Prospecting is the elite’s salespersons most important activity, and many of the quality leads generated through prospecting will ultimately turn into customers and generate revenue.  

A salesperson loses approximately 14% of their customers per year. Lesson:  Never stop prospecting.  The early bird gets the worm and 50% of sales go to the first salesperson to contact the prospect, according to Insidesales.com.  

 There are many valuable prospecting tools available like LinkedIn, Twitter, purchased lists and even Facebook.  We use HubSpot marketing automation software, and they have really hit the mark with an easy to use and effective tool.  Here are my tips on getting the most out of prospecting through HubSpot.  

1. Target Market - If you know your who is your target market, those targeted companies can be searched by Industry through the Hubspot platform.  HubSpot has all of the industries listed in the search box.  Highlight the industries that match your targets and prospect away!
2. Company Revenue - The prospecting tool in Hubspot has company revenue broken down from under a million to over a billion.  Choose the range that best represents your ideal client, and you will receive a list to go through.
3. Geographic Region - Through HubSpot’s tool, a search can be narrowed by any geographic region via State, County, Zip Code and even area code.
4. Saved Searches - All searches can be saved in the tool and as new companies are added to the database, they will automatically show up in your saved searches.  A filter can be applied to a saved search to only show new companies that have been added since the last look.  
5. Company Insights - The company insights allow you to dig deeper and go directly to the company’s web page for further investigation before you decide if the prospect is a good fit and worthy of adding to the database.
6. Adding to your HubSpot database - Upon completing the initial research, the prospect can be added to your database through a check box for multiple additions or simply clicking on the check box to the right. Choose a target of new prospects to generate per week to ensure positive results.
7. Exporting contacts - All of your new prospect companies can be exported to multiple views by clicking on export all in view.   This is a great way to organize new prospects if your company has an outbound calling program.  

Prospecting through HubSpot puts the control back to the salesperson.  When buying a list, you are at the mercy of another company doing all of the research.  The leads pulled directly from the tool by the salesperson create a much higher accuracy rate, and in the end, gives the salesperson more time to convert leads into customers.  

Generating leads and sales is the number one responsibility of any salesperson and prospecting is necessary to achieve results.  HubSpot has created an easy to use and efficient tool for what can be a time consuming task.