There’s a challenge in coordinating deadlines between our sales and development teams, previously relying on manual agreements via email. Sometimes we can meet the deadline and sometimes not, it depends on many factors and always requires confirmation with development team. To make it more efficient and reduce missed deadlines, I wanted to automate this process within HubSpot. I was thinking to make it in our sales pipeline, so when the deal comes to specific stage e.g. ‘Start of the project’, the sales rep would insert suggested deadlines. This would prompt notifications to the development team for confirmation or alternative suggestions of another deadline until the consensus will be achieved. But I do not know whether it’s a good way and if it’s possible to do in HubSpot. I would be glad to receive any extra ideas or suggestions on how to optimize such type of workflow.
Hi @val_spot_on ,
Firstly, I would recommend bringing the two teams together and, if possible, getting agreement on a Service Level Agreement that sets out what each party will do and in what timeframe. Some standardization of this will help you manage it. It sounds to me like right now you have too much negotiation going on on a deal-by-deal basis, and that results in confusion about how “set” the deadlines really are. For this conversation to work, you’ll also want to make sure there is agreement on what sales needs to do so that development can meet their deadlines. It should be a give-and-take process.
Once you know the milestones of your delivery SLA, you can definitely create custom date properties (target completion dates) that correspond to the timeframes you agreed upon in your SLA dicussion. If you were able to standardize these dates in the SLA discussion, you can automate setting these dates with a workflow. If you’re still negotiating different ones for every deal, you’ll have to set them manually.
When you’re managing your development project, use a deal pipeline. HubSpot tracks when deals enter and leave each stage, giving you a built-in date property that you can compare to the target dates you just set.
Now you have all of the date properties you need. Once you have those dates, you can create a workflow that starts when a deal is Closed Won, and uses delay properties to send notifications of impending a set amount of time before a milestone is supposed to be completed like this:
Or uses branching logic based upon the deal stage and whether or not a target date has been missed to notifiy the parties of a missed deadline.
You can also build a report that shows the dates exiting each delivery stage and how those dates and comparing those dates to the target completion dates, which you can evaluate in team meetings.
Once these target dates are understood by all and evaluated on a regular basis, you should have better luck holding teams to their targets.