Managing New Business, Renewal, and Expansion in Hubspot

[EMcGrath]

 We currently only track net new business opportunities in Hubspot. We'd like to track Renewal and Expansion as well, as those are currently managed by our CS and Finance team externally. What are some best practices that you've put in place while building out the ability to track multiple business types? I'm hoping we can also automate some reminders to the team about renewals by tracking all business types in Hubspot, as well as some contract management (i.e. start/ end dates, contract terms, etc... ) as part of this initiative too. 

Do you use opportunity record types? Different classifications of products for different business types? Start and end dates on subscription lines?

[Josh · Accepted solution]

Hi @EMcGrath,

There are a ton of factors at play here, but these are a few of the considerations that have worked well for our clients:

• Tracking start and end dates of a contract either at the deal level or company level, depending on what makes sense
  • Have a separate pipeline for renewals
  • Create a new deal in the renewal pipeline so many days/months before the expiration of the current contract
  • CS works is notified and works the renewal deals using the renewal pipeline
• Use a similar scenario as above, but instead of working immediately from a separate deal pipeline, use a ticket pipeline 
  • This allows your CS team to evaluate the renewal opportunity before creating the deal
  • Once the renewal opportunity is better defined it can be added to either the primary or a separate pipeline
• If you have Enterprise, I love tracking contracts and their associated details using a custom object
  • This provides the greatest flexibility to do whatever you need from an automation and reporting perspective

Hope this helps!

Josh

[Noigenstrem]

I’ve been in a similar boat where we initially focused on new opportunities but soon realized we were missing a lot by not tracking renewals and expansions.Using opportunity record types can really help you organize different business types. You might want to create custom properties for things like start and end dates and contract terms, so everything is in one place. Automating reminders for renewals is also a great idea; it keeps your team proactive rather than reactive.When we added similar tracking, we found it helpful to keep a central dashboard for visibility. Also, I stumbled upon some resources on germany.houseofcompanies.io that really guided me in streamlining our contract management process, especially for expanding into new markets.

[stuartbalcombe · Accepted solution]

Hey - Here are a few ways I'd think about setting things up if you’re trying to use HubSpot as your source of truth for tracking new business, renewal, and expansion revenue across the customer lifecycle.

1. Breaking out renewal revenue into it's own pipeline from initial sale
This allows you to break out renewal deals into different stages based on the time to renewal vs the intent based stages you like have in your new business pipeline. This makes it much easier to quickly visualize how many renewals you will need to handle in specific periods but also automate deals moving through much of the pipeline to improve reporting and trigger specific time based actions or playbooks.

I made this video walkthrough of how I've been thinking about it with a step-by-step of the property and workflow setup.

2. Define the pipeline you'll use to manage expansions and extend the default HubSpot “Deal Type” property to allow more specific definitions of your closed revenue
Once you have your renewal pipeline mapped out, determining where you want to track renewals and adding pipeline tags based on the "Deal Type" property is super helpful to visually identify revenue types.

3. Finally with these first 2 pieces in place you can start reporting on your revenue breakdowns in a more accurate and predictable way as I walk through in this video.

Hope this is helpful, let me know if you have any questions at all and for reference all the steps from the videos are broken out in this guide on managing the renewals process from Arrows.

[EMcGrath]

Thanks @stuartbalcombe  This seems pretty well aligned with the strategy that I've built for our team to manage renewals!

[louischausse]

We've built a Recipe to handle Renewals. A Recipe is a small process that you can install in your HubSpot portal. This doesn't require any third-party tool.

Here's a video of how it works:

Watch the video!

Renewal deals are created automatically for each closed-won deals with a known contract end date. Then, a task is generated with a reminder date XX days before that contract end date to notify the deal owner (or another user of your choice) that the renewal is coming soon.

Other settings and configurations are also available to suit your use case.

If you are interested, we can have a chat to setup this recipe on your HubSpot portal.

Learn more here

[EMcGrath]

Thanks Josh! These are all great considerations

[Josh · Accepted solution]

Hi @EMcGrath,

There are a ton of factors at play here, but these are a few of the considerations that have worked well for our clients:

• Tracking start and end dates of a contract either at the deal level or company level, depending on what makes sense
  • Have a separate pipeline for renewals
  • Create a new deal in the renewal pipeline so many days/months before the expiration of the current contract
  • CS works is notified and works the renewal deals using the renewal pipeline
• Use a similar scenario as above, but instead of working immediately from a separate deal pipeline, use a ticket pipeline 
  • This allows your CS team to evaluate the renewal opportunity before creating the deal
  • Once the renewal opportunity is better defined it can be added to either the primary or a separate pipeline
• If you have Enterprise, I love tracking contracts and their associated details using a custom object
  • This provides the greatest flexibility to do whatever you need from an automation and reporting perspective

Hope this helps!

Josh