Empower Your Purchasing Process with Deal Pipelines for Purchasing

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steal pipelines are a super helpful tool inside of HubSpot but just how helpful they can be really depends on how you set them up so today we're going to tell you everything you need to know for perfect pipelines welcome to HubSpot hacks where we help you get more out of [Music] HubSpot well optimized deal pipelines are essential for Clear reporting clear forecasting and really making it easy for your sales team to use the CR while tracking how opportunities are progressing through your sales process more often than that when we work with customers that are frustrated with any of those things not working very well it really comes down to how well their deal pipelines are set up so what we did is we created a series of five best practices that when followed those deal pipelines really support effective use of HubSpot so we are marketers ourselves so we of course put these best practices in an acronym and the easiest way to remember it is just to remember remember the word close those five best practices are concise linear objective supported and your opportunities should be engaged at every stage so that's the E engaged at every stage so let's walk through those one at a time the first one is concise and what we mean by that is that your deal pipeline shouldn't have a ton of steps and ton of stages representing every step in your sales process what they should represent are the key Milestones that almost every opportunity goes through often times there will be activities that are going to happen between those key milestones and often times those activities vary a lot between opportunity you don't ever know exactly how many meetings you're going to have to have following a discovery meeting to be able to send a proposal or exactly how many emails you're going to need to send between every stage but we do know the key Milestones that when we hit them we are more likely to close that deal so let's dive into some pipelines and show you an example of of a deal pipeline that is concise and one that maybe isn't so right here we have a pipeline that honestly is pretty good so we've got demo schedule demo held proposal sent contract sent very clear Milestones that we want to achieve in this particular sales process your sales process may look very different you may have a b Toc company you may have you may need more stages um but what we really want to do is just make sure that every stage represents a key Milestone so this same sales process represented in HubSpot in a way that's not cons size might look something more like this so demo scheduled demo held demo follow-up sent proposal requested proposal created proposal sent so you can see it's really the same process but in this version we're trying to represent every single activity that A salesperson would need to have and a lot of times are we're going to have deals skipping stages which isn't really ideal when we come to trying to track conversion through each of our stages so we can do the same exact process with much fewer stages we're asking our salese to update those deals less often without really losing any meaningful data about where that's at in our sales process so that's the first one concise the second one is linear so ideally we want deals to move from left to right and not go back and forth between stages and the reason for this is because hubspot's already going to track things like the date that it entered a stage how long it spent in a stage your conversion R Ates from one stage to the next and as you start having deals go forward and then backward and they're in the same stage multiple times that data starts to get muddy and not really that meaningful and so by having them be concise and only representing those clear stages that does help us with linear but we do also have a couple other best practices around making sure our deal pipelines are linear so back in our pipeline here an example that we see very often when our pipelines are not linear is when we have stages like on hold so maybe we do a demo scheduled and then we move this deal to on hold for whatever reason and now we're going to move it back to demo held and back to on hold and so you can see we're just bouncing around all over the place a lot of times on hold is also a place where deals go to die and not actually move forward we'll talk a little bit more about that so when we're thinking about our Milestones think about those key Milestones that we need to hit to make people progress uh make it more likely that we are going to close that deal when people hit that Milestone and think about the Milestones that almost every opportunity is going to hit and that we can move from left to right in a linear fashion the next one is objective and this is the one that we probably see the most problems around it's also the one that is essential to nail if you want accurate forecasting especially if you have a large team or if you're planning to grow your sales team so an example of a pipeline that's not objective would be something like this we've got stages is named interested and qualified and evaluating a lot of times we're just leaving it up to the salesperson to determine whether that opportunity is actually interested whether they're actually qualified whether they're actually evaluating and one person's judgment one salesperson's judgment on your team may be different than another salesperson's judgment on your team and if you're having quotas for your salese on how many deals they should create or how long a deal should spend in a stage before they move to the next stage that definition for qualified may even differ for the same salesperson depending on how they're performing against those quotas so we want our stages to be very objective sometimes we do see teams say okay in order for it to be qualified we need it to be you know these are the the three criteria that we need to hit for qualified and maybe you support that with properties on the deal that can work but it also requires our sales people to remember those or reference other material so whenever possible again identify those key miles milestones and name the deal stages based on the Milestones like this example here there's no subjectivity in whether a demo has been scheduled whether a demo has been held whether a proposal has been set and an ideal pipeline will be just like that extremely clear whether a deal should be in that pipeline or that stage of the pipeline the next piece is supported and the way I like to think about supported is it's really a check on whether or not our stages are objective so supported really the idea here is that every deal should have an activity logged on that record that shows us why a deal should be in the stage that it's in so for example if we move this deal over to demo held we should be able to open this deal and see the meeting logged that is a meeting type of demo if we move it over to proposal sent we should be able to open the record and see the proposal or see the email where the proposal was sent so again being able to click into the deal and see an activity that's logged that supports the reason why it's in the stage that it's in and again that's a great just kind of double check that we've got very objective deal stages the next one and the last one is engaged at every stage and this is also the place where we see a lot of people kind of make some mistakes and so engaged at every stage really means if I was going to call up the contact associated with this deal and say hey are you actively engaged in a sales process with this company if they would say yes there should definitely be a deal if they would say who's that company or I've never actually talked to them or I've been to their website but I'm not actually talking to them about buying anything then there should not be a deal so often times what we see is things like this we've got early stages like Target account or prospecting where the person that would be Associated to that deal doesn't even know that they're in a sales process because they're really not in a sales process or maybe you don't even have a contact Associated to the deal or a company associated to the deal because you don't know all the information yet so these two stages those stages that are very early in the process those should be represented with other HubSpot tools things like lead uh the lead object or things like life cycle stage so using those other tools properly we can get the visibility we need those tools are much more geared towards higher uh higher scale higher volume that we typically see in the early stages and it allows your salespeople to if to really zero in on these deals knowing that those people are all engaged in an active sales process we've got a higher likelihood of closing they've taken some steps to engage with us in that sales process we talked about that on on hold stage that's another example of a place where they're probably not really engaged in the process and then the last piece about engaged that's that's related to that on hold stage it's not really about the the stages in your pipeline but how long you leave deals open so sometimes we see people that uh will talk to somebody and they're engaged in the sales process and then for whatever reason they fall out they say you know contact me in a year or they they start ghosting you and a lot of people would just leave that deal open hoping to re-engage that account we would recommend that you close that deal at that time so have have a policy set up in your business for how long a deal can stay in a certain stage or how long a deal can stay open without getting a response back from the uh from the contact or the account that the opportunity is associated with and the reason for that is because a deal should really represent a an active sales process one instance of an active sales process we already have a company record and a contact record that we can use to uh to represent the the contact in the company so we don't need a deal to just represent a company just because we close a deal the only thing that means is that we've closed this active instance of that sales process it doesn't mean that we can't re-engage them them that we can't um that we can't sell them something in the future it just means that this sales process has died and we need to restart a sales process when they re-engage and remember that best practice of linear we when we do uh re-engage that contact or that that account and create a new deal we won't move that deal from Clos lost back to a new stage in the pipeline we'll create a new deal at that time to represent that new instance of the sales process so how long those deals stay open really is going to vary based on your company if you've got a really long sales cycle those deals may stay open for a year or two if you've got a really short sales cycle maybe your SAS or something like that um and it's a little bit more transactional a little bit more you know high high uh fast-paced and and lower price um maybe it's only a couple weeks so it really does depend on on your company but having that policy in in in place to make sure that all of your deals truly do represent engaged opportunities so that your forecasting is accurate so that your salespeople are prioritizing their time with the people that are most likely to buy so if you follow all five of those best practices like I said you're going to have much better forecasting much better reporting and your sales people are going to be a lot happier because they won't be manually updating nearly as much data in your CRM they can focus more on those Revenue generating activities actually going out there and selling so one more time acronym is close it's concise linear objective supported and those opportunities should be engaged at every stage make sure you hit that subscribe button for more HubSpot tips tricks and how-tos and jump down to 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