Find contacts we are not in discussions with (prospecting)

[MarcusWennmo]

Hi,

We are starting to get a lot of contacts in Hubspot and it's getting hard to keep a structure of which companies we have contacted recently or not. 

We have two ways of doing this process. A or B.
A

1. Go the contacts section in Hubspot

2. Sort contacts on last contacted date and filter out the ones we have contacted more than 6 months ago
3. We go into the contact details of a chosen contact

4. We go to company details (the company of the contact)

5. We look through the company to see if any of our colleagues have contacted this company/ any other person on this company recently

6.  If not, we contact the specific contact we first clicked on

B

1. Go to the companies section on Hubspot

2. Filter our companies with Unknown "last contacted" date or "last contact" date with more than 6 months ago

3.  We go into those companies and find an associated contact
4. We reach out to the associated contact

Its a lot of manual work here. Is there a smarter way of doing this? Is it for example possible to filter our contacts (in the contact list) and see the last contact date of the company, or if we have contacted anyone at the company at all? 

[SeanReid]

Hi Marcus,

The first thing I'd say here is if you are not using sequences I would seriously look to get those set up. Sequences would be able to win you back time spent on following up with prospects and worrying about if you have been in touch with a contact or not. You could set up a sequence with 9 steps (5 emails, 2 social media activities like LinkedIn messages, 2 calls) and take would take care of your follow up and nurturing. 

In terms of keeping your database in check to find prospects that you have not connected with, you're on the right path with filtering your views on the CRM. The best way of managing this honestly depends on if you prefer to work from a contact level or a company level. It sounds like you are working from a company level, so using process B sounds like the more solid strategy of the two.

What could make it be less of a time suck is if you are allocating company ownership to your reps. So if rep A reaches out to a company, they are assigned as the owner of that company. This means that when you are using your filters from process B you can also include "Company Owner is equal to myself" or "Company Owner is Unknown", thus avoiding your reps researching a company only to find that someone else has already reached out to them.

Let me know if you have any questions on this, or if I'm on the wrong path!

[MarcusWennmo]

Hi Sean,

Thanks for your feedback and for taking the time to write an answer. 
Just as you mentioning we use sequences (we send 3 emails during a 2 week period) and someone answers an email they jump out of the sequence.

The process described is to actually find contacts in companies that we have not yet reached out to, and then add those contacts into a sequence. Therefore, we would also prefer to work from the contacts view (instead of the company view) since this is a place where you can mark contacts then add them to a sequence in 2 clicks. 

I actually found a solution that I want to share for Hubspot users that might have similar problems. Even though its, not a perfect solution, I probably the best I can come across. When changing Life Cycle of a company all contacts of that company will get the same life cycle status. (if the status is a step up in the life cycle hierarchy)

Pretty much all our contacts have Life cycle: Subscriber or Lead. I created filters in the contacts list filtering on "unassigned contacts" and life cycle: "Subscriber" or "Lead". I then went to the company list and filtered on "last contact date: Unknown" to get all the companies we have not yet contacted. I marked all the companies in that list and change the Life Cycle to Market Qualified Lead. When I went back to the contact list with the given filter above, I saw all the contacts on companies when yet have not been in contact with. And now we are working with those an adding them to sequences. Make sense?