How to Build a World-class Outbound Process With HubSpot

Outbound is not dead, but it has changed. Sales teams are now facing increased challenges due to changing buyer behaviors and the diminishing returns of traditional outbound strategies. 

Buyers have become more independent, conducting thorough research and comparisons before speaking to vendors. This means that salespeople get involved much later in the buying process.

Decision-making within companies has also shifted. Many high-level decision-makers delegate much of the preliminary research and vetting to their teams before making buying decisions.

So why should you invest time and resources into building an outbound sales process?

Only a small part of your target market is looking for a solution like yours. How do you reach the rest?

The challenge and opportunity lie in reaching out to these prospects about a new and better way of solving their problems, ultimately guiding them toward future buying decisions.

Outbound sales is the proactive process of identifying and reaching out to potential customers who are a good fit for your product or service.

Prospecting aims to uncover potential customers' specific needs and pain points. Many potential customers are unaware of their pain points or believe their solutions are sufficient.

Outbound marketing can be considered another channel, besides social media or Google, that helps you make your target market aware of your company's products and services.

In this article, we’ll review the steps you can take to build a high-performing outbound sales process in HubSpot, ensuring higher conversions and more meaningful relationships.

Let’s get started.

1. Building a Targeted Account List

Your outbound success hinges on reaching the right people with the right message at the right time.

Even the most well-crafted emails and calls will fall flat without the correct targets.

One critical error many technology companies make is failing to establish who they want to target.

Effective growth programs begin with a clear understanding of whom you're targeting. 

This starts with developing an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), which outlines the types of companies and the specific roles within these companies to which you aim to sell.

Developing your ideal customer profile will let you build an account overview and account plan that shows exactly which companies and contacts you should target with outbound.

To define your ICP, look at your most successful customers who have brought considerable value to your business. What do these customers have in common? 

Use your CRM to review your closed-won deals from previous quarters. Who was involved? Who made the final decision? Who championed the purchase? 

Detailed analysis of these deals can reveal patterns in decision-makers and influencers across successful sales.

Remember, a smaller, more precise TAM often yields better results than a larger, less targeted one. 

HubSpot allows you to categorize and target accounts and buyer roles, which are crucial for tailored communications. 

These buying roles in HubSpot include:

• Champion: The advocate for your product within the prospect's organization.
• Economic Buyer: The person with the financial authority to purchase.
• Decision-Maker: The individual with the power to make the final purchasing decision.
• End-user: The actual user of your product or service within the organization.

After defining your total addressable market (TAM), you can create a plan for activity goals and how much sales can contribute to your company's growth.

This approach ensures that you spend your resources and efforts on prospects who are most likely to buy from you, thereby maximizing the return on your outbound efforts.

2. Crafting the Perfect Sales Messaging

In addition to the targeting list, your outreach messaging must address the needs and interests of the people working at your target accounts, which are the buying committees in each account.

With their function, role, and business needs, each person on the buying committee might require a personalized message to respond to your outreach.

For instance, a financial director will respond more favorably to messages emphasizing how your product can streamline budgeting processes and reduce financial inefficiencies.

Here’s how you can structure your sales messaging to make it compelling:

Start with understanding the buying committee. This involves profiling each buyer to grasp their industry challenges, company roles, and business needs.

Next, detail your product's specific benefits for each persona.

Use data, such as case studies or testimonials, to underscore how your product helps save time or money, enhances productivity, or solves industry-specific problems.

Finally, integrate all this information into a cohesive and persuasive sales pitch for each buyer.

Tailor example pitches for each persona, showing how each element—from product features and benefits to unique selling points and urgency—come together to create a compelling argument that is hard to ignore when it appears in the inbox.

This structured approach ensures that your outbound messages are relevant and appealing to each persona and enhances the overall effectiveness of your sales efforts, driving better engagement and, ultimately, higher conversion rates.

3. Build Email Templates and Scripts

Effective email templates and snippets capture prospects' attention and encourage them to engage with your message. 

HubSpot offers powerful tools for managing and optimizing your email templates and snippets of information that you use frequently.

Templates and snippets are useful because they allow you to standardize the messaging your salespeople use while still leaving room for personalization and collecting data on what is working across multiple salespeople.

HubSpot makes it easy to maintain a library of messages for different sequences.

These templates can be combined with other touch points (such as calling and LinkedIn) in a sequence we will cover in the next step of this guide.

One way you can use HubSpot to automate parts of your outreach while still leaving room for personalization is to use personalization tokens in your templates.

Personalization tokens are information pulled from a contact or company record in HubSpot, such as a name, job title, or placeholder keyword you need to fill out for each email.

Combining templates with personalization tokens lets you combine automation and standardization with meaningful personalization at scale, saving you work hours.

Many frameworks and methodologies can be used to write good cold emails, such as the 4T email, the C-Q-C formula, and Show Me You Know Me.

Using the Show Me You Know Me methodology, let’s write an email template in HubSpot as if we were a systems integrator helping shipping companies reduce GHG emissions from ships:

1. Subject line

The subject line is your first impression, and no meetings will be booked unless the prospect opens your email. How do you stand out in a sea of emails?

The key is to write a subject line that is personalized to the prospect and that only makes sense to them.  According to the SMYKM methodology, shorter subject lines are not necessarily better.

The key to a good subject line is to make it so personalized and relevant to the recipient that it wouldn’t make sense to anyone else reading it.

One great formula for subject lines is:

First name + First personalized thing + Second personalized thing

In this example, the first name would be a personalization token, while the personalized words would be placeholders you would have to fill out before being able to send the email.

2. Preview text

The first line of the email also contains the preview text. This text is what the prospect will see in their inbox next to the subject line. Following the SMYKM methodology, the preview text can look like this:

3. Value proposition

The next part of your email is the body text, where you can use your value proposition.

When writing emails that effectively communicate your value proposition, it's important not to focus on what you sell but on the specific challenges you solve.

This approach ensures that your message aligns closely with your audience's needs and pain points, making it far more compelling than listing many features.

A more detailed and thorough explanation can be beneficial, particularly when dealing with higher-level executives. These recipients often seek deeper insights into how your offering can resolve complex issues, so longer, well-structured emails perform better.

Additionally, anticipating potential objections or rebuttals is crucial. By understanding common concerns and addressing them in your emails, you strengthen your proposition, demonstrate a thorough understanding of the recipient’s challenges, and showcase your product's unique advantages. 

This proactive approach helps build trust and credibility, paving the way for more productive conversations and a higher likelihood of engagement.

Shifting focus from what you sell to the challenges you solve for your customers is essential to crafting an effective value proposition. 

This perspective ensures that the communication resonates more deeply with potential clients, particularly higher-level executives who often look for comprehensive solutions rather than simple products or services. 

A detailed, in-depth explanation can be more effective. It allows you to thoroughly address complex problems and demonstrate your understanding of the industry landscape, which higher executives appreciate.

Your CTA should be clear and compelling, urging the recipient to take a specific action, such as scheduling a meeting, signing up for a demo, or visiting a webpage for more information.

It is important not to be too presumptuous at this stage.

Do not send them a CTA, such as a calendar link, or ask them for a 10-15-minute chat.

Instead, ask them if they have time over the next week or two and if they are open to learning more. If they respond positively, you can send them your calendar link.

For the follow-up emails, keep it short and sweet. A follow-up email using the SMYKM methodology would keep the same subject line (same email thread), and the email could look like this:

The third email could look like this:

6. Scripts for Calls, Voicemails and Video Emails

While email templates cover written communications, your outreach will perform even better by mixing in calls, voicemails, and personalized videos recorded using tools such as Loom.

The downside of using email only is that an email might not arrive in your prospect's inbox, and it can be easily ignored, even if you have personalized it.

If you mix in calls, voicemails, and videos, here are some useful scripts to get you started.

4. Enroll Prospects in Sequences

You now have a library of email templates, snippets, and scripts you can use to open more conversations with prospects.

The next step is to combine all these touchpoints into a sequence you can send to your prospects.

HubSpot Sequences offers a tool for orchestrating a series of customer touchpoints—including emails, calls, and LinkedIn messages—that streamline the communication process with potential customers.

Some touchpoints, like an email, can be completely automated, while others (such as a call or video email) require that the sender does the task manually before proceeding to the next step.

Sequences make individual salespeople and provide valuable data for the whole sales team on optimizing your outbound processes, helping more sales representatives meet their quotas.

Enrolling prospects in a sequence will give you a lot of data on what emails and other touchpoints work best, so you can easily standardize these practices for the whole sales team.

Another benefit is that a sequence will help new salespeople be trained quicker, make existing salespeople more efficient, and increase revenue as your outbound process performs better.

While sequences allow you to automate large parts of your outreach, you still need to meaningfully personalize each individual prospect you contact.

First, you need to build out the sequence inside your HubSpot portal and add the templates you added in the last step and the manual tasks:

Now, you can start enrolling your prospects into a sequence. To maximize the impact of HubSpot sequences, it's essential to tailor them to different customer personas. 

This involves understanding each segment's unique needs and communication preferences and designing specific sequences that address these. 

While your templates and scripts give you the framework for your messaging, you still need to invest some time in actual personalization for each prospect you’re reaching out to.

According to the SMYKM methodology, there are three ways you can personalize:

• About the person: their current job, length of time, promotions, previous employers, career path, common connections, LinkedIn headline or about section, location, education, or hobbies.
• About the company: Website, resources, press releases, values, charity and executive activity
• About the space: The lingo and words they use, who they are in the space, or relevant trends.

5. Use Tasks to Keep You Organized

HubSpot’s Sequences offers powerful tools to enhance task management, ensuring sales teams can focus more on selling and less on administrative tasks. 

When enrolling a contact into a sequence, you will be assigned tasks during the sequence for all the manual tasks (such as a call or a LinkedIn connection request) you must complete.

When setting up tasks in a sequence, you can provide detailed specifications, which include:

• Title: Including keywords like "call" or "email" in the task title can automatically assign it a specific task type, streamlining the categorization process.
• Personalization: Add first name, last name, and company name for more context
• Type: You can choose from various task types such as Call, Email, To-do, or even specialized types like Sales Navigator actions if your CRM is integrated with LinkedIn.
• Priority: Tasks can be marked as low, medium, or high priority to help prioritize daily activities.
• Due Date and Time: Set precise deadlines based on your regional settings to keep everyone on track.
• Repetition: For tasks that need to be done regularly, setting up intervals such as daily, weekly, or monthly can automate part of the workflow.
• Reminders: Email reminders can be configured to ensure no task is overlooked or forgotten.

Adding tasks to queues facilitates efficient task management. This helps organize and prioritize work more effectively. Tasks can also be set to repeat at specified intervals, fostering continuous engagement and consistent follow-up.

Default due dates, times, and reminders can be established to maintain consistency and reduce the time spent setting up individual tasks. This standardization ensures that all tasks adhere to a certain level of uniformity and helps align the team’s efforts.

6. Set and Track Sales Activity Goals

HubSpot provides tools to help managers set and track performance goals, ensuring that every team member is aligned and focused on achieving business objectives. 

HubSpot allows managers to set specific quotas for their sales and service teams at various levels, whether for individual users, teams, or entire sales pipelines. 

Managers can use HubSpot’s goal-setting templates or create custom goals from scratch to tailor objectives that fit their teams' unique needs and overall business strategies.

Users can set and track goals based on revenue, deals created, calls made, and meetings booked.

Setting precise targets for different time frames—weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly—and assigning these targets to specific users or teams to foster accountability and focus.

Once set, goals can be effectively managed and monitored through the HubSpot interface. 

Managers can view goals by measurement type, team, or pipeline and make adjustments as needed, such as editing targets or setting notifications for when milestones are reached.

This enables a dynamic approach to performance management, accommodating changes in business strategies and market conditions.

Integrating goals into reporting allows managers and teams to visualize target data and monitor performance against set objectives. 

HubSpot’s report builder offers special configurations, such as adding reference lines based on sales goals, which enhance the visibility of progress and highlight areas needing attention.

7. Use the Prospecting Workspace

The HubSpot Prospecting Workspace is designed to facilitate just that, offering a suite of features that puts all the features listed in this article into a single workspace.

Summary Tab

This tab provides a comprehensive overview of all your prospecting activities. It allows you to track task progress, view upcoming and overdue tasks, and manage meetings and tasks within sequences. This holistic view ensures you can plan your day effectively and prioritize tasks requiring immediate attention.

Tasks

The Tasks section is organized by due date, giving you clear visibility into what needs to be done and when. Here, you can quickly view task details, start tasks due today, and mark completed tasks off your list. This organized approach helps keep your day structured and ensures you’re always on track with your sales goals.

Schedule

Your daily schedule is displayed in a calendar format, showing all planned meetings, calls, and tasks. It includes virtual meeting links for quick access and detailed viewing of your full schedule. This helps you manage your time efficiently, ensuring you’re prepared for each interaction throughout the day.

Sequences

The Sequences tab shows all the task reminders associated with your active sequences. This feature allows for easy completion and review of tasks linked to contact records, ensuring consistent follow-up and engagement with prospects.

Suggested Activities

To further enhance your efficiency, the Prospecting Workspace automatically generates task suggestions based on certain criteria being met. This proactive feature helps you identify important activities that might be overlooked, optimizing your daily workflow.

Leads

The Leads section categorizes your leads into new, attempted, connected, and recently engaged groups, with options to follow up appropriately. This structured categorization helps you prioritize and strategize follow-ups, enhancing your chances of conversion.

Additional Features

Reviewing Schedules: You can review your schedule through a read-only calendar view, helping you plan without making accidental changes

Managing Contacts and Meeting Outcomes: Directly manage contact information and log meeting outcomes within the workspace to keep all pertinent data updated and accessible.

Activity Filtering: In the Feed tab, you can filter activities by type or sequence enrollment. This provides a tailored view of sales activity notifications, allowing you to focus on the most relevant information.

What about GDPR?

In the debate around GDPR and cold emailing, it's common to encounter concerns that GDPR has ended such practices. However, this understanding is not entirely accurate.

GDPR does not outright ban cold emails; instead, it regulates how personal data is used in these efforts to protect individual privacy.

When constructing an outbound process with HubSpot, remember that GDPR concerns handling personal data and respecting individual rights, not prohibiting marketing strategies. 

One of the lawful bases for processing data under GDPR is having a "legitimate business interest."

That means outreach must be relevant to the recipient's professional role or industry. 

For example, offering a product or service to improve the recipient's business operations could be considered a legitimate business interest. 

Ensure that your outreach closely aligns with the recipient’s profession or role. This is not just a matter of compliance but also of effectiveness. Messages tailored to a recipient's specific context or needs are more likely to be well-received and result in engagement.

Provide a clear and easy way for recipients to opt out of receiving future communications. This respects the recipient's right to privacy and choice and is a requirement under GDPR.

Your emails should prominently display an opt-out link, allowing recipients to stop receiving communications with minimal effort.

Be transparent about where you obtained the recipient’s contact information. This transparency builds trust and is also a requirement under GDPR. You must prove how you acquired the data, whether through a public directory, purchased list, or another method. 

As the quote from Lemlist rightly points out: "GDPR doesn't say 'Don't send cold emails.'

GDPR says, 'If you send cold emails, respect personal data, and have clear reasons for outreach.'"

This encapsulates the essence of GDPR's stance on cold emailing. It’s about ensuring that you respect personal data privacy and have a justified reason for your outreach.

Conclusion

Building a Targeted Account List: The foundation of successful sales prospecting starts with identifying and creating a list of potential accounts that align with your ideal customer profile. This ensures that your efforts are directed towards the most promising leads.

Crafting the Perfect Sales Messaging: It is crucial to develop compelling and personalized sales messages. Tailoring your communication to address your prospects' specific needs and pain points can significantly increase your engagement and response rates.

Build Email Templates and Scripts: Streamlining your outreach with pre-designed email templates and call scripts helps maintain consistency and efficiency. These resources should be adaptable to suit various scenarios and stages of the sales process.

Enroll Prospects in Sequences: Organizing prospects into automated sequences ensures systematic follow-up and nurtures leads over time. These sequences can include emails, calls, and other touchpoints to keep your prospects engaged.

Use Tasks to Keep You Organized: It is essential to leverage task management tools to stay organized. Scheduling and prioritizing tasks helps ensure that no follow-up or important activity falls through the cracks.

Set and Track Sales Activity Goals: Establishing clear sales activity goals and monitoring progress is vital for maintaining momentum and motivation. Tracking key metrics allows you to adjust your strategies and stay on target.

Use the Prospecting Workspace: A dedicated prospecting workspace integrates all these elements into a cohesive system. This centralized hub can enhance productivity and streamline sales by providing easy access to all necessary tools and information.