VIDEO 1: WHY ARE CONTACTS SO IMPORTANT? Hey, it s Kyle from HubSpot Academy. Let s talk about contacts. Contacts are the most fundamental part of any CRM. They re your prospects and customers--the living, breathing human beings your business depends on. Everything you do inside HubSpot Sales will revolve around your contacts. This is true even if you re in B2B sales. You might sell solutions for businesses, but you ll still have to work with the individual people at those businesses. You should be adding each one of them as a contact in HubSpot CRM. You might be wondering, Why? Why are contacts so important? The answer has to do with a change that s happening in the world of sales thanks to this newfangled thing called the internet. Think about what sales was like before the internet existed. If you were selling a big-ticket item like a car or a refrigerator, or if you were selling any sort of service contracts, you would have had a lot of power over your buyers. There was no easy way for your prospects to see if your prices were fair. There was no place for them to find customer reviews to know if your offering worked as advertised. Back then, the seller was the only one with access to this information, so buyers could only get answers to their questions by asking a sales rep. Those days are long gone. And you know this, right? Think about the way you buy things. When you have a problem to solve, you don t wait for someone to knock on your door or call you on the phone and offer you a solution. You just hop online and find the information you need. You figure out your options and go with the one that you think will work best for you. If you have to talk to someone during the sales process, you want it to be a person who understands your situation and can help you find the solution you re looking for. That s the nature of the modern world. Buyers now have all the power, so the old way of selling doesn t work as well anymore. Instead, modern sellers need to practice what we call Inbound Sales. Inbound means you attract buyers to you and meet them on their own terms. Rather than getting your product in front of as many people as possible, the best thing you can do is make yourself available to people who have a problem you can solve, and then help them solve it. That s the secret to success in the modern sales landscape. Focus on the buyer and their needs, and you ll always beat out the self-centered competition. And that s why contacts are so important. That s why everything inside HubSpot Sales ties back to the contact record. Every contact record has a timeline where the entire story of your company s relationship with that contact gets recorded as it happens. 1
When you first add a contact to the CRM, their timeline will be empty, but don t worry--it ll fill up fast enough. As you do your daily work of sending emails and making phone calls, they ll all get added to the timeline automatically. No copy-pasting, no writing out notes for your manager s benefit. Just do your job, and the timeline will create a record of your efforts for you. With all of the administrative work being taken care of automatically, you ll be free to focus on the best part of sales, which is selling. In the next video, we ll talk all about how the contacts section of HubSpot CRM will help you do just that. VIDEO 2: HOW TO USE CONTACTS Let s talk about how to use contacts. First, we ll talk about how to use individual contact records, and then we ll get into how to organize your contacts to make sure you re focusing your efforts on the right people. Here are four things you can do to make sure you re getting the most out of your contact records. First, use contact records for individual people and company records for organizations. In HubSpot CRM, contacts and companies are distinct from one another. If you re in B2B sales, you can use company records to keep track of the businesses you re working with. But remember, your goal should be to interact with people, so you should still create individual contact records for the people at those businesses. Second, associate contact and company records with each other. When a contact record is associated to a company record, the two are linked together inside the CRM, and information will flow between them. You can associate multiple contacts to a single company, and then your interactions with all of those people will be combined together on the company record s timeline. In many cases, the CRM will associate contacts and companies automatically. In fact, the CRM will often create the company record for you and automatically associate it to the appropriate contacts. Anytime you add an email address to a contact record, the CRM will take the domain from that email address and use it to search for company information in a database of public records. Any information it finds will be used to create a company record, and that company will be automatically associated with all of your contacts who have emails at that domain. If you add a contact without an email address, or if they have a freemail address such as gmail or outlook.com, the CRM won t be able create and associate the company record automatically. But if you re in B2B sales, you should still create and associate the company record so you can add contacts to it as you meet more people at that company. 2
Third, use notes and tasks for internal communication. The emails and calls you have with your contacts will get recorded automatically, but the contact record should also record the conversations that happen behind the scenes. There are a couple tools that will help you with this: notes and tasks. Notes and tasks both give you a way to add information to the timeline without notifying the contact. Notes are good for capturing miscellaneous information. If you need a place to jot down some ideas for an upcoming call, for example, you could save that as a note, and it would be added to the timeline. Tasks are simple reminders. So if you want to remember to follow up with one of your contacts who is going out of town for a couple of weeks, you could create a task for the day they get back, and you d get a reminder email to follow up with them on that day. Tasks and notes are great ways to collaborate with other people on your team. Anytime you need to have a conversation about a contact, notes are the place to do it. You can @mention teammates to bring them into the conversation, and then your notes back and forth will be recorded on the timeline for future reference. You can also assign tasks to your teammates if there s something you need them to do on a certain date. This way, all communication, both internal and external, will show up together on the contact s timeline, giving you a full account of what s happening with them. One final thing you should be aware of with tasks and notes: if you create them on a contact record, they ll only appear on that contact record. If you create them on a company record, they ll only appear on that company record. Tasks and notes should be specific to the record you add them to because they won t flow through to the timelines of any associated records. Finally, add a contact to HubSpot CRM for every person you talk to. Even if you re just getting in touch with a company and you ve only spoken with a receptionist, you should still add them as a contact. And if you call back later and get a different receptionist, you should create a record for them, too. This way, the company record will give you a full account of everyone you ve talked to and what they ve said. You never know when you might have to circle back with someone to get more information. Now, you might be thinking, If I make a record for everybody, how do I know which contacts to focus on? Let s talk about that. In the CRM, you can create custom views of contacts so that you only see the people who meet certain qualifications. You can do this for companies as well, but for now let s keep focusing on contacts. Every contact record has a bunch of fields called contact properties. Contact properties hold basic information such as name, phone number, and address. They also hold important internal information, such as who a contact is assigned to and when they were last contacted. When you 3
create a custom view, you ll filter your contacts based on the information stored in their contact properties. Here are four pro tips for making custom views: First, filter by HubSpot Owner to see only the records you own. There s a property that appears on both contact and company records called HubSpot Owner. This tells you which rep a record is assigned to. Depending on how your CRM is set up, you might only be able to see the records you own, but you might also be able to see some records you don t own. So when you re looking for a list of contacts to work with, there are two things you can do with a HubSpot Owner filter. The thing you ll do most often is set it to Me so that you only see the records you already own. The other thing you can do is set it to Is Unknown so you can look for contacts in your territory that you haven t claimed yet. Next, filter by Job Title to find the right people. While it s great to keep track of everyone you meet at a company, when it comes to moving a sale forward, you need to make sure you re talking with the decision maker. Looking at job titles can often help with that. Think about the people who have recently bought from you. Is there a pattern in their job titles? If you aren t sure, dig back through your emails and check out their signatures. If you see a particular title coming up over and over again, create a filter for it and include it in your custom views. By the way, job title probably isn t the only thing your buyers have in common. Take a look at your best customers and see if there are other patterns you can find. Do they work in a particular industry or for a particular size of company? Do they live in a specific part of the world? Do they all tend to be within a certain age range or stage of life? Put all that information together, and you ll get a description for what your typical buyer looks like. We call this a buyer persona. Buyer personas are really handy during the early stages of the sales process. As you find new contacts, you can compare them to your buyer persona to help you determine how good of a fit they are for your offering. But once you get further in the sales process, you ll want to rely less on your buyer persona and more on the details individual contacts provide about themselves. We ll get into buyer personas more in the class on email templates. For now, it s enough just knowing what job titles your buyers tend to have. But if there are other patterns you notice, you might want to see if you can include those as filters in your custom views as well. Next, filter by Lead Status for context. Lead Status is a property that you can use to keep track of how a person is progressing. The default values for this property include such options as New, In Progress, and Unqualified, but your team admin can customize these options to be more relevant to your process. Some teams like to add an option such as Hot or Starred so they can prioritize 4
the contacts who are most eager to make a move. If you make a habit of updating the lead status of your contacts as you work with them, you ll have a lot more flexibility in the views you can create. You could have one view for the hot leads that should be your top priorities and another view for slow but promising leads that need a bit more encouragement. Finally, design views around action. This is the most important tip of them all. Really, you can organize your views however you want, but if you don t have a specific action in mind, they won t do you a lot of good. Instead, create views that focus on specific actions, like following up or finding a new point of contact. Wondering how to do that? Stick around. The next video will give you an example of using contacts and custom views. VIDEO 3: CONTACTS IN ACTION Let s take a quick look at how you might use a custom view to organize your contacts around a specific action. We ll use the fictional example of Bob, a sales rep who works at a landscaping company called Groundskeeper, Inc. He sells landscaping services to small property management companies. Because he works primarily with business owners, it s pretty common for his contacts to get busy and forget to respond to his emails. So Bob decides to make a custom view that will help him identify the people he needs to follow up with. First, Bob adds a filter for HubSpot Owner and sets it to Me. This ensures that he s focusing on the contacts who are assigned to him. Next, Bob adds a filter for Job Title. There are three main titles Bob s primary contacts tend to have: CEO, President, or Owner. Bob puts all three of these in the Job Title filter, with OR in all caps in between. Finally, Bob wants this view to show the people he s trying to make initial contact with, so adds a filter for Lead Status and sets it to New. Bob is now seeing all of the CEOs, Presidents, and Owners who are assigned to him in HubSpot CRM and have a Lead Status of New. As he makes contact with them, he ll change their Lead Status to either Open or Unqualified, depending on how the conversation goes. Now Bob wants to narrow this list down to the contacts he needs to follow up with. There are three additional filters he s going to use to do this: Last Contacted, Next Activity Date, and Number of Times Contacted. 5
Last Contacted is a property that automatically populates with the date a contact most recently had a meeting or was emailed or called. This property can be filtered relative to a specific date, or it can be filtered using more dynamic options such as Last Week or Last Month. Bob wants to follow up with people he hasn t interacted with this month, so he adds a filter for Last Contacted and sets it to Last Month. A very similar property is Last Activity. This works exactly like Last Contacted except that it also takes into consideration notes and tasks. Bob could use Last Activity if he wanted to know the last time he performed any sort of action on a contact record, but in this case he wants to base his view on the last time he actually interacted with a person, so he s using Last Contacted. Next, Bob adds a filter for Next Activity Date. This property only populates if the contact has a meeting or task scheduled for the future. Otherwise, it s blank. Bob wants to focus on people he doesn t already have plans for, so he sets this filter to Is Unknown. This means that the view will only show a contact record if its Next Activity Date is blank. Bob s list is now showing contacts who he hasn t reached out to this month and who he doesn t have anything scheduled with in the future. This is a good follow up list, but Bob wants to take it one step further by adding a filter for Number of Times Contacted. Number of Times Contacted automatically updates with the number of times Bob has called, emailed, or met with a contact. Bob understands that some contacts go silent because they ve decided not to buy from Groundskeeper Inc. He doesn t want to risk hurting his brand by continuing to reach out to people who don t want to hear from him. So he s decided not to try a contact more than 5 times before moving on to someone else. For this follow-up list, Bob doesn t want to include anyone he s already made 5 attempts to contact, so he sets the Number of Times Contacted filter to Less than 5. Bob saves this view as Make first contact and shares it with his team. With the HubSpot Owner filter set to Me, each person who uses this view will see only the leads assigned to them. And now Bob has a list of new leads he needs to follow up with. Nice going, Bob! In the next video, we ll walk through the details of organizing your contacts in HubSpot CRM. VIDEO 4: ORGANIZING YOUR CONTACTS IN HUBSPOT CRM There are two main ways to organize your contacts inside HubSpot CRM: one is on the Contacts page, and the other is on individual contact records. Let s start with the Contacts page. 6
When you come to the Contacts page, the default is for you to see all of the contacts you have access to in your database. On the left side of the page, you can narrow this list down by adding filters. For example, if you want to focus on people who perform a certain role at their company, add a filter for job title. If there are multiple job titles that might describe a single role, such as Vice President and VP, put a capital OR between each one, and you ll get a list of people who have any of these words in their job titles. It s also possible to make a list of all the people who don t have a job title in the CRM. To do this, click the Is Unknown option. You can then quickly update this information by clicking the eyeshaped icon next to each person s name, entering their job title, and clicking save. This way, when you search for the job titles you re most interested in, all of your contacts will be included in the search. Once you ve added some filters to make sure you re looking at the most important people, you ll want to adjust the columns to make sure you re seeing the most important information. To add and remove columns, click the Edit columns button. Here you have a searchable list of all of the contact properties in your CRM. Click on the ones you would like to add as columns. If there are any columns you want to remove, click the X next to them. After you save your columns, you can drag and drop them into whatever order works best for you. If you want to sort by a particular column, click on its header. When you have your filters and columns arranged in the way you need them, you can save this view for easy access in the future. If you want your team to be able to access this view, check the Share this view box. After the view is saved, it will be listed in this dropdown. Feel free to make as many views as you need. If there's one view you'd like to see by default, click the Make this view default button. Now let s move to the contact record. Each contact record has a section that displays information about the contact. To customize this information, click the button at the bottom of the section. This page shows all of the properties for this record in a searchable list. If you re only interested in seeing properties that have values in them, check the Hide blank properties box. To change the value of a property, click on it. If you want to see how the value has changed over time, click the See History button. If you want a certain property to be visible whenever you view a contact record, click the Add To About button and it will be added to the About section. On the left, you ll see the properties that are currently displayed on the contact record. To remove a property, click the x. You can also drag and drop the properties into whatever order works best for you. 7
The changes you make here will be reflected on every contact record. Note that these changes will only affect the way these properties are displayed for you--each user can set these properties for themselves. 8