How to manage multiple contract end dates on a deal when selling software

[KyleRisi]

Hi Team 👋.

We sell software, several different kinds of software to our clients.

A typical deal will contain the following products

1 x professional services (we help you get set up and trained)

1 x 1 year licence to use our software with unlimited users

1 x 3 month free trial of our [INSERT SOFTWARE NAME HERE] 

The 1 year software licence and the 3 month licence need seperate renewal dates.

Of course this would allow us to re-engage with the client ahead of either the trial or the annual licence expiry date in order to upsel a renewal of these licences. 

But I cant work out how to accomodate this model in hubspot and I dont think we are atypical in this approach to deals or line item setup.

Any help / advice would be greatly appreciated.

[AdamLPW]

Hi @KyleRisi,

I have several custom properties on my Contact/Company view in HubSpot.  Some of these I use for renewal dates.  

You could have, for example, Annual Subscription Renewal Date property and 3-Month Subscription Renewal Date.  Set values for these, then use Active Lists to list all companies where e.g. Annual Subscription Renewal Date is in the next 2 months.  

You can even select all these contacts and add them to a task queue (or bulk enrol in a sequence - e.g. "Annual Subscription due in 2 months").

Hope this helps.  May not be the best method, but it works for me.  I'm not sure if there's smarter things that can be done using functionality I don't have access to (Workflows, for example) - always keen to hear ideas from the community on how I can further improve my processes!

[KyleRisi]

Thanks Adam

This sounds promising, I like the idea of having these custom fields on the company record, however to make this robist i would like a way to automatically fill in these fields  when a deal is marked as closed won.

[AdamLPW · Accepted solution]

No worries @KyleRisi, and I have the same issues re: ensuring fields are completed.  

Again, I'm almost certain there's things that can be done using Workflows (i.e. set date when deal closed), but I don't have access to that functionality.  

One thing I do is run regular audits on my HubSpot data to ensure nothing has slipped through the net.  I.E. you can use Active Lists to look for all companies where there is a deal close date but no value in your custom date property.  

There's always manual ways and means...  of course, automation would be preferable, as it eliminates the possibility of user error... but I can see why HubSpot would want me to pay more for the privilege of having my processes automated!