Hello,
I would like to understand how you can track the sales progress of a cold calling outbound team. Thus, I would like to know how many contacts have been tried to call for the first time, been qualified in these calls and with what results (interested, not interested)
I thought at the beginning that you could change contacts property life cycle phase and lead status manually and then afterward run reports on when these changes have been made.
But.. Obviously you can’t track the moment changes of the these 2 contact properties have been done manually .. and I heard that the solution is to make the changes automatically with a workflow or by forms.
Forms doesn’t seem to make sense to me since we are talking about outbound sales.
So am I right, if I use workflows to set the life cycle stage and lead status..
I wonder how you do that when someone calls another person and gets a verbal feedback that he is interested in a product? I can set up the lead status manually and then use a workflow to check for the status and update the life cycle phase to sales qualified lead..
Is that the appropriate way or what other alternatives can be used
You can definitely use the lifecycle stage property to manage where folks are in their journey with you. I’d also add “call types” to manage this. You could have call types and outcomes which reflect their journey with your sales team: initial call, second attempt, follow-up, demo call, etc. These would help in reporting to show how a sales person or team is doing on calls.
Then when a prospect hits the “sales qualified lead” lifecycle stage, you can use the lead status property to manage where they are in that sub-section of their journey.
Plus, have you considered using the Deal object to manage the journey from a deal/opportunity perspective? This could be managed with Deal stages.
HubSpot is customizable enough to have it fit your process, user-friendly enough to be pretty easy to work with, and yet powerful enough to solve a lot of needs in the marketing and sales processes. At least, in my opinion as a user and agency partner.
Hi Dan,
I thought i get it.. but I tried a few things and still my issues are not solved.
I’am doing cold calling.. I call the prospect and I talk to him and I evaluate whether he is being interested or not. So I set the lead status manualy to not interested and the life cycle to SQL.
I thought that I could now track my work by building a report which checks the date of conversion to a sql… but then I learned that Hubspot is not tracking the date of conversion to SQl .. I heard that the date of conversion will only be logged if the switch to SQl is done automatically by a workflow, for example.
I build a workflow which sets the life cycle to SQl… but still the time for the switch to SQL is not logged.
I wonder how Hubspot is used for cold calling where you want to track when someone opens a new contact and when he has qualified a contact. Actually a very simple and basic task in cold calling. I wonder why it’s so difficult to track this action… if at least it is trackable
First, if a prospect is not interested, why are you making an SQL? Isn’t that just a dead lead instead?
Second, while cold calling is certainly part of sales for many, HubSpot was built on the inbound philosophy: “Inbound is a business philosophy based around helping people. The inbound approach means doing business in a human way and creating meaningful 1:1 relationships with strangers, prospects, or customers. Inbound means meeting people on their own terms and interacting with them using the sites, platforms, and networks they value most.” So tools that exist in other systems will look different in HubSpot. Cold calling being one of them.
In testing your question about showing when a lifecycle stage is changed, I see that when changing it manually I do in fact see the time and date it was changed. Here’s an example I just created:
Hi Dan,
thanks for your reply. I appreciate that.
answering your second question first. I had another session / disussion with a hubspot partner who was also questioning if my system is working properly.
He says that its an unexpected behavior that hubspot is not saving the date of the conversion to the sql stage.. So I asked the support again to check if my system is running properly.
this is my result so far when I changed the stage to SQL
And to your first question.. one job of the sales team is to qualify by telephone call if leads fit or better if the customer is an opportunity. This qualification can have different outcomes.. he might not be interested, interested, bad data, unresponsive, etc..
In all cases a qualification has been done and I would like to track how many qualifications an agent is doing and what were the results of his work.
Regarding the philosophy of cold calling .. Many prospects don’t know that there might be a good solution available to them. You might miss many good opportunities to build strong partnerships with these propects if you only rely on reaching out to them by mail. Nowadays, many propects don’t bother reading there mails from someone they dont know. And they might misjudge your mail and not understanding everything. That’s where an agent can help in short to call to understand the customer needs and to check if our services might be interesting for them.
Greetings
