Blog originally published Sep 4, 2018.

Having a healthy stream of leads coming in from your website is a great first step toward generating revenue attributable to your marketing efforts. But turning those leads into customers requires a bit more strategic attention.

Lead scoring is a valuable tool that any sales and marketing team can implement to close more customers. Lead scoring is a system that ranks your prospects based on their perceived value to your organization. It is an automated way to identify and hand off your hottest leads to your sales team so they can work their magic and close more deals.

Attribution and source reporting is one of the most critical aspects of revenue operations, as it directly influences budget and ROI decision-making. HubSpot's powerful CRM comes with several layers of built-in source and attribution data, which be utilized to provide a highly-detailed and granular view of your marketing efforts.

Most healthy and active HubSpot portals are literally swimming in data. This, however, can be overwhelming when it comes to deciding which marketing and sales activities to measure, and how to report on them in an insightful way. Regardless of other reporting needs, it is essential to understand what channels deliver the best, most qualified leads, as it is a requirement to determining where to spend / maximize your budget. Despite its importance, many organizations still struggle to assemble a complete picture of what can sometimes be a very complex lead source landscape.

PLUS Six Examples of Custom Object You Can Make in HubSpot

Does it ever feel like no combination of custom properties, lists, and workflows can solve a particularly important reporting or automation challenge?

Many organizations find themselves in a position where they need to store a significant amount of data unique to their organization and their industry, which cannot be easily managed using custom properties alone.

The solution? Custom objects! These can be created in your HubSpot enterprise portal and can be associated with existing contacts, companies, deals, tickets, and even other custom objects!

Reporting and dashboards are some of the defining features of HubSpot's CRM and automation tools. There are a number of useful tips and tricks you can use to enhance your HubSpot dashboards, share more data with your team, and maximize utilization within your organization.

There are now thousands of apps that seamlessly connect with HubSpot, plus tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands existing API configurations with custom apps that exist to help companies grow better.

Every organization has its own set of priorities when it comes to infusing HubSpot across its specific tech stack; however, there are a number of high-value, free-version apps every company can connect to HubSpot in order to extract more value from the platform. We've outlined six of these free apps to get you started maximizing your HubSpot investment. (and a bonus with Google Sheets at the bottom!)

6 Keys and Best Practices to a Seamless HubSpot Salesforce Integration

HubSpot and Salesforce are two extremely powerful pieces of a company's tech stack, and getting the most out of both systems requires a sophisticated strategic approach that leverages the strengths and limitations of both platforms.

The details of your specific setup will depend on numerous factors, including your teams, your processes, and your experience using each system. While there is no magic formula for confiuring your integration, reliable data is a must. 

Focusing on these six key areas will ensure your integration provides marketing, sales, and customer success / service the right information and accessibility required for success. It's essential to get these right!

HubSpot has a robust and evolving set of reporting tools, built to help you slice and dice your CRM data. These tools let you assemble reports and dashboards that provide valuable insights into your marketing, sales, and customer success teams. Invariably, however, there are always times that pulling your data into a spreadsheet is necessary. The good news - using HubSpot workflows and integrations, you can connect to and populate Google Sheets automatically.

This is a handy feature allows you to funnel your HubSpot data directly into a neat and tidy Google Sheet for analysis. Another benefit is that it makes it much easier to share information with internal and external teams. 

Here's how it works. First, you'll connect your Google account and assign HubSpot data to specific columns in your spreadsheet. Each time the action is triggered by your workflow, a row will be added to your Google Sheet, populating data into one or more columns. 

A new prospect hits your website. Their company is a perfect fit for your services, and you quickly reach out to make contact, but alas! The prospect is not yet ready to buy. This is the scenario facing companies and sales teams of all sizes, who find themselves with a pile of qualified leads who aren’t quite ready to make a purchase. Lead nurturing is the perfect tactic to engage this group of prospective customers until they’re ready to make a purchasing decision. 

A lead nurturing campaign typically consists of a series of automated emails specifically designed to keep leads engaged with your company, nurturing them along their buying journey to becoming a customer. Orchestrated properly, lead nurturing establishes trust with your leads, positions your organization as a bona fide expert in your space, leads to warmer sales conversations, and, most importantly, closes more deals. 

So….2020 probably isn’t going quite as you’d planned. The COVID-19 pandemic has completely upended our way of life and caused massive disruption in nearly every industry and business.

For marketing and sales teams, this means, among other things, that in-person lead generation activities, like trade shows, conferences, and networking events, are canceled for the foreseeable future. 

Thousands of companies are struggling to figure out what to do next. Many B2B companies rely heavily upon in-person events to generate leads, and the COVID-19 crisis has created an alarming gap. 

Marketing automation adoption continues to grow among marketers in 2020, with most marketing teams now using at least one automation tool as part of their tech stack.

Building a smart marketing automation strategy is a great way to generate remarkable marketing results and revenue growth in 2020. Like most things in digital marketing, being strategic and thoughtful in your approach to marketing automation is the best way to proceed. A sloppy or on-the-fly approach without a thoughtful, buttoned-up strategy is almost certain to create headaches and hurdles down the road. And it certainly won’t be scalable.