HubSpot list and save views tools are great for helping to segment and qualify your leads in HubSpot. But how do you organize leads that don't have set property values? Maybe you already have leads in your database, but you've never attributed a lifecycle stage to them, because of this, building a subscriber or MQL list wouldn't be easy, or maybe you've developed a new segmentation strategy that requires the use of a new property value to organize your leads. If you have thousands of leads that need to be updated, this can feel overwhelming and time consuming. As your organization grows, your segmentation and the qualification process will likely evolve as well. But rather than having it feel like a burden, you can use HubSpot to automate and scale how you organize your leads. There are three HubSpot tools and features that can help you do this. These include: sync lifecycle stage settings, hidden form fields, and workflows. Let's start with the sync lifecycle stage settings. In HubSpot, you have contact records, which represent individual people, and you have company records, which represent an organization. Your CRM can get confusing if you're only updating your contact records but not the associated company record. As a result, a leads contact record, maybe an MQL, while their company record may have recently been assigned as an opportunity by your sales team. This can be an issue if your marketing team ascending segmented emails to MQL contacts when actually some of those contacts should be opportunities based on the associated company record. However, enabling your sync lifecycle stage settings allow you to automatically update the lifecycle stage for objects associated with a contact. This way, you won't have to worry about manually updating each of your contact, company, or deal lifecycle stages. Next, let's talk about hidden form fields. HubSpot forms allow you to gather information about your website visitors and new leads that enter your database. While most assume the information you gather is only as good as the information nearly provides in the form, this isn't always true. Forms provide the option to add hidden fields that aren't visible to visitors or leads. Hidden fields are used to pass property values into a contact record without requiring the lead to provide that information. For example, when a contact submits a form with their name and email to subscribe to your newsletter, you can add a hidden field that's a lifecycle stage property and set the property to subscriber. This way, every time someone subscribes to your newsletter by filling out that form, their contact record will automatically update with the subscriber lifecycle stage property. Hidden form fields can help you automate and scale the way you attribute property values to new leads. Finally, let's talk about workflows. While HubSpot workflows are popular for creating lead nurture or drip email series, they're also useful for updating a large number of contact, company, or deal property values. For example, if your company has developed new buyer personas and has updated your persona contact property to reflect them, the next step would be to update each lead with those new personas. To automatically do so, you can develop a workflow. Let's say you have a new persona named R&B Arthur. You've identified R&B Arthur because they filled out a certain form on your website, opened a certain email, and clicked a CTA that states, I like R&B music. You can set the contact enrollment triggers to match that criteria, and set the actions to update the contact property persona to R&B Arthur. Once you turn this workflow on, all leads in your database matching this criteria will automatically enroll in this workflow and have their personal property set to R&B Arthur. Workflows make marketers and sales reps lives so much easier. They can organize and automate even the most complicated segmentation or lead qualification strategies all from one workflow. Here's Marianne Dawson from Campaign Creators, a HubSpot solutions partner marketing agency, share how she helped the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Pharmacy organize their leads and students using HubSpot workflows. An example of a segmentation strategy we implemented was for the School of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. We had a challenge of accurately aging our database. As high school students and college students entered the database, we need to better understand where they were in their academic journey as the years go by. There are several different ways to create segments and chain within HubSpot. For this case, we used workflows to update contact properties and forms to ensure we're collecting the most accurate data. Once the student aging criteria was established, we created a workflow to consolidate the data and update the specific property according to the year when the contact is expected to start pharmacy school. Then, for new contact, we updated all forms to add the consolidated property, so contacts are able to self-select the year they are looking to start pharmacy school. After implementing the segmentation strategy, we have seen improvement in email open rates, and click-through rates for a specific event campaigns and enrollment type of campaigns. It also has helped our overall lead management and purging contacts that no longer qualify or are past their enrollment cycle. We have also been able to use the segmentation strategy for data consolidation using one specific property to identify where a contact is in their academic journey. Segmentation and lead qualification are key to helping you identify and organize each lead based on their buyer's journey. As organizations grow, marketing and sales teams will often experience the growing pains of scaling their segmentation or lead qualification processes. But with the help of HubSpot, you can dream up even the most intricate segmentation, orderly qualification strategies, and still feel confident bringing those strategies to life.
