This is HubSpot’s bread and butter. We’ll split this up into two pieces: tracking leads and tracking opportunities. And, we’ll be using all three HubSpot objects (Contacts, Companies, and Deals) for this one.
This Learning Track covers building a Sales Process in CRM. Before we dive in on where to start, it’s good to know two common CRM implementation issues that we see with a lot of teams:
1. No Lead Flow Process (i.e. no defined process for tracking leads!), which leads to...
2. ...Opening up Deals in the CRM before determining if there is a qualified opportunity
Both of these create misleading sales reporting metrics for your business. Specifically you’ll find your lead-to-opportunity and opportunity-to-close ratios are inaccurate. So, let’s start with how to track leads FIRST, and then discuss how to track opportunities.
Tracking Leads – Build a Lead Flow Process
You should start by adding your leads into HubSpot. When you import your contacts or add them manually, you’ll want to designate a “Lifecycle Stage” of Lead for these contacts (you don’t want to accidentally send your customers a prospecting email!).
Next, you’ll want to give your leads a “Lead Status,” which will help you determine where you are in the process of qualifying a lead.
Together these two properties can help you to organize your contacts and to help you prioritize which contacts you should be following up with at any given time.
After you’ve determined that your leads may be qualified revenue opportunities for you business (based on BANT), then it’s time to create a deal.
Tracking Deals or Opportunities – Your Sales Cycle
After creating a deal, you’ll want to make sure you’ve associated a contact and/or a company to that deal. Remember: Deal = Revenue Opportunity = a potential dollar exchange your business may receive for a product or service.
Your deal pipeline is comprised of deal stages (similar to lead status, but for deals instead of leads) that help you determine where you are in the process of closing a revenue opportunity into a client or customer. (Should you have multiple deal pipelines? The answer is probably not!). These deal stages should represent where your buyers are in their journey to buying your product and typically you want between 5 and 7 deal stages.
After closing a deal, you’ll be able to capture your lead-to-opportunity and opportunity-to-close ratios.
