Deal with multiple scopes and estimators

[Gotcha]

We provide security products/services such as cameras, fire alarms etc. It is very common for us to have 2-3 people working on estimates.  We also have a contractor that does estimates for us

I have stages in the pipeline. Proposal needed, proposal ready for review, proposal needs to be revised etc. The challenge is one estimator will move the proposal to "ready to review" but the other estimators have not finished their scope.

I am wondering if others have the same issue and how they address it?

I currently use tasks for each estimator but was thinking of breaking the deals up into different deals so I can track each estimate better

[Gotcha]

I am the only salesperson (as well as owner,  tech support, etc), and I currently use the stages to quickly gauge where the deals are at. are they ready for my review, etc I like the idea of the required deal properties, or maybe custom fields.

We don't use HubSpot for the actual quotes. We use QuoteWerx and that integrates with Connectwise, our PSA.

Thanks for the ideas!

[christopher-RVO]

Thanks for the tag @kvlschaefer 

@Gotcha  Totally agree with everything that @jolle mentioned. 

A lot of this depends on how the estimators are adding their notes to the deal. Are they leveraging the quotes tool in HubSpot? AKA each estimator creates a quote for the same deal? 

[jolle · Accepted solution]

Thanks for the mention, @kvlschaefer! And great question, @Gotcha!

This is a tricky use case since you're relying on multiple people to update a single deal. I have a couple of thoughts on potential process updates here!

Designate a single person to manage and move the deal

Instead of giving every user the ability to move the deal forward, is it possible to give just one person that responsibility (either one of your existing estimators or another rep?). That person would be responsible for rounding up the scopes from all applicable estimators and ensuring that everything is ready to present to the client before moving the deal to the next stage. The individual estimators could still use the tasks assigned to them to keep track of the scopes needed from them, but it would be on one person to keep everything in line and move the deal along. This would also help you deliver all scopes/a combined scope to the client at once vs creating separate deal pipelines that would likely deliver separate scopes to the same client on different timelines. 

Use required deal properties

Another thought is setting required deal properties that need values before the deal is moved to the next stage. Maybe you could use custom properties specific to each estimator (even if it's a checkbox property for "Estimator 2 has finished scopes/review" or something like that. If that property doesn't have a value, the deal will not be able to be moved to the next stage. This does require a Sales Professional subscription to actually prevent the deal from being moved to the next stage, but lower subsriptions will still display a pop-up window containing the properties that should be completed. Just keep in mind that any estimator could edit any property on the deal and move it forward if they so desired (though you would be able to track who updated what property in the property history). 

Hope this helps!!

[danmoyle]

+1 for everyting @jolle said. One responsible party, if possible, would be ideal. And the required properties between stages was a thought I had. Jacob's got your back here in my opinion, @Gotcha. 

[kvlschaefer]

Hi @Gotcha,

Thank you for reaching out to the Community!

I wanted to invite our subject matter experts to see if they have advice.

Hi @jolle, @christopher-RVO, @danmoyle - Do you have any tips for @Gotcha?

Thank you! ⭐ 

Best,

Kristen