How to Organize Your Leads in the HubSpot CRM

Inbound marketing can help you increase sales in a number of different ways. In fact, inbound is probably the most effective form of marketing in existence today.

Inbound marketing helps by boosting the number and quality of leads you generate through your website and other channels. These leads can then be turned over to the sales team or retained for additional nurturing.

What are inbound leads?

Inbound leads are people who click ads, take action on your social media, or respond to a call-to-action on a landing page. They may exchange information for free reports, or they may indicate their interest in your product or service by signing up for a free newsletter. You can then qualify these people, assess their needs and interest level in your product or service, and continue following up with them until they’re ready to buy.

Inbound marketing efforts usually increase the number of leads you’re generating. This is generally good news, until it comes time to keep track of them. Luckily, organizing your leads in the HubSpot CRM has never been easier.

Import Your Contacts to HubSpot

The first thing you need to do is import your contacts to the HubSpot CRM. If you don’t have the information already in HubSpot, you won’t be able to organize it there.

Luckily, importing your contacts is quick and easy. Export a CSV file from a spreadsheet program, such as Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel. If you don’t already have a spreadsheet to track your contacts, it may take you some time to gather the information you need. Most services, such as LinkedIn, Outlook, and Gmail, allow you to export your contacts easily. From there, you can create a spreadsheet.

Once you have the CSV file and have ensured the data is clean, import it to HubSpot.

Create Filters to Sort Contacts

Once you’ve imported your data and populated the CRM with it, you’ll want to be able to sort your contacts quickly and easily. You’ll do this by creating and saving filters in the CRM.

Navigate to your contacts, and then click “add filter” in the sidebar on the lefthand side of the screen. Search for a property you’d like to use to sort your contacts. An example would be sorting your contacts by the lifecycle stage.

Click on the property name, then select one of the radio buttons to narrow the filter. For the lifecycle stage search, you could restrict the new custom filter to “is any of” and add one or more stages, such as “open deal” and “lead.”

You can add additional criteria to the filter, such as a specific last contacted timeframe. Once you’ve narrowed your filter to give you only the most relevant results, click save.

Using Properties in HubSpot

The HubSpot CRM comes preloaded with several default properties. These include the date you last contacted someone, the date of last activity, the lifecycle stage, and the lead status.

These properties are incredibly useful in sorting your contacts. For example, if you wanted to see all the contacts you haven’t contacted in one month, you could filter via the last contacted property. Each time you run this filter, you’d see who is up for another monthly outreach.

Creating Different Customer Types

Another way to organize your contacts in the HubSpot CRM is to organize them by customer type.

Another useful way to sort leads would be based on how the lead was generated. Leads who reached your site through Google search results versus those who clicked ads on social media likely have different profiles.

Being able to organize and sort your leads in HubSpot CRM allows you to quickly and easily follow up with many different leads on a regular basis.