topic Re: Use Calculated Properties To Conduct Pipeline Health Checks in Tips, Tricks & Best Practices

Use Calculated Properties To Conduct Pipeline Health Checks

SeanReid — Tue, 22 Sep 2020 13:56:47 GMT

"How healthy is my pipeline" is a question I get asked a lot by sales users. It's something that is important for both sales reps and their managers. Reps want to know so they can be sure that their pipeline has deals within in that are likely to close so they don't waste their time on dud deals, while managers want to be sure that their reps are following company playbooks and processes.

I've read a lot of different health check playbooks for pipelines, and one that I'm a big fan of is MEDDIC. MEDDIC stands for "Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Identify Pain and Champion". By ensuring that you have ideitifed all of these areas, you be sure that you are speaking with the right person and that they will see the value behind your solution. To be honest, it works really nicely with the Inbound Sales methodology. Recently, myself and another HubSpot decided to try build out a MEDDIC criteria list in their portal to help see how healthy their pipeline is, and the results were fantastic.

Our goal was to build what we called "A MEDDIC Health Score", which was a score out of 100 which determined how healthy a deal was. We build this out using deal properties and a calculated property.

First, we created the properties for our MEDDIC score:

Each of these were simple to follow. We used checkboxes for when a rep would identify their internal champion and their economic buyer/decision maker. We used single line texts for reps to add the details of said contacts, and dropdown selected for the other criteria. So for example in the "Identify Pain" property the dropdown includes options like "Costs", "Technical Limitations" or "Cyber Security". By having these as a dropdown it ensured that reps were only inputting data that is neccasry and helps keep our reporting clean and void of human error or interpretation.

Once this was built, we moved onto the second stage, which was to create a number property that we called "MEDDIC Score", and a calculated property called "MEDDIC Health Percentage". The formula we used for health was designed to give us a score out of 100, or a percentage of completed properties, to determine how healthy the deal is. It looks like this:

We use the number 7 because we created 7 different properties in our MEDDIC group that our sales team need to complete. So this number should be the number of properties you create, not including the MEDDIC Score or the calculated property. We multiple by 100 to give us a percentage.

Last piece of the puzzle is a workflow to populate the MEDDIC Score. The workflow is a deal type that simple increases the MEDDIC Score each time a property is populated. It looks like this:

And we are set! This only took 30 minutes to build out, but now the team use the calculated property to gauge how healthy their deals and their pipeline are, and it also ensures that if a deal reaches a certain stage it should have a certain amount of these details populated to help ensure an accurate forecast.

Re: Use Calculated Properties To Conduct Pipeline Health Checks

kestrada — Tue, 22 Sep 2020 14:13:53 GMT

Simply amazing. Thanks for sharing your knowledge @SeanReid .

Kira😀

Re: Use Calculated Properties To Conduct Pipeline Health Checks

MEDDICC — Wed, 23 Sep 2020 17:16:49 GMT

This is really great Sean!

This is one of the reasons why I picked HubSpot for MEDDICC's CRM platform because you folks are super innovative with this kind of thing.

There is a real resurgence of Sellers picking up MEDDIC right now.

I have created some definitions for confidence at each stage too if you'd be keen to learn more I'd love to chat. You can get me via my website which is linked above 🙂

Re: Use Calculated Properties To Conduct Pipeline Health Checks

MEDDIC_Academy — Thu, 24 Sep 2020 06:55:11 GMT

@SeanReid this is great: Easy and immediately applicable. Just reflecting the MEDDIC methodology itself. Some of our clients at MEDDIC Academy have done similar implementations.
Of course the idea can be further developed for a more sophisticated scoring with more details, but this is a great start, amazingly done in 30 minutes. Kudos!

Re: Use Calculated Properties To Conduct Pipeline Health Checks

mperry — Thu, 24 Sep 2020 14:30:40 GMT

Thanks for that @SeanReid !

I've actually just used this as a reference to help a HubSpot user with their pipeline 😀

Re: Use Calculated Properties To Conduct Pipeline Health Checks

DanielSEON — Wed, 02 Dec 2020 21:21:47 GMT

Hi @SeanReid, this is fantastic! My only question is whether I actually need the last step (the workflow) if my MEDDIC Score property is a "score" type?

Would there be an advantage to using the workflow instead of the score type property?

Thank you!

Re: Use Calculated Properties To Conduct Pipeline Health Checks

SMoreau — Fri, 20 Aug 2021 21:00:20 GMT

@SeanReid thanks for the share, very useful.

but still question I have some trouble to implement the workflow, especially to calculate the Score.

It Seems that it does not calculate well.

It does not decrease or increase. Can you help?

Re: Use Calculated Properties To Conduct Pipeline Health Checks

JFerraro — Fri, 03 Sep 2021 11:16:12 GMT

Sean: This is great work you've done. How can our company incorporate what you've developed for MEDDIC in Hubspot ...? This ius exactly what we need. Thank you, John Ferraro, VP Sales, Honcho

Re: Use Calculated Properties To Conduct Pipeline Health Checks

GrantCarlile — Wed, 05 Jan 2022 19:48:19 GMT

Hey @JFerraro, where are you at with the buildout? Love to help where I can. GC

Re: Use Calculated Properties To Conduct Pipeline Health Checks

EdHawkins — Sun, 06 Feb 2022 22:42:41 GMT

Hi Sean - this is all great, except I can't seem to get it to work. SMoreau appears to have the same issue. For me, it updates to 12.5 and then that's it. It doesn't update any further. Curious to hear if you've been able to use this and it's worked?

Re: Use Calculated Properties To Conduct Pipeline Health Checks

Gabriel_W — Mon, 09 May 2022 06:31:56 GMT

You need to activate re-calc - then the workflow will add 12.5% every time on criteria is fulfilled.

Re: Use Calculated Properties To Conduct Pipeline Health Checks

JAicher — Sat, 17 Sep 2022 17:20:19 GMT

Sean - this is great, exactly what I was looking for.

However...

In practice, there are some issues with the workflows I can't get around.

I work closely with our reps to roll out new HubSpot functionality, and am in involved in deal reviews. Often times a rep will update all the values at once, or we may go back and change an answer after reviewing the deal.

So here are the issues we've encountered.

When a rep updates more than one value at a time before saving the record, the workflow only runs once and adds 1 point instead of 2, 3, 4, etc. Potential Fix - I created separate workflows for each property so they can run independently to add points. This seems to be working just fine.
Any time a rep changes their answer (ex. change "Decision Criteria" from Business Decision Criteria to Technical Decision Criteria), it reruns the workflow and adds more points when it should just stay constant. We want Re-Enrollment turned on, but not when a value is changed.

I can't seem to figure out #2 on my own. I was testing If/Then branches after enrollment triggers to check IF the value was ever known before then don't increase points, but it's also not working exactly right.

Lastly, deducting points isn't really addressed. I'm looking at separate workflows for that, but once again get into issues where it needs to recognize that the value used to be known and is now unknown which doesn't quite work with HubSpot's workflows.

Does anyone have any ideas here? Thanks!

Re: Use Calculated Properties To Conduct Pipeline Health Checks

KGaudet — Wed, 15 Mar 2023 08:19:54 GMT

I have encountered the exact same issues. Did you manage to find a way to solve this?

Re: Use Calculated Properties To Conduct Pipeline Health Checks

Edyta7510 — Tue, 17 Oct 2023 09:31:13 GMT

@SeanReid the Meddic properties you created are deal properties (not company properties, right?)

Re: Use Calculated Properties To Conduct Pipeline Health Checks

dgomezdev — Wed, 14 Aug 2024 16:51:13 GMT

Hey Sean! Very nice implmentation. However it was not enough for our company needs and they wanted something easier to manage by our reps.

So I just did an implementation for using Meddic in HubSpot. I am trying now to list the app on the marketplace, so the first 3 users, will get lifetime premium access: https://meddiccscore.com/ Just send me a DM with your user!

I hope this is liked by the community!