Weidert Wednesday: HubSpot Prospects is the Best Kept Secret in B2B Sales Prospecting Tools [VIDEO]

Sales prospecting tools can be timesavers. Find one that also features practical contact information management and reporting, and the value increases exponentially. After all, time is money — especially when you’re building B2B relationships and generating revenue.

There are choices among the best sales prospecting tools. If you’re a HubSpot user, chances are you have access to a real contender and may not even know it.

HubSpot Principal Channel Consultant Evan Dean gave the audience at our Appleton HubSpot Users Group a real aha moment when he showcased HubSpot Prospects — explaining what it is, how to access it, and why so many people underutilize this hidden gem for lead prospecting. Watch the video above or catch the summary below to get the inside scoop.

What is HubSpot Prospects?

HubSpot Prospects is a tool that attempts to identify a website visitor’s company based on the visitor’s Internet Service Provider (ISP). To be clear, ISP information isn’t true contact information. It serves as an anonymous layer of awareness about a prospect based on their website visit — before they actually convert and become a contact within HubSpot. This point of distinction is necessary to keep top of mind as work-from-home (WFH) business models tend to skew the results. 

The initial logic behind HubSpot Prospects was simple. Someone at a company visits a website using their work computer while physically located in their workplace. ISP information from that visit is gathered in HubSpot Prospects and lead conversion efforts follow.

However, as WFH gained popularity and transitioned to mainstream operations for many companies, using ISP information got trickier. Instead of identifying with a specific company, WFH visitors show up in HubSpot Prospects results as their home ISP. For example, AT&T may show up as having visited your site — which could be huge in terms of a sales deal — but, in reality, the information is that of a WFH employee.

Proceeding with caution is prudent, but it doesn’t negate the power of what the sales prospecting tool can do for your sales and marketing teams to gather, filter, report on, and use data for lead generation. 

The tool can be particularly useful in reporting on the companies visiting your site, especially if you’re building an account-based marketing campaign.

How to Navigate to Prospects in HubSpot

Given all of its potential, HubSpot Prospects is still underutilized — or is it? A lot depends on the HubSpot license you have.

If your licensing includes Account Based Marketing (ABM), HubSpot Prospects is readily available for use in your HubSpot portal. Simply use the Contacts drop-down menu to navigate to Target Accounts and then select Prospects in the left nav:

For HubSpot users without ABM, Prospects is still available. Navigate to it by typing “Prospects” in the main HubSpot search bar and select the result under the “HubSpot Apps” area:

3 Ways to Optimize Sales & Marketing Strategies with HubSpot Prospects

With features like filters, favorites, one-click company and contact creation, and report generation, HubSpot Prospects is a significant time saver. Automation frees data gatherers from manual tasks so their time can be allocated elsewhere, and sales and marketing teams are better able to collaboratively drive data-based contact targeting, ABM, etc.

HubSpot Prospects also offers practicalities that empower sales and marketing teams in three important ways:

1. Maximizing ABM/ABM hybrid strategies

Marketing teams can be proactive in customizing ABM approaches with the insights gleaned by HubSpot Prospects — perhaps target-specific proposals can be created, or email templates can be enhanced, etc. — to connect with and win over decision makers

2. Reconnecting with previous contacts

As it goes in business, you win some and you lose some. If a person from a company that was a past closed/lost deal reappears as a website visitor, you’ll know because of Prospects. It gives salespeople the opportunity to revive contact relationships and potentially pursue new business

3. Retargeting companies

Since HubSpot Prospects is capable of identifying multiple visitors from the same company, it can help sales and marketing teams go beyond re-establishing connections with previous contacts. It opens the door to expanding the number of contacts to target within the same company using paid ad audiences, so you can get the right information in front of the right people to enhance brand awareness and lead nurturing

HubSpot Prospects may well be one of the most powerful sales prospecting tools you never knew you had at your disposal. Enhanced lead tracking, nurturing, and targeting generate a solid foundation for sales enablement and a robust inbound program. Read our free Guide to B2B Sales Enablement and Inbound Sales to learn more about how marketing and sales teams can work together to execute effective strategies.