Need help setting up Hubspot as a marketing CRM

[paulhinrichsen]

Hello,

I am coming into a statup, brand new, and have never used hubspot. My job is basically the ongoing success of our clients, and helping them with marketing efforts. We sell software that aids financial institutions to sell consumer loans. Right now, we basically have "3 phases". I need to create a way to track where all of our clients are after implementation so we know how far along in the customer experience they are with us.

1) Sales- Under the sales tab in Hubspot we have all of our clients under "Deals" tab, and its broken down between (Prospect, Presentation Scheduled, Discover, Design, Deliver Contract, Closed Lost, and Closed Won.

2) Tech Implementation- We then transition into our implementation where our tech team utilizes the "Service" tab and then clicks "Tickets". This is where every client's implementatin is managed.

3) Ongoing Marketing Success- After they are live, I work with the clients to get them further along in our marketing support pipeline to help them create automated campaigns, direct mail, email, texting etc...but I need a way to track where all of the clients are in this process. I don't want to actually build any campaigns or marketing inside Hubspot, I just want to use Hubspot as a CRM to track what they have done, and where they are in the process. What would you recommend I do in order to set this up? What tab should I start with? Changing what the first two stages are doing, isn't an option. I'd really like it to look like a pipeline, even though that sounds odd for ongoing marketing activities but we really want to move them from one standardized campaign to the next through a life cycle.

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @paulhinrichsen,

For contacts, there isn't a board view (and I'd advise not to use deal pipelines for this purpose – they're not meant to be used like this and it can block a lot of advanced use cases in a HubSpot portal).

To track a contact's journey along marketing touchpoints, I'd recommend using the Lifecycle stage property. @franksteiner79 explains the use of this property really well here. Lifecycle stages can now also be customized and while I personally would stick as close to the standard as I can, they can be adjusted to your needs now.

If you want to log specific touchpoints, you can create a custom multiple checkboxes property that stores the information whether a contact interacted with a campaign. In Professional portals, this can be maintained automatically with workflows. Below Professional, this would have to be done manually.

Let me know if you have any follow-up questions!

[Olivia_Bagnall · Accepted solution]

 @paulhinrichsen If lifecycle stage is not giving you what you need then you could create your own Lifecycle stage property with customised values. Once we then map out what qualifies a contact to enter each stage we can build automations to update this seamlessly. 

I'd love to hear more about your project and how you are integrating your marketing tools with HubSpot so that I can best advise you on how to move forward. If you are interested in having a quick chat, feel free to book some time with me here.

Olivia Bagnall Inbound Consultant and Project Manager Baskey   o.bagnall@baskey.eu www.baskey.eu Rheingasse 14, 50676 Köln

[Olivia_Bagnall · Accepted solution]

 @paulhinrichsen If lifecycle stage is not giving you what you need then you could create your own Lifecycle stage property with customised values. Once we then map out what qualifies a contact to enter each stage we can build automations to update this seamlessly. 

I'd love to hear more about your project and how you are integrating your marketing tools with HubSpot so that I can best advise you on how to move forward. If you are interested in having a quick chat, feel free to book some time with me here.

Olivia Bagnall Inbound Consultant and Project Manager Baskey   o.bagnall@baskey.eu www.baskey.eu Rheingasse 14, 50676 Köln

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @paulhinrichsen,

For contacts, there isn't a board view (and I'd advise not to use deal pipelines for this purpose – they're not meant to be used like this and it can block a lot of advanced use cases in a HubSpot portal).

To track a contact's journey along marketing touchpoints, I'd recommend using the Lifecycle stage property. @franksteiner79 explains the use of this property really well here. Lifecycle stages can now also be customized and while I personally would stick as close to the standard as I can, they can be adjusted to your needs now.

If you want to log specific touchpoints, you can create a custom multiple checkboxes property that stores the information whether a contact interacted with a campaign. In Professional portals, this can be maintained automatically with workflows. Below Professional, this would have to be done manually.

Let me know if you have any follow-up questions!

[paulhinrichsen]

How do you use the Lifecycle stage property, in which menu should I be working out for this?

[karstenkoehler]

Hi @paulhinrichsen,

It's a contact property and high-level behaves like other fields (name, email etc). You can learn all about it here: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/contacts/use-lifecycle-stages

Best regards!

[paulhinrichsen]

Hi @karstenkoehler ... i see how to use this, but I can't edit any of the life cycle stages. Its locked by hubspot...and there's basically nothing here but Customer and Evangelist for after a deal is closed...so it doesn't really help.

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @paulhinrichsen,

The option to customize Lifecycle stage is new and might not yet appear in your portal. When it does, you'd find it under Settings > Objects > Contacts > Lifecycle Stage.

If this is not exactly what you want, your own custom property would work as well. The Lifecycle Stage has a certain logic (see Frank's article I linked above). If you want more flexibility, simply create your own custom property, with options that match what you need.

Best regards!