper level. Understand the research they are doing and the products that they are looking at. Immediately diagnose abandoned carts and slide them into a reconversion nurturing email flow.It’s all easy and doable with the Shopify and HubSpot connector.

Abandoned Cart

For those that aren’t familiar with the term “abandoned cart,” these are folks who visit your site, add an items to their shopping cart and never finish a purchase. The phone rings, their baby starts to cry, the Eagles win the Super Bowl, pigs fly, etc.You can add hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars to your bottom line by bringing the attention back to those items and or others with a 100% automated abandoned cart workflow sequence.

Lists You Need

When you’re selling products, it is nice to have your visitors, leads and contacts in lists that make sense for them and their needs. If they download an ebook on best hiking boots or watch a video on best built workboots, why would you send them an email about your new running shoes? You can use the top American marathons leads list to target them for their new running shoes. Get it? Got it? Good.

Workflows

We already talked about the power of workflows at a normal level and how an abandoned cart sequence could be fired. With transactional emails and workflows, your life just got that much easier.

Or, maybe you have a first time visitor and want to create a “Seven Days to Knowing (add your company name here) Better!” Create the content, emails, workflows and sit back and sip some sweet tea with your feet up. Watch the nurturing happen and the money roll in. Okay— there might still be some other work to do, but you will have made all that future work just a little bit easier.

Connect to Another E-Commerce Platform

Up until now, we have really focused on Shopify but, HubSpot thought way past that. With the e-commerce connector, you can connect many of the popular ecommerce stores.

Have a WordPress site and using Woocommerce or something similar? Then get ready to sell more, faster and better!

Marketing

Traffic Generation

To sell more, you have to market more. Or, you can simply market better. HubSpot gives you many ways to generate more traffic in order to get those important conversations started, nurtured and handed off to your sales team.

CMS (Website)

HubSpot has an amazing CMS system that is easy to manage and use. It is also very robust, with features that were built from the ground up with the marketer in mind. You can easily visualize how your pages are going to look using the editor view.

There is also a staging area, so you can update those pages until your heart’s content, all without your visitors seeing a page that is half done or fully jacked-up because you are rebuilding it. Then, when you are ready, the new staged page becomes the live page with the push of a button.

Most marketers worry about 301 redirects when they change URL for their SEO optimization. Not marketers who use HubSpot. They thought of that and create the 301 redirects for you as you go, as long as you use the HubSpot CMS.

Smart Content

One of my favorite parts of the HubSpot CMS is the ability to serve up SMART content. If people are in a certain list, lifecycle or device, show them the most contextual content per their data and needs. Amazon has been doing this for years, targeting you with what you have purchased in the past, what you’ve or looked at and added to a wishlist. Now, with HubSpot’s CMS, you have the ability to do the same for your potential customers.

Strategy (Content)

You can also put a ton of your SEO worries to the wayside. Use the Content Strategy tool to focus on topics, subtopics and keywords that are relevant for your company and the visitors coming to your site. Make sure that your subtopics link to topics and that you have pillar pages of content in place for your guest when they arrive at your online website party!

Blog

At the end of the day, 70% of your potential customers research what they are going to purchase in order to solve their problem, without reaching out to you or your team.

Are you educating them or are your competitors? If the answer is your competitors, please know that buyers are more likely to purchase from the same site that showed thought leadership through the research phase.