How are you adjusting to life during these very peculiar and unpredictable times? What about working from home? How is that going? 

There will be  a multitude of different answers to these questions, depending on who you are, what you do and your situation. Personally, it’s slowly becoming the new norm and I am starting to embrace working from home life. One of the key factors that has helped make my transition to working from home much easier is HubSpot.

If you are a HubSpot user then this could be your lucky day as you have some really powerful tools at your disposal that can help you right now.

Let’s take a look.

The CRM and logging activity

I wanted to start with the CRM as it’s such an important part of HubSpot and because of the way it works; a great tool to help you work effectively from home.

One of the main issues of working remotely is regular communication with your team. For sales people, knowing the conversations the rest of the sales team is having with prospects and customers is crucial. 

HubSpot’s CRM allows you to log meetings, calls, emails and notes directly onto contact records. The great thing about this is that you can also mention team members in any of your activity logging which will notify said team members, keeping everyone on the team on the same page and improving communication. 

The conversations inbox

A feature that is often under-utilised by businesses that use HubSpot, the conversations inbox can be a great way to work collaboratively with your team.

Essentially, the conversations inbox allows you to connect a variety of different communcations channels into a central area that your team can all access and respond to.

Channels include live chat, bots, support and enquiry email addresses, forms, and even Facebook messenger chats. Your team can respond to any support queries, live chats or new business enquiries from one central collaborative area rather than working in isolation

Blog collaboration

One for the marketers and content writers here.

HubSpot has  two modes when it comes to adding a new blog; inline edit mode which is your standard WYSIWYG editor and a more collaborative feature called draft and comment mode.

Draft and comment mode allows the content writer to write their blog post directly into HubSpot in a minimal zen like white screen environment. Team members can then go into the blog and leave comments on certain sections and open up conversations around the theme and direction of the blog within the editor. If you have used Google docs before, it works in the same way.  

It’s a great time saver for remote teams to collaborate and it keeps everyone in the loop regarding blog posts.

Social media tool

In times like these, it’s even more imperative to make sure your company's social media presence is spot on in terms of regular content being published, with correctly positioned tone of voice and messaging.

HubSpot’s social media tool allows your team to work on composing, publishing and monitoring your social media content, all from one place. 

Your team can see which posts are scheduled out across which channels and make any edits to these posts before they get published. There is also a built in monitoring platform where you and your team can reply to posts across any channel and monitor any set of keywords and mentions of your brand. There is also a built in content calendar which your whole team can use to plan content activity.

Of course, the great thing about using the HubSpot social media platform is that it ties in directly with the CRM system, so you can track conversations with customers and prospects too.

HubSpot’s workflow automation

Automation might not be the first thing you think of when it comes to remote working, however, in times when communication and productivity are difficult to manually control, automation can be the key.

HubSpot has an advanced automation system built within it and this can be a lifesaver for remote working businesses. 

You can set up workflows to automate both internal and external processes; from your entire sales process and pipeline to that marketing lead nurturing program you are running. You may just want to send an automated message to team members when a deal is closed, or you may want to fire off an email to a prospect when they fill in the contact form - pretty much anything can be automated.

It’s all about getting the right information to the right people at the right time and you can stay on top of that using HubSpot workflows. 

Meetings link

The meetings feature in HubSpot could be a game changer for any client / customer facing team member, especially when it comes to saving time trying to constantly set up video meetings with people.

Meetings works by connecting directly to your calendar (Gmail or 365). It looks at when you are available and when you aren’t and allows people to book a time slot with you when you are free. Of course, there are more granular settings you can select when setting up your meetings link, like days and times when you can’t be at meetings, and buffers between when meetings are allowed to be booked. You have complete control.

What this allows you to do is take away the constant back and forth of email tennis and give your clients and customers the freedom to choose a slot for a meeting. 

So there you have it. HubSpot can be a great platform for both marketing and sales teams to have by your side when your entire business is working remotely. It’s also worth mentioning that HubSpot connects to most modern 3rd party software systems so you have the ability to connect everything together within HubSpot, further increasing its remote working capability.

If you need any help getting these features up and running on HubSpot then see our HubSpot services page.