Stages and Atributtion - Companies VS Contacts

[DSpagnol]

Hey Community!

I have had somethings troubling me for some time now and would like to request your support/ideas! 🙂

When we are talking about Lifecycle Stage or Lead Status, we are usually talking about Contacts. But how does this relate to the associated Company in a B2B SaaS Business Model? I have a few examples to make my doubt clear:

1. A new contact reaches the MQL phase, the Company should be considered an MQL too, right? If this contact moves up to the "Opportunity" Stage, the lifecycle stage should be aligned between contact and company.
What if a new contact enters in the CRM? His Lifecycle Stage would be "Subscriber" or "Lead", even though the Account is already an "Opportunity"? How do you build that?

2. Regarding Sales Status, do we have this information available at the Company? Or only at the contact level? If the contact status is "Deal Created" and a new contact pops in, should the status be "New"? How would the Sales Rep identify we already have a history with that company?

3. Regarding attribution, do you guys use the first source, or the latest source to attribute Pipeline Generation Performance? 

Thank you very much for your help!

[SteveHTM · Accepted solution]

@DSpagnol - so much to discuss here! And I'm sure there will be many shades of opinion in the community, so I'll just kick things off with my default approach - although even this is is influenced, project to project, by strongly held management views or client marketing/sales cultural differences.

Firstly, on Contact and Company lifecycle management:

I tend to switch off the automatic sync of lifecycle stages between the two objects, in favor of a customized approach set up with workflows. One reason for this is the different sizes and buying practices of your potential clients. You may have a Contact at MQL for IBM (as an example), but it seems likely this is a Contact champion at some smaller business unit, rather than a representative of a corporate wide initiative. Other Contacts across the organization, and the Company object itself don't need to track that same lifecycle. lifecycle stage. For smaller targets of opportunity, you may feel differently according to culture, but it can all add to workflow complexity, without giving a huge reporting upside.

[For simplicity, I'm ignoring the option of parent/child company structures here.]

When the Deal is created, I think it is key that only the specific Contacts associated with that Deal get promoted to Oppty. ABM can be used to determine their specific roles.

I do tend to assume it is useful to set Company lifecycle to Opportunity when any Deal is created, and to Customer when any Deal is won - to give the bigger sales perspective (and organizational kudos) - but it doesn't seem right to force all Contactsassociated with the Company (especially a large Company) to track that lifecycle update.

Use of Lead Status:

I believe the assumption of this property is that it can be used to mark progress between MQL and Oppty by subdividing the initial Sales engagement at SQL lifecycle for any given Contact. In a previous HubSpot era, when lifecycle was a pretty rigidly defined property, I had instances where Lead Status was used as a kind of alternative set of lifecycle tracking with company preferred nomenclature. Lifecycle cusomization now makes this trick unecessary, but some sales teams insist on very granular stages between an MQL and the creation of a Deal, where Lead Status could be a useful yardstick. It doesn't seem useful to duplicate this at a Company level.

If a new Contact is introduced to a existing sales process - then consider whether they are important to connect to the Deal or not. If important, they enter at Oppty lifecycle and Lead Status is likely less relevant.

Attribution:

Depending on platform level, you have a wide variety of options/models available to assess campaign effectiveness. For simplicity of team communication, I would tend to start with a basic reporting option which may well turn out to be 'first source'.

Does any of this help?

Steve

[SteveHTM · Accepted solution]

@DSpagnol - so much to discuss here! And I'm sure there will be many shades of opinion in the community, so I'll just kick things off with my default approach - although even this is is influenced, project to project, by strongly held management views or client marketing/sales cultural differences.

Firstly, on Contact and Company lifecycle management:

I tend to switch off the automatic sync of lifecycle stages between the two objects, in favor of a customized approach set up with workflows. One reason for this is the different sizes and buying practices of your potential clients. You may have a Contact at MQL for IBM (as an example), but it seems likely this is a Contact champion at some smaller business unit, rather than a representative of a corporate wide initiative. Other Contacts across the organization, and the Company object itself don't need to track that same lifecycle. lifecycle stage. For smaller targets of opportunity, you may feel differently according to culture, but it can all add to workflow complexity, without giving a huge reporting upside.

[For simplicity, I'm ignoring the option of parent/child company structures here.]

When the Deal is created, I think it is key that only the specific Contacts associated with that Deal get promoted to Oppty. ABM can be used to determine their specific roles.

I do tend to assume it is useful to set Company lifecycle to Opportunity when any Deal is created, and to Customer when any Deal is won - to give the bigger sales perspective (and organizational kudos) - but it doesn't seem right to force all Contactsassociated with the Company (especially a large Company) to track that lifecycle update.

Use of Lead Status:

I believe the assumption of this property is that it can be used to mark progress between MQL and Oppty by subdividing the initial Sales engagement at SQL lifecycle for any given Contact. In a previous HubSpot era, when lifecycle was a pretty rigidly defined property, I had instances where Lead Status was used as a kind of alternative set of lifecycle tracking with company preferred nomenclature. Lifecycle cusomization now makes this trick unecessary, but some sales teams insist on very granular stages between an MQL and the creation of a Deal, where Lead Status could be a useful yardstick. It doesn't seem useful to duplicate this at a Company level.

If a new Contact is introduced to a existing sales process - then consider whether they are important to connect to the Deal or not. If important, they enter at Oppty lifecycle and Lead Status is likely less relevant.

Attribution:

Depending on platform level, you have a wide variety of options/models available to assess campaign effectiveness. For simplicity of team communication, I would tend to start with a basic reporting option which may well turn out to be 'first source'.

Does any of this help?

Steve

[DSpagnol]

Hey Steve, thank you a lot for jumping in and sharing your view on this!

We are currently reviewing our processes in my company, and one more question popped up: should we move the "Lead Status" back to New on every conversion the contact has? Or should we maintain the current status?

My feeling is NO, we should not move it back to new. Because we'd lose the historical data and confuse the SDRs working on the contacts

However, tracking if all conversions have been followed up would be easier. And now, my next question: imagine that a contact is in Status "Connected" and fills up a Handraise form, how would we track if the SDR followed up with this contact (if the status is not changing from connected)?

[SteveHTM · Accepted solution]

@DSpagnol - Thank you for tagging my notes as a solution!

Per you follow-up question about Lead Status. There's no reason to reset this property as I tend to advocate using it, but I'm intruiged by your referenced to "conversion" in this context and maybe this leads to some ambiguity.

I tend to define conversions as marketing interactions (join a webinar, download a document, web sessions, etc.) which show increased engagement prior to the start of any sales conversation. At some level of Contact engagment, perhaps measured by scoring, etc. then we tip into SQL lifecycle and the success of follow-up sales outreach is measured by the Lead Status. If that logic seems to broadly match your company process, the logical end point of the Lead Status stages is probably creation of an Deal or some disqualification decision. 

There's a whole other discussion about how to handle SQLs when they are disqualified and potentially get re-engaged somewhat later in time - but we shoudl leave that for another day!

Steve