Trial as deal and Deal Merging in HubSpot

[ChoAtIron]

Hi all,

Since trials are pretty essential to our business, we record trials as custom objects and a life cycle stage as well as deal stages in HubSpot.

The thing is when there are different people who participate in the purchasing process.

This is the scenario that we are facing currently. 

Person A from Company A signs up for a trial and Person B from Company A actually buys it. At that time, we have Deal A at Trial Stage and Deal B as Closed Won Stage. 

In this case, to get accurate data in reporting, we are thinking of merging the trial deal of Person A with the closed won deal of Person B using custom APIs. 

So, according to HubSpot, the merging deal will create a third deal. So we might lose the historical data of deals that happen between Person A, Person B and us. And we still have no idea what other information we may get lost in merging deals. 

Apart from this, are there any consequences that can happen because of deal merging?

Another scenario is that letting the trial deals alone and not merging with the actual deal won.

So, let’s say there are 10 people that sign up for Trials from Company A and one person from Company A actually purchases our product, it will be 10 Trial lost deals and 1 won deal separately. In this case, we lose the chance to know about the actual data of lost deals and we have no idea that this 1 won deal is coming from Trial. 

So, the question here are:

How SaaS companies are managing the Trial in HubSpot? 

Do they manage Trials as deal stages? 

Do they do a deal merging thing? 

Does HubSpot have any suggestion upon this since HubSpot does Trials as a Saas company? If yes, is the deal merging thing a manual process or automatic one using APIs?

Any suggestions on this case?

Thank you all.

[PamCotton]

Hello, @ChoAtIron thank you for posting in our Community!

Let's invite some top experts to this conversation @ChrisoKlepke @StefaniUAT @joshua-paul any recommendations to @ChoAtIron matter?

Thank you,

Pam