How to Use Hubspot for MSPs

At BigOrange, we use Hubspot for our own business and for our clients. Hubspot helps us and our clients with several processes that are vital to the way we do business as an MSP marketing agency. One of these processes is acquiring customers through lead generation. Here’s how Hubspot for MSPs (managed service providers) streamlines customer acquisition.

Why Should I Care About Digital Lead Generation?

You know how difficult it is to acquire customers. Digital lead generation minimizes the cost of their acquisition, especially if you have a lot of competitors that can afford a higher cost of acquisition. Digital lead generation is the process of attracting and converting as many strangers and prospects as possible into clients and customers. It assists with attracting visitors to your website.

How Do I Get Leads?

Getting leads is a process. This process is composed of five parts:

1. Get found for what you are selling. You can do this by using the right keywords on your website and through consistent content that keeps your website looking fresh. “IT support” and “cyber security” are important keywords to use for MSPs.
2. After you get found, it’s important to provide clear and compelling messaging and calls to action. Once people get to your site they need to know that you are selling what they are looking for and that they should work with you. A good example of a call to action would be “Request a Vulnerability Assessment.”
3. Next you want to give your site visitors sales funnels or “juicy downloads” that convert visitors to leads. An example of this would be a free download like a “Cyber Security Checklist.”
4. To attract more visitors you can run campaigns.
5. Finally you want to nurture your leads into becoming prospects and then customers. You do this through lead nurturing and marketing automation campaigns.

Where Does Hubspot for MSPs Come In?

Hubspot is an all-in-one marketing, sales and customer support CRM (customer relationship management) system. You can store, manage and work contacts in this system. We’ve found that our clients get more leads by leveraging Hubspot as a CRM. There are several tools within Hubspot that will help you with lead generation, including:

• Sales funnels. To convert website visitors into leads you can use sales funnels. A sales funnel is a free product, service or content given to a website visitor in exchange for performing a specific action, like filling out a form. Some examples are an ebook or guide, a discount or promotion, webinars or courses, a loyalty program, templates, free tools, a demo or a free trial. A good sales funnel has high quality and relevant content to your audience. It also needs to align with your business’s products or services.
• Contacts. Anyone who interacts with your business can be saved as a contact in Hubspot. You want to build your contact database by uploading existing lists, embedding forms on your website, integrating your email and manually adding contacts. A best practice for managing contacts is to set up rules for always including: lead source, lead status and lifecycle stage. Creating custom contact views is a great way to see the big picture of the contacts in your sales funnel.
• Nurturing. Use marketing automation to nurture leads. Leads come from your download, “contact us” forms and “book a meeting” links on your site. Use a lead capture form on a landing page to collect leads, deliver the offer and track contacts. When creating forms on Hubspot, set it up so leads coming in through certain forms or links are assigned the correct fields, like lead status as “lead” and lifecycle stage as “marketing qualified lead.” Tailor workflow actions to each stage in your buyer’s journey, i.e. awareness, consideration and decision. This could include providing answers to their questions or problems and continuing engagement, actions to help them understand your solution better, or sending content that delights and cements your brand as the best over competition.
• Sales sequences. With these automated outbound sales activities you can create targeted, customized emails to nurture prospects over time. You can create tasks for your team to follow up on prospects depending on the prospect’s actions like replying to an email or unsubscribing from emails. You can automatically remove contacts after they engage. We recommend well-crafted personalized emails that answer important questions.
• Deals and quotes: This is where money comes in. In Hubspot, you have a dashboard where you can see all of your deals and the stages they’re in. There are also visual cues and reminders for following up on and nurturing deals.

Where to Start

All of this information can be overwhelming. A great place to start is capturing leads from your website using forms, setting up your contact views and working your contacts. If you feel like Hubspot CRM is your next step, book a meeting with us to discuss your business goals and how BigOrange can help you get leads and grow.