I don’t care how good your spreadsheets are, if you keep using them to manage your leads, you are capping your sales and holding your team back. In this video, we’ll make it easy to get started with HubSpot CRM for free so you can sleep at night knowing you’ll never miss another follow-up again. Now HubSpot CRM has several different modules for marketing, for sales, content management, customer service, and operations. Today we’ll focus on Sales 101, importing your contacts, keeping track of follow-ups, managing your pipeline, and forecasting your annual revenue. Let’s jump in. To get HubSpot, head to the following website. You can click on the card in the top right, or I’ve included a link in the description below. To get started, click on "Get Started Free" and then sign up for an account. HubSpot will ask you a couple questions to get you started. You can answer these questions to personalize your experience, but we’re going to skip right through. Now HubSpot might ask you about a template to get you started faster. We’re going to set up manually instead so we can configure it exactly the way you want it. We’ll skip and use sample contacts here. And finally, we’ll skip and add teammates later. When you finish those questions, HubSpot takes you to the user guide page. There’s a lot of great training content here, but we have a lot of leads that we need to get in touch with to grow our business. Let’s stay focused. Move your mouse to the left sidebar, click on "CRM," then click on "Contacts." Now everything I show you today is available on the free version of HubSpot, starting with the Contacts database. The Contacts database is the bread and butter of any CRM. Here you can view anyone you have contact information for and just about any detail you have about them. For example, if you want to know the job title of all your contacts, all you have to do is click on "Edit Columns" and search for "Job Title." Check the box, click "Apply," and you’ll see that field shows up in our contacts list. You can also reorder columns by clicking on the grip handles to show the most important information at a glance. To dive deeper, we need to get our leads into the system. Now you can add leads one by one by clicking the "Create Contact" button, but if you’ve got a spreadsheet like we do, you can just click the "Import" button. Here’s the file that we’re going to import. We’re not going to change any of the column names because HubSpot does a great job at recognizing your data regardless of the format. You’ll notice that we have two types of data in here. We have the contacts themselves as well as the company they’re a part of. This is important for a later part of the process, but for now, click on "Start and Import." We’ll click "Import File from Computer," then "Next." We only have one file. We’ll click "Next" again. Now remember we have two types of objects in that file, both companies and contacts, so we got to tell HubSpot to expect multiple objects, then click "Next." Then we’ll tell HubSpot exactly which objects we have, companies and contacts. Click "Next." Okay, finally we get to upload our file. I’ll drag and drop my file from my desktop, then I’ll click "Next." Oh no, we got a hundred errors. But don’t worry, this is perfectly normal. Let’s figure out what happened. Scrolling down, we see each of our columns from the file we imported on the left. HubSpot has its own columns, which it calls "Properties" on the right. When it can match our columns to its properties, you’ll see a green checkmark in the "Mapped" column. So, for example, it recognized first name, so you see the green checkmark there. Looking down the list, we see that HubSpot recognized most of the data, except for "Lead Status," where it didn’t recognize the values "Contacted" and "Not Contacted." Let’s click on the "hundred errors" link to fix this. HubSpot has its own lead statuses, and none of those are "Contacted" and "Not Contacted." We need to translate those into an equivalent that HubSpot understands. So, for "Contacted," we’ll choose "Connected." And for "Not Contacted," we’ll choose "New." Everything looks good, so we’ll exit out of this. All of our errors are fixed, so let’s click on "Next." Verify that you’re not going to spam your contacts by checking this box, and click "Finish Import." Great, so all of our records were imported, and we can view them right here. Let’s click on "View Contacts." So, we’ve got our contacts, now let’s get on with our work. We’re a donut distributor, so we need to reach out over to Ginger over at Silver Bakery to see if she’d be interested in reselling our donuts. Let’s go up to the search box and type in Ginger’s name. Once we see Ginger in the list, we’ll click on her name and get taken to the contacts page. On this page, you’ll see all the information we imported from our lead list, on the left-hand side. On the right-hand side, you’ll see any associations that HubSpot is tracking, like the company Silver Bakery. In the middle, you’ll see an overview of all activities involving Ginger. Activities include all communication between your company and a lead, like emails, texts, and phone calls. This is one of the main values of a CRM. All communication in one place, so you don’t have to guess what the next steps are with any lead. Now, we don’t have any activities because we haven’t contacted Ginger. Let’s change that. We’ll scroll back up on the left sidebar and click on "Email" to email Ginger. To email from HubSpot, you need to connect your inbox, so click on "Connect Inbox." I recommend you turn on "Inbox Automation," so you get follow-up tasks and contact details automatically captured from your email correspondence. Click on "Connect Your Inbox," type in your email address, and click "Next." From this point, follow the prompts to finish connecting your account. When you finish connecting your email, you’ll land here. Now, if you use Gmail or Outlook, you’ll also be asked if you want to download the HubSpot extension. I recommend that you do it because it makes it very easy for any new email that you send directly from Gmail or Outlook to be saved directly into HubSpot. For now, though, we’ll click "No Thanks." So, let’s write our message to Ginger. We’ll fill in the subject here, and we can fill in the body down below. Now, HubSpot has some cool tools to help you be more efficient with your outreach. The first is a reminder in case Ginger has not replied to us within a certain amount of time. To activate that reminder, click on the checkbox next to "Create a To-Do Task to Follow-Up in Three Business Days." If you want to change the date, click on "In Three Business Days." Let’s change it to "In One Week" instead. Next, we want Ginger to be able to book time with us directly on our calendar instead of going back and forth with her over email about a time that works for both of us. To do this, we can connect our calendar directly by clicking on "Meetings" and then "Get Started." Follow the prompts, and you’ll get a link that your leads can use to book time with you. We’re good with this message. Let’s send it. Immediately, you see the email shows up under the "Recent Activities" list on Ginger’s page. Next, let’s look at our task list. You can find it by clicking on "CRM" in the left sidebar and then clicking on "Tasks." You’ll see the task we just created, but we need to create some more tasks. Let’s click on "Create Tasks" in the top right. Now Emma Jones from Sunrise Delights has asked us for a pricing sheet, so we need to prep that and get it over to her right away. We’ll set the title for this task to send the pricing sheet, and then we’ll associate it with two records in our CRM. So, any time anyone sees Emma Jones or Sunrise Delights inside our CRM, they’ll also see this task needs to be done. First, we’ll search for Emma Jones, and then we’ll search for Sunrise Delights. Let’s make sure this task gets done tomorrow. We’ll click "Create" to finish the creation. And once we refresh the page, we’ll see the task that we just created. As you can see, this is pretty simple, but you need to make a habit to make this effective. I strongly recommend you bookmark this page and schedule the first part of every day to make sure you get your tasks done. Now we just heard back from Ginger, so let’s see what she had to say. This time, click on "Activities," and we can see that Ginger’s email back to us has been logged directly in HubSpot. She says she’s very interested in discussing, and she’s booked some time with us tomorrow using our meeting link, which we can also see above on this meeting at 11am Pacific. Because there’s a potential sale tied to this appointment, we now want to track our interaction with Ginger as a new deal in HubSpot, otherwise known as an opportunity. To do this, click on the "Add" link in the deals association pane. We’ll keep the same deal name. In the free version, we only get one pipeline to use, so we’ll keep it as the default. The deal stage as appointment scheduled sounds right to us. We don’t know the amount yet, but we’ll keep the close date as May 31st because things move quickly in the donut business. Everything else looks fine, so let’s click "Create." So, we’ve created a new deal, but so what? Let’s zoom out and look at our entire pipeline. You can do that by clicking on CRM on the left sidebar and clicking on deals. This view shows all of your deals as a list, but what I find more helpful is to look at them on a board. Now this board represents our sales pipeline, and our pipeline is a set of stages which help you see the life cycle of a deal. From the start, when an appointment is scheduled like Ginger, all the way into the end where hopefully the deal is won, but of course it could be lost as well. So, let’s say that these stages don’t quite match what your business goes through. So, you can click on "Board Options" and then "Edit Stages" to make changes. Here you can add, remove, or change the name of any stage. You’ll also see a percentage in the second column called "Deal Probability." Deal Probability is the chance that for any deal in that stage that it gets to closed one. For example, if you have $10,000 worth of deals in the appointment’s scheduled stage, then you estimate you’re going to close $2,000 worth of those by the time they’re all done. As you can probably guess, these percentages are important for accurate forecasting, and over time you can use your data in HubSpot to make these percentages more accurate and so you’ll get better forecasts of how much money you’ll bring in for the year. Let’s keep the default stages and probabilities in return to our pipeline. You’ve seen that a CRM’s power is how it gives you structure to your processes. It also offers you customizability to meet your business’s unique needs. Case in point, let’s add a custom attribute to our deals called "Order Size" so we can easily track how many donuts we need to make to fulfill the order. We’ll go back to the list view and then click on "Actions" in the top right and click on "Edit Properties." Here you’ll see the 60 properties that come with a deal by default, and we’re going to create another one. So, let’s click on "Create Property." We’ll name this property "Order Size" and we’ll put it in the deal information group. Property groups are just used to organize properties on this settings page. They have no bearing on where the information shows up on the deal page itself. We’ll click "Next." Order size is the number of dozen donuts that we need to make, so we’ll make it a number and click "Next." We’ll set a minimum value of 1 because we can’t have an order with less than one dozen donuts in it. Finally, let’s click "Create." The property is now created, and if we go back to our deals list and click on the silver bakery deal, we can add that property to the left sidebar by clicking on "Actions," then "Customize Properties." Searching for the property after we click on "Add Properties," we’ll type in "Order Size." Check the box, we’ll see "Order Size" now shows up as a property on this list, and click "Save." You’ll see now that "Order Size" shows up as something we can enter in for every single deal. While we added the "Order Size" property, our team has created the rest of the current deals in our pipeline. Let’s get an overview of all those deals by checking out some reporting. Move your mouse over to the left sidebar, click on "Reporting and Data," and then click on "Dashboards." HubSpot has a number of dashboards with pre-built reports, so we’re going to search for one called "Sales" and click on it. Let’s keep the default reports and see what HubSpot creates for us. We’d like everyone to be able to view this dashboard, so let’s keep the default settings and click "Create Dashboard." Then click on "Go to your Dashboard." So, we don’t see a lot yet, because we just started doing activities today. Let’s change the date range to include this whole year. Click on "Click Filters," then click on "Date Range," and then click "Add." Then click on the "Date Range" dropdown and select "Is After," and we’ll select "January 1st, 2024," and click "Apply." That looks better. In the top left, we see all the activities from today. In the top right, we don’t see anything yet. This report is not affected by the dashboard filter that we just set, so let’s skip it for now. Next, we see the total pipeline split by deal stage to estimate our total revenue for the year. Remember, each stage is weighted by that probability that we saw earlier. On the right side, we see our progress to date in closed deals. Finally, at the bottom, we see all the activity from today, the email sent, the meeting that was scheduled, and the two tasks that we created. These reports will get more useful over time to track and hold your team accountable to sales activity and deal flow. And there you have it. We’ve just done a whirlwind tour of HubSpot CRM. You’ve got your contacts in one place. You’ve got a single place for tasks on follow-ups. You’ve got a sales pipeline set up. And you know how to forecast your business growth. If you learned something today, please give us a like and don’t forget to hit that subscribe button. Let us know in the comments if you want to see any part of HubSpot in more detail. This is David, signing out. I’ll see you next time.