This is my first post so apologies if it’s a bit convulted.
Our team adopted HubSpot sales earlier this year previously moving from managing deals through smartsheets. We provide consulting services and our deal progression can range from being in-depth to very quick small jobs across a range of four major-services.
Currently we track a deal in hubspot in what seems a fairly normal sense, then handing over to another team to handle constructing a solution, quoting, pricing, etc. Then back to the sales team to submit to the potential client, and then finally to the delivery team.
This is all captured in various power points and the crossing between the two is something we want to eliminate. Given the difficulty in how we quote we have custom forms that won’t move but the handover process is something we want to move onto HubSpot.
Effectivly I’m being tasked with finding what the best method of moving our qualification and our various handover stages into HubSpot. Still being new I wanted to reach out and find what people’s best type of solutions in configuring this is as far as building a process that is:
- flexible - in that size and detail available for a deal can be scalable
- adminless - trying to find a way that requires as little admin as required
- standardised - essentially a way to reduce the amount of difference between deals whilst not losing essentially information
At the moment the best solution I can come up with is going through with our managers as to what information is used for what decisions and mapping them against a series of questions (radio select properties) in hubspot. Maybe using different cards to accomdate for a large vs small opportunity to reduce the amount of effort required. And having them go across a series of workflows and triggers based on the answers? I know playbooks are somewhat of an option too potenitally?
Really the question is just has anyone done this type of work and what did you find worked well/would have liked to know in hindsight, either from purely the HubSpot side or even the human side when working with hubspot in this sort of sense.
Thank you
Welcome to the HubSpot community and kudos to writing your first post.
It looks like you’re on a Sales Hub Professional subscription, so the good news is that you’ll have most, if not all of the tools to achieve what you’re trying to accomplish. For detailed instructions however, I would need more coloring in with this part:
This is all captured in various power points and the crossing between the two is something we want to eliminate. Given the difficulty in how we quote we have custom forms that won’t move but the handover process is something we want to move onto HubSpot.
Effectivly I’m being tasked with finding what the best method of moving our qualification and our various handover stages into HubSpot.
What exactly are the steps here and the exact requirements? How, for example, is the handling of small deals different from the handling of bigger deals?
In any case, here are some general thoughts:
As a reflex, new CRM users tend to move an existing deal from a sales pipeline to another pipeline to mirror those handover processes, e.g. from sales to a customer success pipeline. This is not recommended and not best practice. Moving a deal from one pipeline to another essentially deletes background information on the deal movements, rendering a lot of useful reports useless. Instead, you can use a workflow that looks at a deal landing in the closed won stage of a sales pipeline, then create a new deal record in an onboarding pipeline, copying over relevant information and associating it to the source sales deal, all while associating the new deal to the person who is responsible for onboarding. Set up and manage object pipelines
When setting up this kind of automation, workflow branches allow you to differentiate based on any information that is documented and rule-based, e.g. assign deals of a certain size to users A, B, and C. Create workflows
At any deal stage, you can make filling fields (and uploading files!) a required criterion to move deals along. That way, you’re forcing users to maintain required information. Even if PowerPoints are still in use, for example, users would be forced to at least upload them on a deal record. Set up and manage object pipelines
You can use deal-based workflows to send internal email notifications to users who do not maintain their records, e.g. inactive onboarding deals which have not been updated in a week and still sit in the same deal stage, without any planned activity.
For general adoption, I’m a big fan of visualizing data for end users – which makes them understand the differences between previous bad processes and the new HubSpot world. This could be helping them identify the biggest opportunities among their deals (be it sales, onboarding or any other process), flagging urgent items, visualizing trends over time. These reports can be sent via email on a regular basis. Create reports with the custom report builder
Have a look and let me know if you have any follow-up questions!