Using Deals to Track Leads

[khayward]

Hello, it was recommended to us to use Deals to track Leads in HubSpot.

Challenge: there are times when one Company may be buying/interested in multiple products from our company. It's possible the same Contact within the Company interested in these different products, so they are truly separate "leads." (Ex: XYZ Company, Jane Doe is interested in Advisory Services, and also Solutions Services - may buy one, but not the other, etc). [Clarification: In MS Dynamics "Contacts" and "Leads" are separate. You can have/track multiple leads against one Contact. Trying to reconcile that process with HubSpot's structure.]

Solution Recommended by HubSpot Partner: Create a "Deal Stage 0" and track all leads as deals. This has now triggered a slew of workflows required to 

• automatically create deals based on lead source (or manually create for offline sources)
• set Lifecyle stages back to "Lead, MQL or SQL" depending on source (because Lifecycle stage updates to opportunity when a deal is triggered)
• TBD what the impact to reporting this recommend process will have

There are also concerns about having thousands (10K+) of "Lead-Deals" in Stage 0 of the pipeline for one business unit. [Which we should clean up, understood, but even more than 100 might be difficult in the pipeline]

Looking into this further, I cannot find any instance in the HubSpot Community where it has been recommended to use Deals to track Leads. 

Is this a process that anyone has had success with?

Edited to add - trying to achieve these three things:

1. The ability to log multiple leads (different lines of inquiry) against a single contact.
2. The ability to log leads against contacts who are existing customers (so have a Lifecycle Stage of “Customer”) without losing visibility of the lead
3. The ability to identify/track/report on the status of all leads – open, disqualified or converted to deals.

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @khayward,

If you need a way to categorize contacts by business units before they show interest in your services, you could follow @GuyTaylor's approach. I'd suggest a multiple checkboxes dropdown by business units. The detailed tagging approach (including product and lifecycle stage) would be too high maintenance for my taste.

Alternatively, you could make use of HubSpot user properties. You can create more properties like the contact owner: business unit 1 owner, business unit 2 owner, business unit 3 owner etc. This would allow you to see which business units are currently working a lead. If a particular owner is not assigned, it's clear that this BU is not working the contact.

You're saing that leads could be in different stages of the sales process with different business units? E.g. appointment scheduled for advisory services by business unit 1, decision maker brought in for solution services by business unit 2? In that case, I'd recommend creating separate deals for each product. One contact could have multiple associated deals then. If a contact decides that they're not interested in one of the services after all, the deal would simply be closed/lost.

In general, I'd recommend listing all of the requirements for the HubSpot process from a sales perspective first. That would be the first step before mapping this process to HubSpot tools and finding potential workarounds.

Best regards!

[PMgoUrban]

@karstenkoehler I have an issue in a similar vein, would it be ok to get your thoughts on this?

https://community.hubspot.com/t5/Sales-Hub-Tools/Tracking-lifecycle-stages-and-reporting-MQL-to-SQL/... 

[GuyTaylor]

Hi @khayward, here is one approach.

1. Tag your contacts. Any combination is allowed here so there is no issues with having multiple business units, each with their own products, interacting with the same contact. Jon Smith might be tagged with: BU1-Product2 AND BU2-Product1.

2. Detailed tagging. If desired you can tag in such a way to give a sales status for each product. Such as BU1-P2-SalesQualified or BU2-P1-MarketingQualified. Not sure if you need this lvl of detail but it is possible.

3. Tracking. Once contacts are tagged it's super easy to track them. You can run a filter to show any combination of desired contacts. Such as show me all contacts interested(tagged) in BU2-P1-SQ. Or show me all contacts interested in BU2-P1-MQ + BU2-P2-MQ. 

3.1 Reports. The above step is good for pulling a list of contacts. To vislualize this data and make it more interesting you can use reports. With reports you can create a visual to show contacts moving thru sales states like marketing qualified > sales qualifed > closed, etc. If you have the custom reports feature you can create just about anything.

4. Deals. No need to create a deal for each contact persee. Altho some people might do this if they have a small number of contacts and enjoy the visual nature of the deal board. But for your sitaution better to just create a deal when the interaction with a contact rises to that level. The deal can specifically state the exact business unit, product, and contacts involved. You can create multiple deals to seperate out different products even if it involes the same the same contact, should that be desired.

All of this starts with properly tagging your contacts. You can create custom properties to accomplish this. For example you might create a property called business unit 1. Populate this property will all the appropriate products/services. When you get a contact who is interested in a product/service from busniess unit 1 >  open that property within the contact record and select all that apply.

Guy Taylor | linkedhub.io

[karstenkoehler]

Hello @khayward,

There might be some context I'm missing here but I wouldn't recommend using deals for lead management. A deal should be created when a (qualified) lead signals their interested in buying from your company. The workaround suggested by the HubSpot partner does not make sense to me – it is clearly working against HubSpot's logic if you have to reset lifecycle stages by force.

It's also not clear to me how this automatic deal creation solves the problem of different combinations of products.

Is the sales process the same for the different services? (Are there different deal phases for advisory services than there are for solution services?) In that case, you could consider working with different pipelines. If someone shows interest in advisory services, create a deal in the advisory services pipeline. If someone is interested in solution services, create a deal in the solution services pipeline. Again, I'd only do that if the deal phases are different (e.g. an additional appointment stage).

If there isn't a notable difference in the sales process, I would recommend working with HubSpot products, available in Sales Hub Professional and Enterprise: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/deals/how-do-i-use-products You could create a product for advisory services, another for solution services etc. When a lead is interested in buying from you, create a deal and add the appropriate products. If throughout the sales process they decide they're interested in different or additional product, just switch it out and update the deal accordingly.

Should there be multiple leads from the same company, potentially from different departments, you can still create separate deals.

Again, I might be missing some context but I can't see why one wouldn't work with the standard tools and HubSpot's own logic here. You would definitely lock yourself in with this type of workaround – and very early on in mapping and optimizing your sales process, too.

Hope this helps!

[khayward]

Thank you, @karstenkoehler 

The only context which may be missing is we have four business units (I understand this makes our custom configuration more complex). We have four BU pipelines setup, each with different products/services setup. It is not often that two BUs sell to the same Company/Contact. But we do offer the same range of services in each BU (Advisory, Solutions, Operations Services) and a Company/Contact may be showing interest in any one of those areas at varying times in the sales process within one BU.

I believe the challenge was tracking multiple leads while still in the marketing phase. Our BUs were able to do this Microsoft Dynamics (where Contacts and "Leads" are separate records) and I think reconciling that in HubSpot (where Contacts and Leads are the same record) was a mental leap. We were told the agency themselves used Deals to track Leads, so I trusted the recommendation.  

You suggest using deal-products to track multiple opportunities, but what do we do when they aren't qualified opportunities yet?

[RHorton-Ortho]

@khayward  - Where did you eventually land on this question?

[khayward]

@RHorton-Ortho  - apologies for the very late response, but I'll leave it here for the community nonetheless. 

We did end up using Deals to track leads. I'm happy to speak to anyone about our use case. It is working well and we have much automation setup to create these (0) Lead records (deals that show up in "Stage 0" on all of our configured pipelines - we exclude this stage from Sales reports).

Having become very proficient in HubSpot since the implementation phase, I do believe we could have made this work using the Lifecyle stage for lead tracking - though I'd have to map that out on exact workflows and custom fields needed to make it suitable for our multiple divisions/P&Ls/sales approaches.

[SBanthia]

Hi! I am struggling with a very similar problem (i think!). Any chance you'd be able to advice based on your experience please?

We might have a contact who has now become our paying customer and now we wish to grow this account. Therefore, we have been pitching new services and there might be two scenarios: 

1. Where the client is definitely interested in buying the service = create a deal

2. Where the client needs to be nurtured / made aware and it might take longer = I need help here - how to track this? What is the impact on lifecycle stage, lead status and pipeline?

[SThomas5]

Hi SBanitha,

Did you figure out a solution to this?  We're also a multi-product company and the same contacts will be procuring each of our products and will be at different lifecycle stages for each of those procurements.  It seems so strange that HubSpot does not account for multiple products being sold to the same contact (e.g. a CFO).

Thanks!

[DianaGomez]

Hi @khayward!

Thanks for sharing 🙂

Best,

Diana