How do you use HubSpot to generate more qualified leads?

HubSpot's lifecycle stages supply the labels. A marketing qualified lead is a contact that marketing has judged ready for the sales team. A sales qualified lead is one that sales has qualified as a potential customer. An opportunity is a contact associated with a deal. You can customize the stages, and a stage can be set by a person or by automation.

Those labels say who makes each decision, and they leave the evidence to you. Suppose a company sells inventory software to food distributors that run three or more warehouses. Its marketing and sales teams could agree on a definition. A marketing qualified lead works in operations or purchasing at a distributor of that size and has viewed the pricing page or asked for a demo.

A form submission alone doesn't meet that definition. The same guide can be downloaded by a student or by an operations director. If neither the form nor the existing CRM data distinguishes them, the two submissions look alike. The company needs the role and the warehouse count on the record before it can tell them apart.

Scoring sorts the contacts already in your CRM. It can't create buyers, so the supply of good leads depends on what brings fitting prospects to you. Lean Labs' article on B2B lead generation with HubSpot's Marketing Hub starts there. It recommends publishing content that answers the questions buyers ask and following up with email that matches what each contact showed interest in. In the article's account, the contact record in the CRM gives the team what it needs to choose the next action.

Suppose the inventory software company's sales team keeps hearing one question from distributors: how lot tracking connects to their accounting system. The company's other option is an inventory guide aimed at anyone curious about the subject. The page that answers the distributors' question is the one that addresses the reader the company wants as a lead.

The company's definition needs a job role and a warehouse count, so each record has to hold both. A form is one way to get them. A property can also be filled by enrichment or by a person editing the record.

Asking for both facts on every form makes the form longer, and HubSpot's form shortening is one way to ask for less. In the updated form editor, with enrichment settings turned on, HubSpot hides fields it can fill from its enrichment data. It is available on Marketing, Sales, Service, Data and Content Hub from the Starter tier, and on Smart CRM at Professional or Enterprise.

Enrichment won't fill every record. When it finds nothing for a visitor, HubSpot shows every field. A field can also stay visible when its value came from another source. Conditional logic and redirects don't work with enriched properties, so check any form that relies on either before you turn shortening on. A fact specific to your business, such as a warehouse count, is one to plan on asking for directly.

HubSpot's lead scoring tool builds two kinds of score. A fit score reads properties, such as job title or company size. An engagement score reads actions, such as page views and form submissions. A combined score keeps both component values. Criteria can add or subtract points, and engagement points can decay as an action gets older.

The two scores are worth keeping apart because they describe different things. Under this company's definition, an operations director at a twelve-warehouse distributor who has read one blog post matches the profile and hasn't yet shown intent. A student who has read ten pages shows activity and doesn't match the profile. The company would respond to them differently, and a single blended number could rank the student higher.

Suppose the company gives 20 points of fit for three or more warehouses and 15 for an operations or purchasing title. It gives 10 points of engagement for a pricing page view and 25 for a demo request. It treats a contact as marketing qualified at 35 points of fit and at least 10 of engagement. Every number in that rule is the company's own choice. The score reports how well a contact matches the criteria you entered, and it can't confirm that the person will buy.

Contact scoring requires Marketing Hub Professional or Enterprise. Company scores work on Marketing Hub or Sales Hub at those tiers, and deal scores are a Sales Hub feature.

A contact that meets the definition should change stage and get an owner. HubSpot's record owner settings let a person assign owners one record at a time or through an import, and an import doesn't notify the new owners. Assigning owners with a workflow requires a Professional or Enterprise subscription. Rotating leads among reps requires Sales Hub or Service Hub at those tiers, and each rep in the rotation needs a Sales or Service seat.

Rotation balances only the assignments made by that one rotation action. A rep who also receives leads another way can end up with more than an even share.

An assigned owner shows who is responsible for a lead. It doesn't show that anyone has followed up. In this company's process, the evidence of follow-up is the stage change a rep makes after a first conversation. HubSpot's definition gives the sales qualified decision to the sales team, and each team decides how it makes that call. Suppose the inventory software company's rule is that the rep confirms the warehouse count and a plan to buy in that conversation, and only then changes the stage.

A person can do the qualifying and routing by hand: read each new record, set its lifecycle stage and assign an owner. The Professional and Enterprise tiers take over the repetitive parts. We cover the prices in how much HubSpot costs.

Take the contacts marked marketing qualified in one quarter and follow that same group forward. Count how many of them sales later qualified and how many ended up with a deal. Staying with one group matters, because a deal that closes this month can belong to a lead created months ago.

Suppose 40 contacts reached marketing qualified in the first quarter and sales qualified 10 of them. The reps report that most of the rejected leads held purchasing titles and had no say in software decisions. The company could limit the title points to operations roles and then watch the next quarter's group.

HubSpot's attribution reports add the source side. Contact create, deal create and revenue attribution are separate reports, and the deal and revenue reports require Marketing Hub Enterprise. Each model allocates credit to interactions HubSpot recorded, such as tracked page views, submitted forms and logged calls. The deal create and revenue reports show which pages and campaigns appear on the path to a deal. These reports don't prove that a page caused the deal, and they can't count an interaction that was never recorded.

Use what the group shows to revisit the criteria in your definition and your choices about where leads come from. A rule that keeps passing leads sales rejects is worth a second look, and so is a source whose leads sales keeps accepting. A low acceptance rate can also come from how reps qualify, even when the criteria are sound. And a source whose leads sales accepts still has to be worth what those leads cost to acquire.