In my conversations with hundreds of customers, they reinforce what many businesses already know - it’s crucial for their teams to log the activity on their HubSpot CRM whenever a call or meeting is completed or attempted.
For a step-by-step on logging activities on HubSpot, refer to this Knowledge Base article.
Most users already input and track the essentials - Contacted/Attendee(s), Call/Meeting Outcome, Activity Date, Call/Meeting Notes.
This is a great foundation, and these essentials unlock two vital reports and insights for your team:
Number of calls (or meetings) by time period:
Number of calls (or meetings) by outcome:
To get even deeper insights with minimal additional effort, here are three simple strategies to adopt.
(1) Tagging Call/Meeting Type
An Outcome tells you what happened, but Type tells you the purpose. While it’s valuable to know your team had 100 connected calls last month, it’ll be equally valuable to know what type of calls these were.
Common Call/Meeting Types include Discovery, Demo, Support etc, but you can customise the types in accordance to what’s most relevant to your business and processes.
With the Call/Meeting Type diligently updated, this allows for another data insight to be pulled - Number of calls (or meetings) by type:
To add the Call/Meeting type option in your activity log and to customise the options, follow the steps outlined here.
Bonus Tip: For majority of your reports, you can add an additional data layer under “Break Down By”, which further allows you to segment your data. For example, in this same report, we can further segment by the user which these calls are assigned to:
(2) Customising Call/Meeting Outcomes
Similar to Call/Meeting Types, you can customise the options for Call/Meeting Outcomes. For example, if you’re feeling that “Connected” is too broad an outcome to utilise, you can consider adding more specific options such as “Connected - Call Back Again”, “Connected - Meeting Scheduled”, “Connected - Not Interested” etc. To do so, follow the steps outlined here.
(3) Trigger Workflow Automation(s) Based On Call/Meeting Log Inputs
After logging the data, you can make the data work for you. Use the option(s) selected in your Call/Meeting Outcomes and Types to trigger Workflows, allowing processes to run automatically in the background such as maintaining your data hygiene, sending emails, sending internal notifications etc.
For example, if a call was successfully connected and resulted in a further meeting scheduled (i.e “Connected - Meeting Scheduled”), you can automatically update the associated contact’s lifecycle stage to Opportunity.
Logging calls and meetings is the minimum expectation for an accurate interaction history, but it doesn’t have to stop there. By refining your inputs and layering in automation, you turn simple records into further actionable data and automated processes.
If you need any guidance in setting these up, do reach out to our Support Team!