How do you manage Outbound channels in your organisation?

[BOCondún]

Hi all, 

My organisation is setting up an integration with Instantly.ai. The idea is for our Sales team to perform outreach on Instantly and only push contacts over to HubSpot when they meet a set list of criteira (still deciding on what that might be, but likely to be when sales have received an initial response).

My question is about tagging them once they've arrived in HubSpot. What should the Lifecycle Stage be? Lead Status? I'm aware that this will be highly dependent on our own processes and how we define our existing customer journey, but I'm curious to get an outside opinion. 

How does everyone else manage their Outbound channels in their organisations?

[SteveHTM · Accepted solution]

@BOCondún - there's so much that you could say about this at the philosophical and practical level. But I'll try and confine this post to a few considerations I'd look at under similar circumstances.

1) What's the practical divide that is behind the handoff from Instantly to HubSpot? At this point are you adding sales stage support (deals etc.), more detailed engagement instrumentation or just trying to bring all prospects into a unified reporting regime?

2) What's the team ownership change when the prospect meets these criteria? For example, an Inside sales team to an Account management handoff?

3) Given that you are using HubSpot, I would assume there is also an inbound track for prospect conversion, nurturing and scoring. Given that, what's the point at which these two tracks logically converge?

4) What's the anticiapted next step when a propsect reaches this convergence qualification point? What automation support do you need in the tool to take that next step? Marketing emails, sequences, call logging, etc.?

I'd guess that the answer to these questions might logicall lead you to an SQL lifecycle or similar, where you might use stages of lead status to instrument the sales qualification before creating a fully formed deal. But, as you say, this is highy dependent on your won oreganizations view  of the propsect/customer journey.

Hope this is useful at least.

Steve 

[BOCondún]

Hi Steve,

Thanks so much for your input here. Lots of food for thought.

1. A truly important consideration and something that my colleagues and I will have to sit down and unravel. Depending on the level of qualification that can be done in Instantly (and this is the part for us to figure out - I have yet to get familiar with the system), we could quite easily pull them in as SQLs.
2. We’re using an end-to-end sales model, meaning the Owner will stay the same. However, I’m glad you bring this up as it could be something that changes further down the line.
3. Excellent question. For me to answer with confidence, well have to test out the new system but I imagine the tracks will run independently of one another right up until the initial outreach from sales where the goal of the email will be to book a discovery call. It’s at this point we have our team complete a playbook so ideally the process is the same from here.
4. Call logging, and the ability to submit playbooks will be key from this point, as well as our ability to report on the sales activities with a breakdown of the sales channel: inbound vs outbound.

[RichReed]

I would generally recommend keeping instantly.ai and HubSpot data seperate. The reason being is that you'll end up filling your CRM with lots of 'leads' that don't have any interest in your product/service. 

In terms of workflow, I would send positive responses from instantly into HubSpot as MQLs/SQLs. Then once a meeting is booked with the prospect, I would turn that into a deal. 

I also recommend having a custom 'lead source' property to tag that these users came from outbound emails, and another 'instantly campaign' to track which campaign they came from. 

For alerts, I would create a workflow that sets a contact owner and alerts them when a new outbound lead is generated, and a task is set for them to follow up with that contact. You can also easily integrate Slack with Instantly to push alerts of these positive responses into their own dedicated channel. 

Hope that helps! 

[acquirely]

The issue I see is that the opportunities are coming from different email inboxes that originally send the email. So how do we do that transition from the original outbound inbox that they responded to, to the inbox that's connected to the SDR in Hubspot?