Security to Keep Sales Reps from Closing Deals

[dflynt]

I thought I had found an answer to this question before, but can't find it now.  We have a process where customer service closes deals (by setting to Closed Won) when we get a PO from a customer.  Is it possible to not allow Sales Reps to close deals?  If this is not possible, how are folks solving this?  Ideally we could automate something where we kick back to the previous stage, but, if I'm not mistaken, it looks like we still get locked into a close date when this happens.

[ELaw]

Hi, I have been having this same issue and after a brainstorming sesh, I think I may have come up with a solution. This solution will only work with the Enterprise upgrade, which I don't have yet (still trying to get buy-in from senior management) so I have not been able to test this out myself but I don't see why this couldn't work:

1. Set up a restricted property that only the Sales Ops/Manager can edit. For example: Approved: yes/no

2. Set up a workflow that when a sales rep changes the deal stage to "closed-won" if the "approved" property is not filled out (which it wont be because it can only be completed by a manager), the deal stage is kicked back to the previous stage. 

3. This work flow should also trigger for the sales manager to get an alert to "approve" the deal.

4. Once the manager reviews, they can then complete the "approved" property and close-won the deal. 

I sure hope this helps!

Elisabeth

[karstenkoehler]

Kyle Jepson shared a similar approach on LinkedIn recently, @ELaw, nice one.

Here's the post for reference: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6898988769068802048/

@dflynt, highly recommend you check this out.

Cheers!

[ELaw]

This is great, and gave me some additional ideas! Thank you for sharing!

[karstenkoehler]

Hi @dflynt,

That makes perfect sense and I agree this would be a useful feature – unfortunately it's not supported at the moment. You could suggest it in the HubSpot Ideas section of the community. The product team reviews these requests based on popularity.

Best regards!

[dflynt]

Just as a point of clarification.  We absolutely want sales reps to enter deals and move them through the deal stages that they are in charge of.  However, we don't believe that a sales rep (whose commissions are based on closed won deals) should be allowed to mark their deals as closed won.  Just a standard protection that we think should exist.  In accounting we would call it a control.  For now, we have trained the sales reps and created an exception report that shows customer service and our head of sales when this occurs.  However, it would be nice if there was a way to lock it down or use a workflow to push it back a stage and clean up anything HubSpot triggers when a deal as closed.

[ConnorSlivensky]

Is there something stopping you from using user groups and permissions to stop sales reps from doing this? I haven't had to separate users more than Super Admin and User so I could be missing something.

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @dflynt,

It sounds like you have different teams with access to deal records, customer service and sales? If the issue is that customer service is editing deal records, you could create a user role in HubSpot for customer service representatives that restricts those users from editing deal records. I've set the setting to "None" in my screenshot:

There is also an option to restrict edit access for certain properties (in this case Deal stage) which you can learn about here: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/account/restrict-edit-access-for-properties This, again, would make sense for customer service.

If the issue is that sales reps close deals prematurely, then the my preferred solution would be training. Not allowing sales reps to edit deals or move deals along the pipeline would essentially prevent them from doing their work. (Theoretically you could restrict edit access to the Deal stage property and work with deal automation, updating stages based on deal activity or other property changes. But there would likely be scenarios when a sales manager would have to check all open deals and whether they are in the correct stage. Doable, but more manual work for one person.)

Hope this helps!