What are Hubspot Sequences?
Hubspot Sequences is an automation tool that helps your organization’s sales representatives send out customizable emails to leads. These sequences give your sales team precious time back by allowing them to automate and semi-automate personalized touch points. This frees your team up to focus on other productive tasks without compromising the sales funnel.
Sequences are among the many amazing features on the Hubspot Sales Engagement Platform. Hubspot’s suite of tools are designed to help sales teams drive engagement and close sales.
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Who Uses Hubspot Sequences?
Hubspot Sequences can be used by all different kinds of customer-facing team members, including business developers, sales developers, sales reps and account managers. Sequences can be tweaked to meet the respective demands and tasks of each role through various features and frequency customizations.
How do Hubspot Sequences Work?
To save time and stay organized, Hubspot Sequences enable teams to create a series of sales activities and enroll contacts as targets of specified executions. These emails can be structured around a variety of tasks and peppered with call-to-actions, such as clicking on a link to schedule a meeting with one of your sales reps.
The sequence of these sales emails will naturally bring leads through your respective sales funnel, with touch points written by a human for a human to maximize engagement. Hubspot sequences can also support complex sales outreach scenarios where the program will generate a task to connect on LinkedIn, then create a call record and email the prospect. In each case, the sales team takes control of the content but has their workflows semi-automated. They can monitor success metrics and tweak campaigns in real time.
Why Sequences are a Game Changer
To gain a competitive advantage, sales organizations are beginning to leverage technology to more efficiently and personally connect with leads. This shift is happening across the industry in many ways, with Hubspot Sequences differentiating for the value it adds to sales processes.
Before the advent of this technology, sales reps had to manually make calls, send emails and reach out to connections on LinkedIn. They had to track and respond to all interactions manually, which left little time for anything else. Hubspot Sequences track all of this for you and help sales teams execute at significantly higher volumes. A company using Hubspot automation sequences performs at 10- to 100-times the efficiency of companies that do not.
When to use Hubspot Sequences
Given that Sequences help sales reps stay in touch, there is an infinitive list of ways that they can be leveraged.
We are going to focus on 4 categories of usage.
Prospecting
The majority of users start off using sequences for prospecting with the intent of setting meetings. This is a great first place to start because you can build out sequences that are highly reusable and personalized. This is less complex than using sequences for buyer intent situations which we highlight later.
Inbound Leads
It is very common for sales reps to receive leads, follow up once or maybe twice, and then move on to focus on prospects that are more engaged. The challenge is that it takes more sales activities to engage a lead than most reps will complete. With sequences, sales reps can enroll inbound leads, which will automatically follow a set of sales actions without additional interactions from the sales rep.
Buyer Intent
By storing all contacts and prospect data in Hubspot and linking it to your website, you get to see which pages prospects are visiting on your website. Each time someone visits your site, sales reps get a better understanding of the services that prospect is interested in. Then they can enroll them in a sequence that is 100% tailored to the pages or products that they showed interest in.
Deal Follow Up
Another sequence that can be created is the deal follow-up sequence. While guiding a prospect through the buying cycle, prospects often get to a point where they are in a holding pattern or making a decision. In many cases, the sales rep also puts their actions on hold or converts to intermittent check-ins to see if the prospect is ready to buy. In this case, the rep can use a deal follow-up sequence which automatically sends the prospect helpful purchase decision information. The goal with this sequence is to stay in touch with helpful information while the prospect is collaborating with their team on a purchase decision.
Common Use Cases
Staying Relevant - Have you ever received an email from someone with a solution that you thought was compelling but wasn’t the right time to buy? I have, and what usually happens is that I file it away somewhere thinking I want to revisit it at a later date. Then that date comes along and I can’t find it, so I do a Google search and find someone else to provide the service. At FounderScale, we work to overcome this by putting in systems and processes that engage prospects on a monthly basis. Our goal is to send something useful to every prospect in our database every 30 days. We use Sequences to do this because we don’t want one size fits all email blasts and we want it to come from the rep's email so that the prospects build recognition with a person that they will work with.
Podcast Interviews
If your company has a B2B interview-style podcast, the sequence tool is a great way to reach out and follow up with a large number of interview requests in an automated way.
Webinars
One of the best ways to drive more people to a webinar is to engage your sales team in sending outbound sequences inviting customers and prospects to attend. With all the marketing data in Hubspot, marketing can send the standard communications about the webinar, and then sales can have a list of all the contacts that weren’t notified. These are perfect for outreach from a rep.
What are Multi-Channel Sequences?
When it comes to sales prospecting, the best and most effective sequences are ones where you reach out across multiple channels which may include emails, calls, and Linkedin messages. You can also get more creative by adding offline channels to send mailers or by leveraging SMS depending on the type of business you are in.
Sales Belief Systems
Before getting started with sequences you will want to have a plan in place that outlines how it will be used. Many of the use cases require the management team to set expectations and create a belief system on what sequences should be used for. Without a belief system, you might end up sending a lot of emails that end up in the SPAM box and provide little to no value to prospects.
Belief System Examples:
Every 30 Days -
As a company, we spend a lot of time and money building prospect lists. To ensure that we fully leverage the data, all contacts in Hubspot must receive an update from a sales representative every 30 days. This metric will be monitored and reported on in our weekly sales meetings or one on ones.
Build Relationships and Provide Value -
Although we will occasionally reach out with sequences asking for a meeting, our primary goal is to build a relationship and provide value to prospects. We do that by providing opportunities to engage which could be guides, relevant blogs posts, and invites to webinars, podcasts, or other sales engagement events.
No Response Policy -
If a prospect doesn’t open 11 total emails over a period of time, they will be excluded from further sequences.
Multi-Channel -
We will always use multi-channel sequences to ensure we are doing everything we can to engage prospects. We will not focus solely on email as the channel of communication.
Segmentation
The goal is to be timely, relevant, and provide value. In order to do that we need to segment the database and send sequences with information that speaks directly to the prospect or client. There is nothing worse than a generic outreach campaign where you can tell someone doesn’t even know your title or the type of business you work in. When sequences are sent to segmented lists and the email subjects and content matches the contact, they are more likely to open, click and engage.
Time Boxing
Setting aside time for Sequences - One of the challenges that many sales representatives have with features like sequences is that they need to carve out a set amount of time to focus on getting prospects and contacts enrolled in the right sequences. Because of this, we recommend that sales managers train sales representatives on how to time box. This is a concept where they will dedicate a set amount of time to a given task like sequence segmentation, setup, and enrollment.
Immediate sequences vs mass enrollment - Depending on the role of the sales rep and their specific use cases
Hubspot Sequence Features
Automated Unenrollment - One of the most useful features in Hubspot Sequences is that when a prospect responds, they are automatically un-enrolled from future automated follow-ups. This gives the sales rep the opportunity to engage and respond without accidentally sending multiple emails.
Threading -
Sequence emails can be threaded or unique meaning that when you send a second email, it can appear as a follow-up to the previous email. This uses the same subject and standard email threading. You can also choose non-threaded which is helpful when using sequence to stay in touch over a period of time.
Metrics -
The sequences function provides all the metrics you need to test out messaging and determine what works and what doesn’t. Unlike sending regular emails with a mail client, Hubspot provides, opens, clicks and other interaction data for all contacts enrolled in the sequence
Send Later -
Sequences can be scheduled to start at a set time and date.
Sequences for Sales Managers
In order to leverage Hubspot sequences, management must manage the expectation that sales team members utilize the feature. This can often be challenging for more seasoned managers or sales reps who may not be as inclined to leverage sales tools for efficiency.
Usage Review -
Sales managers will want to monitor the usage of sequences using Hubspot reports. There are also roll-up reports where you can see the metrics for multiple sequences at a time.
Effectiveness -
Sales managers will want to review the effectiveness of different sequences using hubspot reports. Set an attainable goa