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by Lauren Ryan on April 2022
By now you know that leads are people who’ve expressed interest in your product or service by either contacting you or requesting more information (in the form of a free download, a consultation, or even a demo).
But sometimes, people visit a website during the research phase and aren’t quite ready to request a product or contact the company. Maybe they read the blog, visit the About page, and share interesting discoveries with their team so they can weigh in.
You may think there’s no way to track this behavior other than website analytics. But, HubSpot created a cool feature as part of their Target Accounts rollout—the Prospects Tool.
Now, let’s explore the Prospects Tool in the HubSpot CRM along with its top components and potential use cases so you can start tracking user behavior before they submit contact information.
What is the HubSpot Prospect Tool?
The Prospect tool in HubSpot is a tool that tracks your visitor’s IP address for each page view through the HubSpot tracking code. It then finds the visitor’s company information and creates a record with anything that’s publicly available (like company name, industry, annual revenue, size, and location). There’s even a section where you can find related companies or view the company’s LinkedIn page. It also includes the date of the first visit and the source (organic search or direct traffic, for example).
There is a caveat — If the visitor is a small business or an individual, they likely won’t have a dedicated IP address, in which case they’ll be filtered out by HubSpot automatically.
The HubSpot Prospect Tool allows you to:
- Set up notifications for you or your team to be alerted when a company that has yet to convert visits or revisits your website.
- Filter by Properties about the prospect company or their visitor behavior, like how many employees they have or what pages they visited or returned to.
- Collect company data including city, country, domain, Facebook page, LinkedIn page, LinkedIn bio, industry, number of employees, and annual revenue.
- Collect information about the company’s behavior on your page, including the number of visitors, the number of page views, first and last seen pages, and the source of entry.
Examples of what you can do with the HubSpot Prospects Tool
There’s a lot you can do with the Prospects Tool, from discovering who’s viewing your pages, which could help you discover a new industry you may not have thought of, to better targeting your marketing efforts to increase conversions.
Here are a few examples of how to use the HubSpot Prospects Tool
- Alert your outbound sales team when companies visit & revisit your website. They’ll be better informed about potential opportunities and be able to create highly targeted messaging to address the visitors’ interests based on their behavior.
- Add companies to your LinkedIn Sales Navigator outreach and engage with them both personally and with your company page.
- Add company domains to targeted social and paid ads or create lookalike audiences based on the current visitors.
- Create targeted pop-ups by source if you can determine which pages are most frequented by these visitors to support lead generation efforts.
- Determine the estimated value of the sources that are NOT converting with high-value prospects visiting so you can optimize the sources for conversion.
Benefits of using the Prospects Tool in HubSpot
As you can see, the Prospects Tool gives you a pretty granular look at who’s visiting your page and what they’re doing once they’re on your site. Collecting this much data early on helps you hone in on your messaging and target high-potential pages with pop-ups or other marketing optimization efforts.
The Prospects Tool also gives you a better understanding of what the company’s process looks like before they reach out to you, which adds context to your sales process and gives you a more clear picture of what leads to a successful deal. This information is priceless for your marketing and sales teams as they prepare to engage with potential customers as they’ll be privy to the prospects’ concerns and what they’ve already learned about your product, which is grounds for a stronger pitch or demo when the time comes.
To start using the Prospects Tool, you first need to install the tracking code on your website and landing pages if your website is not built using HubSpot CMS. Check out this guide about how to install the HubSpot tracking code if that’s the case. If your website is in HubSpot, you’re automatically tracking visitors and won’t have to install the tracking code.
To access your prospects, go to your search bar and enter Prospects. Then, you can either click on the Prospects button on the left or find the Prospects link to your right.
Or, navigate to Contacts > Target Accounts > Prospects.
From this view, you can create filters, mark them as favorites, or hide existing prospects depending on your needs. As we mentioned above, a good example of filters would be industry, annual revenue, or company size. This article in the HubSpot knowledge base shows you more about the management options for prospects within the tool.
HubSpot’s Prospects Tool provides priceless insight into the silent lurkers
Not everyone that comes to your page will be ready to submit a form right away. This tool allows you to understand user behavior well before companies are ready to engage. With this knowledge, you’ll be better able to make informed decisions and optimize your website to support your marketing and sales.
On the flip side, studying your prospects gives you a strong foundation for any outreach and a comprehensive marketing strategy — what are visitors looking for? What are they clicking? What page converts the most? All of these are crucial for your ad strategy, content marketing, and sales conversations.