How do you operationalize social selling inside HubSpot?

In January, I posted on LinkedIn that I was open to a new role. That same day, completely coincidentally, I had a demo on my calendar with a company called FirstTouch. I had reached out because I had a problem I couldn’t solve: how do you manage social outreach at scale without it living in some disconnected stack of tools that is missing the valuable context stored in your CRM? I’d tried a bunch of things. Nothing really fit. So when Michael Kurson, one of FirstTouch’s founders, showed me what they were building, I had one of those “wait, this is actually it” moments.

What followed was a dozen-plus conversations with Michael and co-founder Jared Mintzlaff over the next several weeks. By the end of it, I was convinced they were building the future of GTM. And they were convinced I was the right person to help them build it. So here we are.

I’m joining FirstTouch as their Head of Revenue Operations.

But that’s not what this newsletter is about. What I really want to talk about is how you can leverage HubSpot and FirstTouch together to operationalize your sales team’s social strategy.

Because that’s the part that blew my mind when I first saw it, and I think it will blow yours as well.

FirstTouch is a native HubSpot integration built around a concept called Operationalized Social. It’s currently the only social automation platform in the HubSpot app marketplace.

Social is one of the best channels for building pipeline right now, but the way most B2B teams use it is completely unscalable and untraceable. Founders are posting, reps are sending connection requests and messages, and none of it gets logged anywhere your CRM can see. It’s got none of the infrastructure and process required of modern revenue motions.

FirstTouch changes that. It plugs directly into HubSpot and lets your team orchestrate social actions through workflows, trigger engagement based on segment membership, and report on it like any other channel.

The methodology that sits behind it has three phases.

The core principle is earning the right to a conversation before you ever ask for one.

And you earn that right, not by automating the entire process, but by efficiently leveraging AI and automation in some areas, while maintaining a human-in-the-loop to ensure real connection is happening.

Here’s the thing about AI: it’s made it incredibly easy to produce a lot of content very quickly. Which means everyone is producing a lot of content very quickly. The internet is increasingly full of polished, well-structured, totally forgettable stuff.

In that environment, the thing that actually breaks through is human connection. Not a clever subject line. Not an AI-personalized cold email that still reads like an AI-personalized cold email. Actual, genuine, one-person-to-another engagement. Showing up in someone’s comments. Sharing their work. Saying something real.

The irony is that this kind of relationship-building has always been how the best B2B deals get done. The AI era hasn’t changed that, it’s just made the alternatives worse. Mass outreach channels like email and phone are suffering from severe diminishing returns. Buyers are tuning out. The teams that figure out how to build trust before they make asks are going to have a huge advantage over the ones still spraying and praying.

For years, I have been running the same social playbook that FirstTouch is built to support. You are probably subscribed to this very newsletter because you saw me offering value on LinkedIn first.

Now for the fun part. Check out these social plays that I am running today that have proven to be incredibly effective:

Managing event-related sales activity is one of the things I have seen companies struggle with most. Usually follow up is a generic automated sequence of emails thanking the person for attending and asking if they want to book a sales call. Those almost always end up in email trash bins.

Instead (or in addition to) sending an email, I’ve started using a more personalized follow up via FirstTouch.

Here’s how it works:

I recommend Contrast for webinars and hapily for in-person events, but you can use whatever event-centric enrollment criteria you prefer.

This pushes the attendee data from HubSpot to FirstTouch, where we can start actioning it.

FirstTouch’s Qualification Agent allows you to enter information about what your ideal customer looks like as well as what disqualifying factors there might be. The agent looks at the contact’s HubSpot data, LinkedIn profile, and company page and evaluates it against your ICP. You can set a threshold so that only qualified leads move forward.

If you are already connected with someone, you probably want to use different messaging than if you need to send a fresh connection request. Use branching logic to split based on whether or not you are already connected.

Next, you can automate outreach actions to go out to your qualified event leads. You can have AI write messages using a combination of templated language and AI prompts that can leverage dynamic tokens that pull up-to-date data from HubSpot or LinkedIn.

Those pre-written messages are then routed to you for approval (which can be done inside HubSpot, so your reps never have to leave the CRM) before they are sent. You can make edits to ensure you are never sending AI slop to a leads inbox.

Catching a prospect right when they are thinking about you is the fastest way to move deals to the finish line. If you have contacts associated with deals in your active pipeline that visit your website, it’s an ideal time to reach out.

This play is designed to give them a gentle nudge without seeming creepy.

Make sure to include the right pipeline, exclude deals that have already closed, and select relevant website pages, so you know the intent is high.

Because these contacts are already in your pipeline, no qualification needed. Just go straight to checking connection status. FirstTouch can be configured to assign actions to the Contact or Company owner in HubSpot, so you know the right person is the one sending outreach.

Shoot a quick connection request or message. You can even include context from the page they were visiting, by having FirstTouch’s AI read the URL from the “Last page seen” property in HubSpot.

The handoff from Sales to Customer Success is a huge point of failure at most companies. The customer has spent days or weeks developing a relationship with the sales rep, and is now being passed off to a new person that they have never met and with whom they have no rapport.

You can start building that relationship as soon as the deal closes by having their new CS rep connect with and welcome them via LinkedIn message!

At this point, you probably get the logic behind the FirstTouch flow builder, so instead, I want to show what a personalized message could look like. Purple highlighted text is dynamic tokens. Green is AI prompting. Everything else stays just the way you wrote it.

When I first saw this functionality I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it. Here’s how you can get started:

I’ll be running bi-weekly Onboarding Workshops alongside FirstTouch Co-Founder Jared Mintzlaff starting on Tuesday, April 21 where we will be helping new users get set up and launch their first flow.

Don’t worry, Hubsessed will remain the independent educational resource that you’ve come to know and love. When I joined FirstTouch, I let them know that this was important to me and that I wanted to continue to build this community.

I’ll still be writing weekly newsletters and offering courses and live bootcamps (like the upcoming Attribution Unlocked bootcamp, happening May 6-27).

Looking forward to continuing to share in-depth guides, app reviews, product updates, and strategy and analysis for years to come!

Best,
Ryan