35. Building sales pipeline with HubSpot. How to manage early prospect conversations?

Introduction

Life is never simple in sales. First, you struggle to connect with the right people. Then, when your leads start rolling in the challenge becomes more of a memory game. As your leads mount, it quickly becomes overwhelming.

But if you’re managing your contacts using a CRM like HubSpot, it doesn’t have to be.
In today’s episode, we look at how to add structure to the sales process and how to create a pipeline for managing your leads.

To help you improve your marketing strategy, download the free brand script worksheet, which includes sections for each part of the storytelling framework we discuss in our episodes, here (or copy and paste the link below): 

demodia.com/brandscript-worksheet

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Episode Transcript

Life is never simple in sales. First you struggle to connect with the right people. Then when your leads start rolling in, the challenge becomes more of a memory game. Who have you spoken with? When did you last connect? What did you discuss? When should you follow up again and with whom? As your leads mount, it quickly becomes overwhelming. But if you're managing your contacts using a CRM, like HubSpot, it doesn't have to be. In today's episode, I'm gonna look at how to add structure to your sales process and how to create a pipeline for managing your leads. I introduce you to the buyer's journey and we hear how Daniel's going with his project. So let's get the show started. Hi there. I'm Simon Harvey and welcome to the authentic marketing podcast in association with Demodia, where we give you actionable advice that will help you create marketing that works. Um, as the owner of a small business myself, I have to admit that one of the activities that I struggle with most as we grew the company was sales. It's not that I don't like being labeled as a salesperson. No, not at all. The challenge was much more about the fact that I wore so many hats and that sales was only one of those. I'd be talking with a new prospect at an event one minute, them working on finances, maybe the next, you know, accounts, that sort of stuff, and then helping customers to solve their challenges the next minute. The thing was, when there was so much going on, it was just impossible to remember who I'd spoken with and what we'd agreed would happen next, when we'd agreed we'd connect next, etc. And I know that, you know, we lost so many potential good customers during those early years just because of my own lack of process. So, that's really what I wanted to try and help you guys out with today. These days we've changed the way that we work quite a bit within Demodia, and we now follow quite a structured sales process. So this now provides me with a pretty good way of knowing exactly where each contact is within our database, you know, where they sit within their customer journey, which of those contacts are most likely to buy from us and where I am with my overall deal negotiations. There's far too much I think in this list to be able to cover in one episode, so I think that over the next couple of weeks what I'm going to do is I'm going to go through each of those steps with you in and explain how you can set up a similar process within your business. So I guess the best place to start probably is right at the beginning. And with that, maybe it's time to introduce Daniel and maybe we can take a look at how he's working with his sales, what he's set up there and how he manages those early prospect conversations. So welcome back, Daniel. Good to have you again.

Thank you very much, Simon. It's good to be here.

So what are we looking at today then?

Today, we will have a look at sales. I think sales is at least as important as marketing is for a business. I

would say it's more so than marketing. Yeah,

even more. So you see, it's important to talk about these things, right? Yep. And you know Within the last weeks, I started to work on my own sales because until now, I only did my sales with word to mouth. And now I want to start doing proper sales. Uh huh. Yeah. Put a

bit more structure in there.

Yes, a little bit structure. Exactly. And then, you know, I started googling about sales to learn a bit more about it, how to do it properly. And whenever I google sales, I come across this word sales pipeline.

Okay. Yeah.

You know, I read about it a little bit, but I would prefer to hear it from you. Can you tell me what a sales pipeline is and why I would need that?

So the sales funnel or the sales pipeline really, it describes the stages that your customer goes through in the process of basically becoming a customer. Why this is important is that there are different things that we want to do with a particular customer at different points in that life cycle. Typically the life cycle or the sales funnel begins where we've got something that we typically call a subscriber or a lead. So that's the first point that somebody comes into that sales funnel. All right. The second term you'll often hear referred to within the sales funnel is a marketing qualified lead. So a marketing qualified lead is typically somebody that you've started a bit of a conversation with. Maybe they filled in a form on your website or something. Can you know enough about them to now actually start a conversation? So, for example, you've got the name and email address and you know what industry that they're in. So you can actually start to have a sensible, targeted conversation with them at that point. The next step in there tends to be what we call a sales qualified lead or an SQL. So sales qualified lead. The difference between that and a marketing qualified lead is you've started that conversation and that prospect has expressed an interest. So they've said, yes, I want to know more about this. So maybe they filled a contact form in on your website. That would be somebody that's a sales qualified lead straight away there. You know, they might jump through some of these other steps in the process. Or it could be that you've started a conversation on LinkedIn, perhaps, or you've started sending some cold emails to somebody and they've said, yes, I want to learn more about this. You know, there could be an interest for our business here. So that's the point that they become the sales qualified lead when they express an interest. The next step in there is what's referred to often as the sort of opportunity or the deal stage. Here, so that's the point in the conversation where you have started to talk to a customer. They've expressed an interest in what you're actually trying to sell to them, and you have then qualified them and said, Okay, this is the sort of customer that we can sell to. You know, they've maybe got enough budget in there. They've got a proper project. I know who the signing authority is for this particular project, and you know, we've actually got a solution that we can sell to them. So at that point in time, you would create an opportunity or a deal, depending on what you want to call it there. So that's the next stage. And basically then you go through that deal stage. You've got all your sales negotiations and things that are happening during that stage until ultimately, hopefully they become a customer. So that would be the last point in your sales funnel, basically, or in your sales pipeline there.

Okay, I understand. So when you first get the lead, he's gonna get the status marketing qualified lead. As soon as he shows interest, he will become a sales qualified lead. And then when we actually have a solution to sell to them based on their interest, then they will get into this opportunity deal stage and become a sales qualified lead.

No, they've gone past the sales qualified lead at that point. So they're now the marketing deal stage. I'm sorry. There's deal stage. Yep.

Okay. So they become the sales qualified lease first and then they come into the deal stage.

Yep, exactly.

Okay. And then in the end they become your customer.

That's the intent. Yeah, that's it. Exactly.

Actually sounds pretty simple.

Yeah, and the way that you can track that HubSpot, we're talking a lot about that, uses a property called LifecycleStage in there. So if you're using your HubSpot instance, you can go into any customer, so any company basically, or any individual contact within HubSpot, and there's a default LifecycleStage field in there that will have all of those different stages that we've just gone through. And then, you know, you can mark them and you know exactly who's at what point in their overall life then.

All right, and then I remember from a conversation last week or so that there's not only the life cycle stage, but there's also different stages for some stages of the life cycle stage. Is that right?

Um, yes. Yeah, you could look at it that way. It's probably quite a good way of describing it actually. So. There's two other parts or two sub parts, I would guess, typically to this process. So in the earlier stages where you've got sort of a marketing and sales qualified lead, typically what organizations like to do then is they like to be able to have a little bit more structure around tracking those leads and the interactions that are going on with those leads. So they often set up what I call a sort of a prospect pipeline inside that prospecting pipeline. There's then a sub status, which is set, which is again in HubSpot. They call it a lead status. Other platforms might call it something different, but that status basically is used by the sales guy. To go through and monitor how interactions are going with a prospect before they become a deal. So, for example, somebody might fill in a form on your website and you look at that and they say, okay, yeah, they've attended my webinar. They've downloaded my white paper. I looked in the CRM and their company looks really interesting. Let me reach out to them. So you send that person an email. And so what you'd then use is you'd use that lead status in there to track how that conversation is going. So when the initial lead comes in through the white paper or the webinar registration, you know, that would be tagged as a new lead coming in there. Then, for example, when you send them an email, that lead status, you might change to attempting to contact or something equivalent. When they finally reply to you, you might change that status to connected, so that you know you're actually having a proper conversation with this particular person.

I understand.

Then during that conversation, there may be a point when they sort of come around and say, yeah, really interested in what you've got to do, but timing's not right at the moment. So you don't want to throw those people away because they're a lead that you've spent time to actually collect. So you might have a nurturing status so that then you can use that status to say, okay, send this person some automated responses and let the automation take over a bit. Or if it's going well. And you identify that there is a real opportunity there and that they say, yes, I potentially want to know more. Give me a proposal. Tell me more about your solution. Whatever. Then in that section, you might have a qualified or a disqualified status if they're at the opposite and they don't express an interest. So that would be your prospect pipeline or in HubSpot, as I say, they call that the lead status.

Okay, so the lead status shows me how qualified the lead is for becoming a customer. Yes, different small steps.

Yeah, exactly. It's sort of the sub steps of that marketing and sales qualified part of the process. Exactly that. Yeah.

Okay, that's interesting. And for the other steps of the life cycle, are there also smaller steps for each stage or is that only for the marketing qualified lead stage?

The other one that you most often see some sub stages for is this sort of opportunity or deal stage in there. I think we're going to have an episode completely about that in a couple of weeks. So I won't go through the details of what all those sub stages are. But just to know, yeah, there's a deal pipeline, typically, that you would see in that particular stage. And that has its own deal stages in there, which different organizations have different stages. But we can go through those, as I say, in a future episode.

All right, let's skip those for the moment if we're going to talk about it anyway in a future episode. What's really interesting me is, uh, you told a little bit on how you can use it with HubSpot, but you didn't go into too much detail there. I heard that there is this new prospecting workspace in HubSpot to help you manage exactly what you just described. Yep. But I never really got to play with it and also never tested it. Can you maybe explain me how I can do what you just described using this new prospecting workspace in HubSpot?

Yeah, sure. So if you haven't found it yet, where you go to in HubSpot is the sales, and then there's the prospecting sub menu inside there. So it's a fairly new space in HubSpot. So you'll see this is evolving over time. I mean, even since I've been playing with it over the last couple of months, this has grown no end in here, but it's really the space that you can come to to manage that sort of lead status part. So the marketing qualified sales qualified part of that journey. So the idea is, what you have is what we call leads that are in here, not to confuse them with the status of a lead, but they call them leads within this prospecting workspace. And what happens basically is as a contact goes through its life, you have something that triggers and says, this is now a marketing qualified lead. So that could be some manual thing. So it could just be the fact they're filled in a certain form that makes them reach that qualification. Or again, within many tools like HubSpot, you've got something called lead scoring. And basically what that's doing is it's looking At the interest that a prospect is showing. And it's also looking at the demographics, for example, of the company that they work for. And if they meet a certain criteria, then again, that can pass them over a score threshold that automatically sets them to a marketing qualified lead.

So. Each lead gets his own score. And then based on that, you decide if it's worth your time to work on that lead or not.

Absolutely right. Yeah, exactly. I think that's probably again worth an episode in its own right to go through there. There's a lot of detail that we can cover in lead scoring. Yeah.

Yeah, we don't want to extend this episode too much. Yes.

Um, okay. So, yeah, carrying on in the prospecting space. So when they get to that marketing qualified stage, basically, then you want to start reaching out to them. So what will happen is there's an automation that happens behind the scenes in HubSpot that when it reaches a specific stage in the journey, so a marketing qualified lead, for example, it will then create a lead in this prospecting workspace. And I've got in the workspace here, my list of leads. So these are all the people that I'm working on, all the contacts that I'm working with at the moment. So now instead of me having to just have this great big contact list with everybody in now in one place, I can very clearly see all of the leads that I'm working on in here. And then in that space, I can label them so I can flag them as warm leads or cold leads, hot leads, whatever in there. So I know which of the ones that are showing most interest. And then if I click on any of those leads, what you can see on the screen. is the basic conversations and things that I've had. So you can see that lead stage, that status that I was talking about a minute ago, and that's represented on the screen there. And you can see very clearly where that person is within that sort of conversation. Have I just sent out an email to them? Are we actually having a proper conversation? Is it connected? Are they being nurtured potentially there? And then also I can use this space now to actually manage all of the interactions with that particular person. So again, I can send them an email directly through here. I can see all the communications that we've had directly through here. If I want to, I could put them into a sequence. So we talked about sequences in an episode a couple of weeks ago and send them a chain of emails one after another. So this is really useful to be able to just keep a high level overview on those sales type conversation or the pre sales conversations, basically. I

mean, on an organizational side, this is amazing, right? You have everything in one place. You can just click on the name of a lead and then you see everything. each stage that this lead is in, all types of conversations through different channels. It's crazy.

Yeah, it's certainly a massive improvement on what HubSpot had not even six months ago, basically, where, as I say, you just had that great big contact list. And it was a nightmare to try and go through those and monitor which of the contacts that I'm actually in communication with at the moment. And again, the beauty of this is that once you are assigned a Each of your sales people have their own view of this workspace, so I only see the leads that I'm working on, and I'm not confused by the leads that you're working on, for example, so you know, we can see our own priorities and our own work in there.

Everybody has their own workspace. Yeah, basically. That's great. And, um, you mentioned hot and cold leads, right? Yeah. So this also helps me with my code leads. I can also store them in here and flag them as code leads, right?

Yeah, exactly. So ones that you have maybe had a communication with or are a little bit more suspect in their nature or, for example, you know, I know you use LinkedIn quite a bit, so you could potentially reach out, connect with somebody on LinkedIn and then move the conversation to an email. Yeah. So in those cases, if you're having a one to one sales email conversation, you might mark them as cold to start off with until they actually express some level of interest. Or if you're reaching out to people that you've met at an event that you're following up with again, they might be cold leads in there. So you can set those up and yeah, then you would nurture them. So you would use the techniques that we talked about when we talked about sequences the other week and I talked about these sales nurture sequence, you know, would use that approach basically here. So you would tell a story that's relevant to that particular person.

Okay, I understand. So first you flag them inside the system and then you start the nurturing.

Yep, exactly.

And when you do the nurturing, do you use storytelling?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. As I mentioned a second ago, I think the storytelling is essential inside here. So I think every time you interact with a customer, you should be telling a story. It shouldn't be just a specific thing that you think, Oh, should I use storytelling? You know, storytelling should be used everywhere throughout your sales and marketing. If you're not talking about a problem that your customer's got, then they're not interested in what you're saying. So. Story is absolutely the point here. And I think again, I gave you a couple of weeks ago, a framework to go through for these cold emails that uses your problem as the sort of the hook initially, or rather uses their problem as the hook initially to get them interested and then talks about you as the guide, put some authority in there using a customer case study. So there was about five emails in that sequence that I'd recommend people go back and review that and use that process definitely here at this point. Thank you.

Okay, that's good to know. Definitely. So looking at these different life stages inside HubSpot, I can see on top that it's saying subscriber and lead, and you talk a lot about leads and marketing qualified lead, sales qualified lead. Yep. What is the subscriber doing in there?

Ah, yeah. That's a really good question actually. And again, it's something that comes up quite a lot, particularly with people that are using HubSpot because they add in this extra subscriber stage at the very beginning of the life cycle. And it's an interesting stage. You don't have to have it in there. Um, and a lot of things that you'll read on the internet don't have it in there. They just start with a lead for example. Okay. The difference, really, it's about knowing who is really just literally subscribing to your newsletter or something like that. So people that are not necessarily ready to buy in any sense, you know, they're not even somebody you would ever want to sell to. They might be students, for example, in there, but they're interested in the content that you're providing, maybe just purely for educational purposes. So a subscriber tends to be somebody who is literally just there to consume your information. That's

The window shoppers.

Yeah, that's probably a good way of looking at it. Yeah, yeah, no, it's probably true enough. So typically, you know, you might only have an email address for a subscriber, whereas a lead is just a little bit more qualified in there. So typically you have a little bit more information about them. So maybe first name, last name, you know what company they're working for something along those lines. So you can actually start to sort of identify There is a little bit more potential interest in there. So that's the difference. Yeah, good point. I think your subscribers are basically your window shoppers in there, and your leads are the ones that are actually coming into the door and potentially showing out some real interest or some level of interest in what you've got hanging up on the clothes rails.

Okay, I understand. This is important to differentiate here. All right. Thank you very much, Simon, for answering all my questions.

Good. Thank you very much. Yeah, well, enjoy that. Go away and see what you can come up with. And I think, yeah, as I mentioned earlier next week, I think we should have a look at the lead scoring part and we can get that set up for you and have some automation going on within that sales process.

Sounds very good to me. Great,

take care, have a good week then. See ya.

Thank you, you too.

Thanks for your thoughts, Daniel. As great as always to have you here. We did cover quite a lot of ground today there, but the most important part I think that you need to take away from this conversation is that life cycle stage and what those stages are. As a reminder, it all starts with a subscriber or lead, somebody that's filled in a form on your website or that you've picked up from an event. They become marketing qualified once we confirm that there's a good fit with our company and what we do and once they've shown some level of engagement. They move on to an SQL once they've expressed an interest in our offering. Then they move on to a deal or an opportunity once we mutually agree that there's an opportunity there to be had. And of course, the final stage that we didn't actually talk about in the conversation with Daniel is that they become a customer. You know, we all want those deals to close and we want more customers. So if you're using HubSpot, there's actually a lifecycle field in there that we mentioned earlier, and other CRMs have very similar sorts of fields. And it's a really good idea to fill that in so that you get an idea of how many people you're talking to, and which of those people are of the most value to you. So if you're having problems setting up or managing your sales pipeline, then as always you can hire an authentic engagement coach. Just go to wantauthentic. com to hire a coach that will show you how to increase the effectiveness of your sales efforts and give you an easier way to grow your business. So we're at the point of the show again, where I like to give you a set of specific steps that you can take away that will help you improve your sales and drive business through your sales pipeline. So for today's task, I want you to set up that sales funnel for your business. It's easy to do. You just need to go through your contacts. And for each of them you need to tag them with one of those stages that we discussed earlier. So, Subscriber, Lead, MQL, SQL, Opportunity or Customer. You can go through your spreadsheet and have an extra column in there that you add if you want. Or if you've got a CRM, it's much easier to just be able to go through and use a field. So all of your contacts add a value to. If you do that, I guarantee you that you'll have a much better idea of who you're actively working with, and it will give you a much better way of filtering through those lists of contacts and just keeping in touch with the right people at the right time. So next week, we're going to take a closer look at how to automate the process of finding MQLs, and I'll talk about lead scoring. But for now, that's it for today's episode of the Authentic Marketing Podcast. Thanks very much for listening, and don't forget to book the podcast. I know I say this every week, but as a small business supporter, the most valuable thing that you can do is to share this podcast with somebody else that you know who runs a small business of their own. You know, if you've found this useful, they're going to as well. Thanks for helping. See you next time.