Mar 28, 20247:58 AM - last edited on Apr 8, 20247:47 AM by kvlschaefer
HubSpot Moderator
[Closed] AMA - Lead Management with Sales Hub | April 1-5, 2024
Hi Folks,
Nick here from Sales Hub Product Marketing along with Nidhi, Will and Zachary from the Sales Hub Product Team.
At INBOUND last year we introduced the prospecting workspace and the leads object, as well as several other brand new features that help sales reps manage their leads and upcoming sales activities in one place. In case you missed it, here’s a quick recap!
Since INBOUND, here’s what we’ve launched to make leads and the prospecting workspace even better…
Suggested activities in the prospecting workspace
Enhanced lead visibility and bulk actions in the workspace
Lead record ownership improvements
Lead creation by associated property
Several new default lead properties, including lead type
[Coming Soon] New leads API endpoints
[Coming Soon] Flexible automation for leads
[Coming Soon] Custom properties for leads
[Coming Soon] Enhanced lead reporting capabilities
Now we’re back, about six months later, and we’re excited to hear what questions you have about the prospecting workspace, the new leads object, and lead management with Sales Hub!
Our AMA will take place right here in the Community forum from April 1st - April 5th!
[Closed] AMA - Lead Management with Sales Hub | April 1-5, 2024
Why did you call them Leads and not Prospects? You even called the view "Prospecting". Argh!
This is so confusing. After 12 years of confusion with sales people about what a Lead is in their CRM vs a lifecycle stage Lead in Hubspot, you've gone and made it even more confusing!
Not really a question, just flagging for awareness in case anyone else wants to leverage this workaround.
You mentioned Custom Properties coming soon - I stumbled on this the other day unintentionally and wanted to share, as it seems like the groundwork is there but not fully implemented.
If you go to Properties > Lead properties, it's not possible to add a custom property:
If you change to Contact properties, you can change the Object type to Lead:
Which allows you to create a lead property:
It isn't accessible anywhere on the lead record directly, even when viewing all properties:
It can be used for filters:
This lead property can also be set in workflows:
which then opens the opportunity to use in lists:
So the only functionality missing is the ability to view the property on the lead record itself - the data can be captured and leveraged for automations to help with streamlining processes that were done via lead status/lifecycle stage prior to the creation of the Lead object.
If my reply answered your question please mark it as a solution to make it easier for others to find.
[Closed] AMA - Lead Management with Sales Hub | April 1-5, 2024
As far as I understand it, when you click on the lead record, the reason you can't view the property is because you are actually looking at the contact record, and not the lead itself. It's very misleading in my opinion.
[Closed] AMA - Lead Management with Sales Hub | April 1-5, 2024
Hi there, Thanks for hosting this! It would be great for a webinar or product videos to explain all the new features like custom properties, automation and reporting when its time.. I have a few questions: 1) When can we expect custom properties and automation for Leads? 2) We use Aircall for calls and SMS. Calls do show up in 'Recent communications' and 'Last activity' but not for Aircall SMS? Our reps send a lot of SMS's, so they're having to view the entire contact record for the complete picture which kinda defeats the purpose of the Leads workspace efficiency in one window.
3) We send or log meetings with Contacts/Leads, and a meeting will show up in 'Last activity' or 'Recent communications' but if it was 6 months ago, we can only view it in the entire contact record. We need the ability to ask ourselves the question 'When was the last time we met with this lead / Filter all my leads that haven't had a meeting in over 180 days'. A property 'last meeting date' would be great. Or a custom property that can be filtered by the meeting type = X, and date is more than X days ago.
4) Can you share some more on the admin and/or supervisor-type features? We have 'team leaders' or sales teams that would want a view of there entire team, without click 'View all leads' and selecting members in their team.
[Closed] AMA - Lead Management with Sales Hub | April 1-5, 2024
Hi @jbiddle! Thank you for your questions 🙂 Hopefully these answers help:
1) Custom properties and our first iteration of automations will be coming later this month!
2) Ah surfacing activity events from integrations is unfortunately a known limitation in the prospecting workspace sidebar. But we’re constantly thinking about how to improve our experience so thanks for sharing your painpoint + feedback on this! We’ll investigate the functionality of adding this in.
3) Hm I'm surprised to hear you're not able to view older activities in the "Recent Communications" section of the sidebar. Have you tried the "Show more" button to view more activities in that view? Please let me know if that doesn't help and we can follow up! Also totally hear you on the usefulness of the last engagement date/filter for specific type of activities like Meetings - we don't have this as a default property but hopefully you can set something like this soon with custom properties!
4) It’s a little tricky to share more on this since we’re actively working on it but our aim is to bring more flexibility and solve for the needs of admins/ managers like you mentioned. Would you be interested in scheduling a call with us to expand more on your use-cases for these roles? We’d love to learn more!
[Closed] AMA - Lead Management with Sales Hub | April 1-5, 2024
Hi! I'm curious how you utilize Lifecycle Stages with the Prospecting tool? Subscriber - Opportunity used to make sense for a strictly inbound approach. However, when you are moving prospecting into HubSpot what have you found success in labeling cold or warm leads that the sales team is connecting with on LinkedIn or reaching out via email/phone via ZoomInfo?
In the past, I labeled and defined Lifecycle stages as follow:
Subscriber - contact who signed up for our newsletter or blog
Lead - contact with a lead score greater than 50, has downloaded at least 1 Awareness offer, and has visited the website 1-3 times
MQL - contact with a lead score greater than 100, has 2 Awareness offers OR 1 Consideration offer, and has visited website 5-9 times
SQL - contact with a lead score greater than 200, has downloaded 2 Consideration offers OR 1 Decision offer, has indicated they want to speak with Sales and usually has been on our website 10+ times
Opportunity - contact has been qualifed and has an open deal
Customer - contact has a Closed Won deal
Outbound Prospecting throws this for a loop as we aren't sure exactly where the contact is in their buyer journey yet.
Additionally, as we have a sales team enter their own leads into HubSpot, what have you found to be the best and smoothest process to turn those into Leads in the Prospecting tool? I setup HubSpot to grab Lead-SQL automatically but it seems there must be a delay between contact creation from ZoomInfo or HubSpot and the Lead object being generated. If there is in fact a delay, is it 5 min? 15 min? I'd love to be able to better explain this to the sales team as we roll out using the Prospecting tool. Right now, when they don't immediately see those leads in the Prospecting tool, they start manually creating them which I don't think is the right process.
[Closed] AMA - Lead Management with Sales Hub | April 1-5, 2024
Hey @JonahWilson - love this question! With customizable lifecycle stages (I'll abbreviate as LCS), there's a ton of different directions you could go with LCS + leads. I'm going to share two general approaches to LCS customization we've suggested to internal teams below. Would love your feedback!
Please note: these approaches are not HubSpot's "official" stance (and not indicative of any impending changes to default LCS!) they're just two ways we think custom LCS could work well if you're also using leads!
The first model assumes that marketing and sales have not aligned on the definition of a "Qualified Lead" - i.e. an inbound MQL looks very different from an outbound lead that sales would reach out to.
Screenshot of the model below, but here's how you could customize LCS & LCS definitions:
1. [Renamed]New: an unqualified contact or company that’s relatively (or completely) unknown to your organization (renamed from “Lead”)
2a. Marketing Qualified Lead: a contact or company that your marketing team has qualified as ready for the sales team. Lead records in Sales Hub are generated for MQLs.
2b. [Redefined] Sales Qualified Lead: a contact or company that your sales team has identified as a good fit prospect. Lead records in Sales Hub are generated for SQLs.
3. Opportunity: a contact or company that is associated with a deal (e.g., they're involved in a potential deal with your organization).
4. Customer: a contact or company with at least one closed deal.
(5) Evangelist and Other still used, and remain unchanged. Subscriber is obsolete and can be removed.
The second model assumes tight alignment between marketing and sales around ICP and what a "good fit" lead that's ready for sales outreach looks like.
Another screenshor below, but here's how the LCS would look:
1. [Renamed] New: an unqualified contact or company that’s relatively (or completely) unknown to your organization (renamed from “Lead”)
2. [New/Renamed] Qualified Lead: a contact or company that your sales or marketing team has qualified as ready for the sales outreach. Lead records in Sales Hub are generated for all QLs.
3. Opportunity: a contact or company that is associated with a deal (e.g., they're involved in a potential deal with your organization).
4. Customer: a contact or company with at least one closed deal.
(5) Evangelist and Other still used, and remain unchanged. Subscriber is obsolete and can be removed.
[Closed] AMA - Lead Management with Sales Hub | April 1-5, 2024
This is great. But it's just way too complicated to explain to 120 sales people. Beyond how HS coud put so much into a tool but not plan how it would fit into the lifecycle stage/flywheel data logic.
[Closed] AMA - Lead Management with Sales Hub | April 1-5, 2024
It would have been so much easier to design:
Sub-Lead-MQL-Prospect-SQL-Oppo-Customer Introducing the kind of multi-object "person" paradigm we see in e.g. D365 CRM is just creating all the data sync issues and owner issues we see in those CRMs. Argh!
[Closed] AMA - Lead Management with Sales Hub | April 1-5, 2024
To clear up one thing - the lead record in HubSpot is never intended to replace a contact or company like in Salesforce or possibly MSD365.
The lead will always have an associated and persistent contact or company record, exactly like how deals::companies or deals::contacts have worked in the past.
Fair feedback re: complexity of the data model! But I think one of the best parts about leads is that you don't have to explain that much to reps any more. Hear me out...
In the past, to prospect in HubSpot, reps had to know where to find every single tool in Sales Hub (tasks, sequences, etc.) and navigate back and forth between them as we as what the lead status property definitions meant, and how/when/where to update it. Not to mention "leads" would have been just contact or company records, with no additional functionality that helped them manage their day.
Now, we can just tell them that leads from marketing appear in the propsecting workspace in their queue. When they find good fit contacts or companies, they can create leads for themselves, which also appear in the workspace in their queue!
They don't have to know anything about my first post, since out-of-the-box lifecycle stage automation takes care of all that for them. They can ignore LCS, lead status, etc. and just focus on the workspace.
[Closed] AMA - Lead Management with Sales Hub | April 1-5, 2024
Regarding your second question:
"Additionally, as we have a sales team enter their own leads into HubSpot, what have you found to be the best and smoothest process to turn those into Leads in the Prospecting tool?"
Just my opinion, but I think a rep should always "get eyes" on a cold sourced contact or company before they generate a lead.
In the slides above, there's something called a "Fit Check" for sales in both models.
Much like an MQL framework, a Sales Fit Check framework provides guidance for reps, and helps them determine whether or not they should open a lead record and reach out to a contact generated via outbound.
This is sales/outbound equivalent of marketing/inbound nurturing -- it's a process designed to make sure the contact/company is actually worth sales' time reaching out to!
The Framework should be lightweight, aligned with marketing’s QL definition, and include things like:
Industry: does this individual work in a good-fit industry for my product or service?
Title: is this the right person to reach out to about my product or service?
Timing: based on what I know so far, is now a good time to reach out to this person?
The Fit Check happens before a lead record is manually created for a ‘New’ contact.
It should take just a few minutes of research.
If a contact passes the check, reps are instructed to create a lead record and reach out to the contact, and built-in automation in lead settings will move the contact’s lifecycle stage to SQL or QL (or whatever LCS you'd like), depending on how you've configured your LCS!
[Closed] AMA - Lead Management with Sales Hub | April 1-5, 2024
Can you provide any more specifics on when API endpoints are releasing? We currently manage Opportunities in Dynamics and need a viable way to bring Qualified Lead data there before we can consider adopting.
[Closed] AMA - Lead Management with Sales Hub | April 1-5, 2024
1. I'm curious about if we'll be able to associate multiple contacts to a lead. I've seen many places where a lead is more representative of a company than a contact (Most B2B companies) and so it would be helpful to associate multiple contacts to the same lead and have the outreach to all contacts be tracked in the lead. 2. I would also like to know if there will be a more direct way to edit the lead as an object. Currently when you click on the lead in the workspace, it pulls up a condensed view of the contact record and not the lead itself. This could get very confusing if reps are wanting to make edits on the lead record and not the contact record.
3. Will there be a way to change the primary record association for leads to have companies be the main record associated instead of contacts?
[Closed] AMA - Lead Management with Sales Hub | April 1-5, 2024
1. This is something we're actively working on. I'd love to run some ideas by you. Email coming your way.
2. This is also something we have strongly under consideration. We're currently looking into how to make leads data hygene and editing more accessible for customers. Will hopefully have updates soon.
3. Very related to the problem I'm thinking about wrt question 1. Very eager to chat more about this!
[Closed] AMA - Lead Management with Sales Hub | April 1-5, 2024
Hello, One thing that seems to be causing friction is that in our use case, the owner of the contact is not always the owner of the lead - can we solve this by putting another owner property on the contact ? if we did that, then would both owners be able to create leads? In addition, I'd like to see an easy way to see all leads created from a contact or company, what's the best way to do that? Thanks! Nicole
[Closed] AMA - Lead Management with Sales Hub | April 1-5, 2024
Hi Nicole,
There is a setting in lead settings called 'Sync lead owner with contact or company owner' if this setting is disabled. You can assign leads to a discrete lead owner without changing the associated contact's owner. If this doesn't quite cover your use case, please let me know.
There are a couple ways of doing this. We list all existing records in the right sidebar of the company or contact record. You can also add a column to company and contact index pages called 'Contact or Comapny --> Leads' this will list all leads associated with a given contact or company record.
Additionally, from the workspace, you could click the 'Actions' dropdown above the leads table in the and select 'View all leads', you could then filter to an individual company or contact.
[Closed] AMA - Lead Management with Sales Hub | April 1-5, 2024
Is there a plan to make make creating a deal from a Qualified lead optional. Currently it is a account setting to either required a deal be created or not.
I have multiple business units who cant all use HubSpot the same?
[Closed] AMA - Lead Management with Sales Hub | April 1-5, 2024
This is an interesting one. Can you tell me more about why optional? Or is the ideal here that some business units are required to create deals, while some are not?