My company and I are working on deploying Hubspot as our CRM, and we were able to implement most of our needs and use cases, but there is one left for which I couldn’t figure out any satisfying solution.
The question is as follows:
The company has two legal entities (a mother company and a subsidiary) with a sales team in each.
Both sales teams work quite closely with each other, so they need to share a contact base
However, we need to know which legal entity sold/invoiced what and to which customer.
We cannot rely on simple filters (such as countries, deal owner etc.) to do this because we have a variety of exceptions to every rule (for instance, in some cases, some team members in entity A can send quotes on behalf of entity B, some people can have deals with companies from any country etc.)
We will also need to capture transactions between our two legal entities (for subcontracting).
To do that, I was thinking of adding a custom property to the deals to indicate which entity would invoice, and also having the two entities in the companies in the CRM so that can be set as the customers for the deal in the case of subcontracting. But somehow, I am not fully happy with this idea.
Does anyone have another idea that could be better? Maybe someone here encountered a similar case?
Thanks a lot for your answer and your suggestions.
We’re not using deal tags, but at first sight, it looks like it could help us. I will take a look at it and mostly check we can add tags manually to each deal. We would need that if we want to use tags such as “Entity A”, “Entity B” and “internal” to differentiate the deals of each entity.
Using the pipelines could also be an option. We have not configured our pipelines yet so we only have the default one, but I was rather planning to use pipelines for different types of products we sell with slightly different processes. But maybe I should reconsider this.
Unfortunately, we don’t have access to custom objects, and there is no plan to take an enterprise subscription, so this is probably not the way for us.
I will take a look at tags and pipelines to see if it could work for us, and mark your answer as a solution if it works.
Deal tags are based on filters and can’t be used manually, so you would need to create the custom property within the deal to control them - this would be set by the reps manually and the tag would visually separate them and make it easier to filter, etc.
A few thoughts on multiple pipelines for different processes, I would make sure the product processes are unique from the buyer perspective - are they steps they take different? or only internal processes?
Map out as much as you can in a flow chart before you start building the pipelines, it will help tremendously with getting things configured to match your sales process - and remember that a pipeline should ideally be 5-6 stages, max around 8, anything more and it’s likely too detailed or accounting for choices that may not apply to every deal.
On the pipelines, I’ll pay attention to this question. I think the process form buyer’s perspective is quite different, so it would probably make sense to have several pipelines, then…
Thanks a lot for your answers, they help me a lot!