MQL for Clients

[jcatalano]

We are currently trying to build out a marketing influenced deal/opportunity report. Our customer success team handles client related selling and our sales team handles new business. We would like to track new business leads as well as client leads; however, we run into workflow issues and salesforce validation rule issues when we try to mimic our lead qualification process for new sales with clients.

Once someone is a customer their qualification is changed to customer; however, now we want them to be nurtured as a client and they could be an MQL as a client. 

Does anyone have suggestions for tracking this? 

[MPeach · Accepted solution]

Hi there,

The short answer to your question is yes and no. Confusing right? Well in essence I think what you want is possible, but not using lifecycle stages. Lifecycle stages in reality are used to qualify people through from lead to customer, helping us identify the marketing and sales touchpoints along the way. Lifecycle stages however, don't really have equivalents once we classify someone as a customer. There are however 2 separate approaches you could take depending on your level of HubSpot software subscription that could help: 

If you have HubSpot's Marketing Software you could create a new contact property called 'Client Lifecyle Stage'  (or whatever you like really), and create new values for this property for the client sales team to use. The values you set for this new property are completely up to you, but if you want to follow a similar approach to lifecycle stages, you could use something like: Not Yet Engaged, Engaged, Interested, Proposal Sent, Proposal Accepted, Proposal Rejected. Or anything like this that you think best descibes the different stages of the client sales process. This contact property can then be used by the client sales team just as you would lifecycle stages for new businesses.

The second approach requires access to HubSpot's Sales tools. This approach would involve using the deal boards and creating a deal pipeline for the client sales team to use, and use the different deal stages in the same way one would lifecycle stages. So when a new customer is acquired a new deal is created in the client deal board labelled new customer(uncontacted) and then they would move along the deal stages as they are engaged with by the client sales team.

I think both of these could work effectively to help with tracking the contact and engagement of the client sales team and would give you the visibility over how well this team is performing and how customers are tracking through the client sales process. 

*Note both of these involve ensuring that whichever solution you use, that your client sales team buys in to the new process and updates contact properties or deal stages accordingly. 

All the best and hope this helped. If it did and you think it answered your question, then go ahead and mark it as a solution.