Anyone who works in sales or marketing can attest to the fact that there is always a metric ton of information keep track of. How many people have visited your company? How many have signed up for your email list? Downloaded content? Reached out for a demo? Knowing the answers to these questions ensures that a) you monitor the health of your pipeline, and b) that you're able to follow up with qualified leads in a timely manner.
And while you may have started doing this with spreadsheets when your business was new, as it grows, you may have found that you needed a more efficient process. This is where the HubSpot Deals tool comes in. Deals in HubSpot helps ensure that no one falls through the cracks and that you can verify the status of any prospect at any given moment.
A HubSpot deal is an ongoing communication with a contact. You can categorize each deal stage to track the progress of these communications—and you can do so in accordance with your own company’s steps as leads move along the pipeline.
For example, let’s say that your first step as a lead moves towards a sale is to have them schedule an appointment with one of your sales reps. Then you send them a proposal and a contract. Then they sign the contract. All of these stages are parts of a deal.
HubSpot includes seven default stages: appointment scheduled, qualified to buy, presentation scheduled, decision maker bought-in, contract sent, closed won, and closed lost. However, you can customize these stages in your account settings.
While smaller businesses may think they’re fine to continue using more rudimentary methods of tracking leads as they move through the sales funnel, the practical advantages of using HubSpot deals are many:
Your business can’t live on a hope and a prayer. You have to be proactive about having a steady flow of leads coming in and moving along. This is why it's important to track how far along your sales pipeline each prospect is.
Knowing how many deals you have near the "closed won" stage and when and why deals are lost is crucial to help you identify ways to improve your sales process. For example, if you notice that you have a lot of leads stalling at the second-to-last phase of your sales process, doing things like reaching out for additional engagement, following up promptly, and focusing on prospects with a higher lead score can help you close those deals faster—or even prevent them from becoming lost.
Surely, you have quarterly revenue goals. Therefore, you have to ensure a minimum number of pipeline volume, interaction, and actual sales. In addition, you want to know whether a lead is stuck in a particular stage for an unusual amount of time and what you can do to remedy those bottlenecks.
Lead scoring is a useful tool to prioritize leads based on their likelihood of becoming a customer. And since you’re the one who’s assigning point values to each interaction, you want to ensure that number reflects a lead’s actual level of interest and readiness to close.
If you notice that your sales team consistently fails to make a sale when reaching out to prospects with high lead scores, you probably need to revisit your scoring system.
Even if you have sales reps who are complete rockstars, there are only so many hours in a day. Knowing how many people are in each stage of the pipeline enables you to better allocate your resources so that no one is left on the back burner because a particular rep is too busy helping someone else.
You have to strike when the iron’s hot, and making someone wait just one extra day can be the difference between closing that sale or having them go to a competitor. With deal tracking in HubSpot, you can see if someone's followed up with a lead recently because every interaction through HubSpot is tracked—allowing you to generate reminders when hot leads are about to start going cold.
If the details of each deal stage is ironed out and is a true representation of how things move along your pipeline, you’ll be able to forecast whether you’re on track to hitting your revenue goals.
Consequently, you’ll be able to gauge whether it’s time to reassess your strategies, provide additional resources, or grow your team.
There are many reasons to track your team’s performance: identifying the stronger ones and compensating them accordingly are some of the obvious ones. But you also want to be able to gauge each team member’s work capacity. If you have too many leads and only a handful of sales reps, it may be time to hire additional people. In addition, if you notice the same issues coming up repeatedly, that may indicate that your training needs to be either more structured or updated.
Now that you know the benefits of using HubSpot deals, let’s go down a list of best practices. Ensuring that your sales team is well-versed on them is an essential component of this process.
While it’s totally fine to stick with HubSpot’s deals default stages, these will only be helpful if they genuinely reflect your company’s sales processes. Even if most of them are the same and you think you’re good to go, get together with your sales team to create an accurate and exhaustive list. And always involve them in this planning, since they are in the front lines and understand this better than anyone else within your company.
There are several reasons as to why different team members may use different names for each deal stage: previous companies they’ve worked for, watching different video tutorials online, or simply going by what personally makes sense to them. However, this sets the stage for misunderstandings or miscommunications.
Avoid this issue by coming up with standardized names for each stage of your deals, train them properly, and ensure that they can refer back to the nomenclature either through a shared doc or your company’s knowledge base.
In order to avoid duplication and confusion, prior to entering a new deal, conduct a search within your deals database to ensure that what you’re about to enter doesn’t already exist. This is yet another reason why having standardized names will help you work more efficiently.
HubSpot lets you enter the monetary value of a specific deal. For example, you can include how much revenue a contract will generate throughout a specific term. If you don’t specify the term-length, HubSpot’s default setting is 12 months. Keep in mind that HubSpot can be used for more than one currency, so check to see that you’re entering the correct value. You can also set it up as a monthly recurring revenue.
As each deal moves forward along the pipeline, you should assign it a win probability percentage. For example, someone who scheduled a discovery call may have a 15 percent to 20 percent probability of becoming a client. By the same token, someone who’s already reviewed a proposal and requested a contract may have a 90 percent probability of closing that sale. Doing this will help you better forecast your revenue.
A deal doesn’t require that you enter a close date. However, you may have to do so depending on which CRM you’re integrating with your Sales Hub. But in addition to that, you want to establish a realistic closing date (based on previous pipeline history) so that your sales and marketing team can do their lead nurturing and follow ups effectively. Remember, time is of the essence in this process. Letting too much time go by increases the likelihood of losing that sale.
Your customer relationship management (CRM) software has all the information you need to craft ultra focused, personalized communications with your contacts. This is what helps you tailor your pitch to best fit their specific needs.
It also enables you to identify upsell opportunities. So you want to make sure that each deal is associated with objects in your CRM. This also lets you see all information relating to each deal in a centralized location — all past communications, previous purchases, and any issues that may have come up.
Even the best sales reps might need a reminder to help them stay on task to keep moving a prospect from one end of the sales pipeline to the end of it. So, it helps to use the HubSpot Sequences tool or the Workflows tool to set up task reminders for your sales reps that trigger partway through a sequence or when a lead hits a certain deal stage in your deals tool.
This helps your sales reps stay on top of communications with your hottest leads.
Not every deal results in victory. Sometimes, you'll lose a prospect even though it looked like they were extremely close to closing. So, it's important to be prepared for this eventuality. One way to do this is to create a follow-up workflow that goes out to lost leads.
Building out workflows for when a prospect is moved to the closed-lost deal stage can help you:
Just because you've closed a deal doesn't mean that you're done interacting with that customer! To keep the customer happy, you'll want to create a smooth customer experience after the sale is completed.
Creating a post-close workflow that generates task reminders for introducing the prospect to their services team or setting their expectations for the delivery of goods and services can help create a smoother, more positive customer experience.
Additionally, you could create opportunities to re-engage with customers by upselling additional products or services that are related to the deal they closed later on. For example, say you sell computers to clients. A few weeks or months after the sale, you could send a message reminding the customer to carry out regular maintenance on their device or upsell them your remote desktop management services.
This would help you keep the relationship with the customer open to create additional sales opportunities in the future.
HubSpot deals make it a lot easier for you to track your company’s progress as you move towards meeting your quarterly revenue goals. But we also know that the platform comes with a learning curve, and that there might be a way to optimize its use. Let us help you with a free HubSpot audit! We’ll let you know what’s working, and actionable steps to modify what can be improved.