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so in this video i want to talk to you about how to set up your pipelines and deal stages specifically within hubspot but the things that i'm saying right now are actually applicable for any crm um a big question that we often get is how do we set up pipelines so that they accurately reflect our business process they actually help us sell right um and there is kind of a science behind this uh first let's look at why would you want a pipeline what does a pipeline really do for your business well it's it's a great way to keep track of your deals but it's not just for showing how much deals you've closed one or lost in in the past the main reason that you want to have a pipeline is literally the name says it right you want to be able to see what's in the pipeline what's in the future so it's an important tool for doing accurate forecasting on your sales and hubspot has this feature where you can build multiple pipelines so one question that we often get is should i build one pipeline or do i need more than one my sort of go-to approach is that i will build an extra pipeline if i find that i have a secondary process or a sales process for a different type of product or service that is very different from my initial so if there's two processes that maybe you're selling to a particular group of customers in one way and there's a group of customers they sell to as well in a completely different fashion with a different process that should be a separate pipeline and it should not be a separate pipeline if all you're doing basically saying well we're selling the same product in the same way but in a different country or with like a different little label something like that on it in that case what i would do at least in hubspot is use a property on the deal to identify that thing so if it's like a country for example i would i would put it in there and then use a filter on my my main pipeline to basically see the sales happening in for example a particular country or if it's like new business or existing business something like that should not be a reason to create a new pipeline in my eyes the next question that often comes up with pipelines is when is something actually a deal when should it be on the pipeline um and this is a funny one because what i've seen a lot actually in the past mostly when it's a very sales driven organization is that the first stage of the pipeline gets used as sort of a big dump of all the prospects that we want to talk to in the future and i can understand that from the point of view of wanting to see everything in one place but what this does is it skews the the use that your pipeline has for forecasting because you're going to basically put this big block at the front of all these people that do not uh want to uh or who've probably never even heard of you before and you're going to put it on your pipeline and it's going to basically mess up your conversion rates it's going to show a lot of inactive deals on there for a very long time it's not a good place to put them what i would do as sort of a rule of thumb for when is something a deal it's either when your prospect has risen their hand through a contact form or quote form or request a demo form saying i want to hear from you or when your sales team has done some cold outreach and they've confirmed there's at least some basic level of interest to continue talks with you so those are the sort of two rule of thumbs that i use to determine if something is a deal if it's not if it doesn't match those criteria then it should just be a prospect that is you know some kind of life cycle stage or qualification criteria on there but it's not actually a deal or an opportunity yet so then the key question really is how do you determine your deal stages how many should there be and what should you call them and my big uh go-to rule of thumb here is that every stage should represent the buyer taking a step closer to actually buying something because if it it doesn't represent the buyer taking a step then it's actually not progress you want to avoid that the stages are just there to make your sales team look busy and there's actually a cool little exercise that you can do to distill your deal stages and i'm not going to take all the credit for this i've learned this from kyle jepson who is a professor i guess at hubspot academy he knows a lot about this kind of stuff and he wrote a blog about this quite some time ago actually but i still use to this day to build up my pipeline stages and the exercise is as follows your first step is to take every step of your sales process and just jot it down on a piece of paper or in like a certain sort of table and then divide those into two rows one being all the steps that you take as the buyer sorry as the seller obviously and all the steps that your buyer needs to take just put in everything that you can think of that needs to logically happen in your mind for a deal going from the open stage at the start all the way to the closed stage and then the next step is to go through that list and take out everything that can be skipped and you need to be strict here right so you need to leave only those points on this list that are absolutely essential every single time i'll give you some examples things like follow-up or booking time to schedule the next meeting or sending a contract things like that um they may feel unavoidable but they may actually be very skippable so be strict there and take those out next you want to go through your list again and make sure that any remaining deal stages meet the following three criteria number one you want to make sure that it's factual meaning that it is something that has actually happened and that it's not just something that is a hunch on that on the account of the sales rep number two you want to make sure that it's inspectable meaning that there's some kind of proof in the system that you can point at and say look this thing has actually happened and number three you want this to be buyer centric that goes back to what i said at the start you want this stuff to represent the buyer making progress in in the sales process and not just you doing busy work the last step you want to take is remove any doubt about whether the action of your deal stage name has already occurred or whether it still needs to happen and the best way to do that is to take the deal stage name just put it in the past tense like demo completed or contract received now you should have a nice and clean list of deal stages that you can use to set up your pipeline with the last thing to do is to just slap an open stage at the beginning which represents any new deals coming in either from a whether that's the prospect raising their hand themselves or your sales folk having confirmed that there's something there and a closed lost stage at the end for those deals that do not go the mile and that's it that's really the sort of the scientific method that i use to plan out my pipelines and deal stages for the clients here at gradient i hope that's been helpful to you if if so or if not if you have any comments or questions feel free to leave those in the comments i'll do my best to answer them and catch you in a next potential video