Use Activity Filters to Prioritize Outreach

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Use Activity Filters to Prioritize Outreach

What are activity filters & why using them

Activity filters on HubSpot gather all the interactions or activities on contact, company, deal and ticket records over time. When was my last call with this contact? What pages did a contact view? When did the deal enter a specific pipeline stage? Activity filters will tell you! 

On a single record level, you can view and track these activities on the central section of a record: 

Using activities filters helps you prioritize outreach by focusing your efforts on the most engaged contacts. These activities are transcribed as properties for every object on your CRM. This is how you can efficiently track activity dates, type, volume, … and stay on top of the opportunities in your portal.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of activity filters you can find as property on your CRM: 

Marketing-related activity properties: 

• Email engagement: last marketing email open/click/reply date, number of marketing emails clicked
• Website & Form: first conversion, last engagement date, number of form submissions, time of last session

Sales activity properties: 

• Call & Meeting engagement: recent sales email opened date, date of last meeting booked, number of times contacted 
• Deal activity: last activity date, number of sales activities, date entered/exited “deal stage”

Find here the full list of activity filters. 

Once you know what activity filters to focus on for your business, you can include them in different HubSpot tools and optimize your usage. 

I’ll focus my next examples on contact activities. Remember that you can implement this for your company, deal, ticket and other object activities!

Build your lead scoring strategy with activity filters

To prioritize outreach, you can create property scores to qualify contacts in your CRM, measure those engaging most with you, and uncover opportunities that would have fallen through the cracks. Here are the main steps to build your score: 

• Find the gaps: where do you lack visibility in your CRM? Is it to measure the engagement of new contacts, or maybe customers for upsell opportunities?
• Determine the key activities to qualify contacts: website activities, email engagement, form submissions, … 
• Allocate points to these engagement criteria

Your score will be calculated automatically for every contact, becoming a new central property to prioritize outreach.

Use activity filters for your prospection 

Both the marketing and sales teams are benefiting from activity filters to organize and prioritize prospection. There are 2 tools to help in that regard: 

• Lists 

Rather used by marketing teams, lists are key for audience targeting for your email marketing or paid ads campaigns. You’ll find 2 types of lists on HubSpot: static and active. I’ll recommend using active lists to get the most of activity filters as the list will automatically update based on your criteria. 

When building your list, you can combine activity with non-activity filters, equivalent to behavior and contact characteristics. Here are a few examples of how active lists can be used: 

• Sending marketing emails to contacts based in UK, in the “lead” lifecycle stage (characteristics) who submitted my website form and engaged with my emails in the past 6 months (behavior). 
• Create an audience list for your LinkedIn ads with contacts including “manager” or “director” in their job title with an engagement score of 60 or more. . 

Learn here how to build your list step by step. 

• Custom views

Very similar to lists, custom views are rather than used by sales teams, and are found under CRM > Contacts. You can create and save a view also based on activity and non-activity filters so the view will update automatically. 

For example, each owner in your team can view their assigned contacts with a high engagement score, no open deals, and no current enrollment in sequence.  

Automate your outreach and nurturing 

The core of your CRM is automation. Once you know what activity filters to focus on, workflow on HubSpot can take your outreach to the next level. 

Keeping track of what’s happening in your CRM and reaching out at the right time can be (very) challenging: this is where automation becomes a central part of your strategy. 

With workflow, you can launch email campaigns to nurture your prospects, notify in real-time when a prospect interacts with your content, update properties, or even build different scenarios based on contacts’ activities. 

Have a look at this workflow example:

Email nurturing workflow - Watch Video

Want to learn more about workflow? Have a look at this lesson on the HubSpot Academy 🎓

Report and measure your performance efficiently 

The final step to leverage activity filters is to use them while building your reports. 

This academy lesson will take you through the steps to create your reports from scratch. 

Pro Tip: HubSpot already pulls out a bunch of reports for you! You can check them out there and add them to your dashboard if relevant: