How to Build a B2B Growth Engine with HubSpot, Smartlead and Slack

Looking to streamline your B2B sales and marketing operations? Many businesses struggle to maintain visibility across their sales and marketing activities, especially when running outbound campaigns. With data spread across multiple platforms, it's easy to lose track of prospects and miss crucial touchpoints. However, by creating a powerful ecosystem using HubSpot, Smartlead, and Slack, you can attract, manage, and convert prospects more effectively.

Creating Your Outbound Infrastructure

The foundation of any successful outbound campaign starts with proper infrastructure. For most B2B businesses, we recommend setting up approximately ten domains and twenty email accounts through Smartlead. While this might seem like a significant investment, it's relatively inexpensive considering the potential return. These domains need proper technical email configuration and, most importantly, must be warmed up before launching any campaigns. This warming-up period is crucial for maintaining good deliverability and ensuring your messages reach their intended recipients.

Integrating with HubSpot

Once your outbound infrastructure is in place, the next step is creating a seamless connection with HubSpot. The native integration between Smartlead and HubSpot makes this process straightforward. When setting up this integration, you'll want to create dedicated pipeline stages specifically for outbound leads. This separation helps maintain clean data and prevents your pipeline from becoming cluttered with early-stage prospects.

The system should be configured to automatically create deals when prospects show interest. However, it's important not to assign monetary values to these initial leads to maintain accurate revenue forecasting. All email activities should be tracked within HubSpot, giving you a complete view of each prospect's engagement history.

Leveraging Slack for Team Communication

While HubSpot serves as your system of record, Slack becomes your central nervous system for real-time notifications and team communication. Through webhook connections with Smartlead, you can track everything from email opens to positive responses. This visibility is crucial for maintaining team alignment and ensuring quick responses to interested prospects.

The beauty of using Slack for notifications lies in its accessibility. Your entire team gains visibility into the sales process, from top-of-funnel activities like website visits and email opens to bottom-of-funnel events such as closed deals and lost opportunities. This transparency helps marketing teams understand which deals are being signed and allows sales teams to see the effectiveness of ongoing campaigns.

Managing Your Pipeline

Your HubSpot pipeline should be structured to reflect your sales process accurately. A typical B2B sales pipeline might begin with discovery calls, moving through proposals and negotiations, then proceeding to NDAs and contracts, before finally reaching the closed won or lost stage. At each stage, you can implement automations to streamline the process.

For instance, when a prospect reaches the NDA stage, you can automatically generate the necessary documentation. Similarly, when you're ready for contracts, integration with services like DocuSign or PandaDoc can automate the creation and sending of agreements. This automation extends to the onboarding process once a deal is won, ensuring a smooth transition from prospect to customer.

Tracking and Learning from Lost Opportunities

Understanding why deals don't close is just as important as celebrating wins. When a deal is lost, capture both categorical reasons (such as price, budget, authority, or competition) and detailed explanations through free-text fields. This information should flow back into Slack, allowing the entire team to learn from each lost opportunity and adjust strategies accordingly.

The Power of Integration

This three-platform integration creates a powerful ecosystem that's greater than the sum of its parts. HubSpot provides robust CRM capabilities and automation tools, Smartlead enables effective outbound campaign management, and Slack ensures real-time communication and visibility. Together, they form a comprehensive system that can significantly improve your team's efficiency and effectiveness.

Making It Work for Your Business

While this setup has proven effective for many B2B businesses, it's important to remember that some customisation may be necessary for your specific needs. The key is maintaining the core principle of full visibility while automating repetitive tasks and ensuring smooth hand-offs between teams.

Conclusion

Building an effective B2B growth engine doesn't require dozens of tools or complicated processes. By thoughtfully integrating HubSpot, Smartlead, and Slack, you can create a streamlined system that provides visibility, automates key processes, and helps your team work more effectively. The result is a more efficient sales process, better team alignment, and ultimately, improved conversion rates.

Ready to transform your B2B sales process? Get in touch with our team at Breeze, and we'll help you implement this exact system for your business.