37. Building sales pipeline with HubSpot. How to progress your deals?

Introduction

You’ve got no idea who to call next, which deals are at what stage, or most importantly how much work and revenue you should expect in the future. It’s completely overwhelming. But it doesn’t have to be.

Today we’re going to move toward the bottom of the sales funnel and focus on deals and how to manage the closing stages of the sales process. The most important thing about deals is that they not only help you to track where you are in each sales conversation, but they also enable you to see what revenue can expect over the coming months.

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

---

Join marketing experts Simon Harvey and Daniel Kleber on Authentic Marketing, the biweekly podcast that provides proven marketing tips to improve your marketing efforts and help your business grow.

Subscribe to our biweekly episodes dropping Friday on your favourite podcast platforms like Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other.

Book a consultation with our Authentic Engagement coaches to help you navigate through the jungle of the business world: demodia.com/sales-marketing-review

Demodia Instagram: instagram.com/demodia_digital

Demodia LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/demodia

Episode Transcript

When you already have 20 other things to do each day, keeping track of a pipeline full of opportunities is impossible. You've got no idea who to call next, which deals are at what stage, or most importantly, how much work and revenue you should expect in the future. Spreadsheets can help you when your business is small, but they're not really a solution as you start to scale. It's completely overwhelming, but it doesn't have to be. There is an established way that companies keep track of their prospects and sales forecasts and it's called a deal pipeline. In today's episode, I look at how to set up your own pipeline and how to track the progress of your deals. So let's get started. Hi there, I'm your host Simon Harvey and welcome to the Authentic Marketing Podcast in association with Demodia, where we give you actionable advice that will help you to create marketing that works. It's been a busy couple of weeks here since we last spoke. I was lucky enough to get out and present at the Start Summit here last week. So there were some 6, 000 great minds, I think, that came together sharing business ideas, talking about founding startups of things. I thank everybody that came up to the presentation and everybody I had a chance to talk with. And I welcome all of you that are tuning into the podcast for the first time today. Thanks for joining us. More generally, it seems like spring's finally with us, you know, the weather's slowly warming up and looking around at recent figures for inflation and economic trends, it does seem like the economy might be starting to warm up too. That's really great news for small businesses like ours, but it does bring about its own challenges. You know, when times are slow, we all naturally tighten our belts, make sure that we're managing our expenditure as much as we can. But as things start to pick up again, it's equally important that we loosen that belt too. The trouble is, particularly for small businesses that have never been through this, You need to find the right timing, leave things too late and your competition's going to get a head start. So they're going to start marketing first, putting more investment into sales and they'll outmaneuver you. Leave things too soon and you can end up in financial struggles again, cashflow problems, those sorts of things. Particularly As a startup, you know, talking with so many of you out there, it's worrying. You've not got the experience of navigating through these phases before. And I know from my own experience and conversations that many of you also don't have the processes in place to help to guide you. So that's what I wanted to look at today. In the last couple of episodes, we looked at managing prospects and scoring leads. So today we're going to move towards the bottom of that sales funnel, and I want to focus on deals and how to manage the closing stages of that sales process. The most important thing about deals managing those deals is it not only helps you to track where you are in each of these sales conversations, you know, who you're talking to, which people are part of that deal or opportunity team. But as a business leader, tracking deals enables you to see what revenue you can expect and what you can expect coming into the bank over the next few months. And that's key to be able to create a stable business. So, you know, with that, let's go over and have a chat with Daniel. Let's see what he's been up to this week. And we'll talk more about how to set up and how to manage deals within your company. Hi there, Daniel. Good to have you back again. How's your week been?

Hello. Hello. My week. Uh, it was great.

Yeah. And you've been up too much this week.

Yeah, you know me. I do a lot of sports. I went climbing one day and then I started running. Oh,

really?

Yes. Oh,

you're gonna be catching up with me soon then, are you?

Hopefully.

How much you been out so far? What have you got up to?

Uh, this week I managed to go out two times, and each time was for 40 minutes, and I did 5. 5 kilometers. I know it's not that good for 40 minutes, but for those 5. 5 kilometers, I also did 130 altitude meters.

Yeah, that's pretty good if you can do that sort of elevation over that period, yeah. You'll be up to your half marathon before you know it.

No, I don't think so. You can come round with

me in May time when I'm doing my next one, yeah.

Crazy. I think I'll pass on that one. But, it's really nice, I mean, it gives me a good fresh feeling every day and, uh, yeah. Quite like it.

That's good. So yeah, this week we've been talking about, um, we've been continuing our conversation, I guess, about the sales pipelines and what happens at the end of that sales process. So we've talked initially about how do we do some prospecting. So that was a couple of weeks ago. We talked about the prospecting stage. We talked last week about lead qualification and lead scoring. Yes. And so this week we're focusing much more now on the end of that sales process, really, where the sales people start to get involved. So we're really talking about, I suppose, sales leads in that sales qualification process and the sales process itself. So how's that working for you at the moment?

Yeah, last week, I promised that I will start on creating my own lead scoring system. Well, that is in work. Good to hear. At least I'm doing something there, but it's not finalized yet. But I already have a couple of questions in mind that popped up when I started working on this. Yeah. So, you know, last week we talked about the lead scoring and how you can put a certain Score on each lead. Yep, indeed. And now I'm curious to see what you can do with leads that actually get a high score. Uh huh. And you know, you have these leads, you know that they would fit very well. They have big potential. But How can I take those leads and turn them into real customers now?

Well, so if you've got your leads that you've come through your pipeline, now you've got your lead score set up and you've got your automation that we talked about set up so that they're marked as marketing qualified when they've met your basic criteria, what you now need to do is you now have some manual processes, you know, you can't automate all this from this point. So basically you want to have what you call a lead queue. And so a lead queue is just a list of all these marketing qualified leads that come in. You know, it can just be a contact list in HubSpot. And it's a list of all these marketing qualified leads. And you can look at the lead score in there. And basically you just go through them from the top to the bottom and you say, which of these contacts are actually worth me reaching out to. So some of those you might look at straight away and say, you know, they're useless. They're not much interest to me. And you might mark them as unqualified. So you might change the lead status to unqualified in there. So. You might look at them and say, actually, this is a student. This is somebody from a university or something that's registered. Um, I can't sell to them. So you would manually mark them as unqualified for those ones that are more interesting, that look like they're the right company and look like they're a fit. Now's the point you've actually got to start your sales process. So basically you need to reach out to them and you need to either phone them. and see if they're interested in it, or you need to reach out to them through an email. So you can reach out via a direct email or again, a few weeks ago when we were talking about emails, we talked about sequences and this is a perfect opportunity for a sequence. So you might have a two or three email sequence that says, you know, thanks very much. I see you've been interacting with us or shown an interest in what we're doing. How can I help you? You know, here's the problem that we're solving. How can I help you to solve that problem? So you're going to initiate a conversation. That's the key thing in there. So does that make sense? Yes. Until now, it makes sense. Good. You're going to initiate a conversation and then we come back to the pipeline. Now you've started the conversation and somebody's reacted to you again. If they come back to you and say, I'm not interested, you can just mark them as unqualified. So change that lead life cycle to unqualified. If they come back on the other hand and say, yes, I'm interested. Tell me more. That's is basically your gating criteria for becoming a sales qualified lead. So at the point that they say, yes, tell me more. I'm interested. They are now a sales qualified lead. So you need to go back into your HubSpot system and your contact and you change that lead life cycle to sales qualified lead.

Okay. I understand. So. For this process, you have to do a lot manually, which surprises me actually. But I understand why. And you said that you could create a sequence of emails or just write a personal email each time.

Yes, exactly.

I think a pretty important question here is what is your experience with that? Did you have better results when you sent a email sequence for each qualified lead at that stage? Or did you have, uh, better results when you wrote a personal email each time?

Well, I think the beauty of sequences, particularly when it comes to HubSpot sequences, is that you can personalize them. So I would say there is no difference, really. The difference is not so much in the quality. It's more in the amount of work that it takes. If you use a sequence. You can create three personalized emails to that individual, and you can do it there and then. So you can spend 15 minutes or so just working on one thing and know that over the next two weeks, all the emails that you need to send have been sent out or will be sent for you. Whereas If you do it just through normal emails, you have to put a task in your task book to say, okay, get back in touch with this person today and send the next email. And then another week later, send the next email. So it's just continual interrupts in your weekly cycle. If you use individual emails,

Okay. So you would recommend to at least automate using a sequence?

Yes, exactly. I'd recommend that's definitely a way that you can save yourself time there. Yeah.

Okay. That makes sense. And how do you actually use HubSpot to work with your sales leads?

Yeah. Okay. So the sales leads we'll say are those people that are sales qualified now. And typically what you do within HubSpot, when somebody reaches that sales qualified level, when they've said, yes, I'm interested, tell me more. Within HubSpot, we've got a thing called a deal and a pipeline. So a deal is basically, it's an opportunity that you're working with now. So a deal connects you to one or a couple of contacts in your database that are working for the same company that are all part of that particular sale. And in a deal, you can then also link a product or a service that you're selling to them. So basically, you would say, Daniel, you're interested. We've had a conversation. You and I are interested in talking about our storytelling service, for example, and I would tell you that's going to cost you. So many thousand francs or dollars to build a story for your business and in the deal, you would then go into there and you would say, yeah, I've had a conversation with Simon. Simon's interested in here. It's an amount of this. If I sell him this storytelling consulting job, it's going to cost them this exact amount. And I can say over this period of time, you know, I expect this conversation to go on for, you know, maybe six weeks so I can put a deal close date in there of six weeks from now. And then you can use those deals and the deals go into what we call a pipeline. And the pipeline is a set of different stages. So you can then monitor the conversation. So at different points in time, you can see, okay, well, you know, this conversation with Simon has just started. We're just learning about things. We're just talking about what this service or product is about. And then at some future point in time, you can see, okay, yeah, he's agreed that we're interested in that. He wants me to send a pricing information or he's happy with the pricing. He wants to send me a contract. So you literally have a set of steps or a set of stages in there, and it's very quick and easy for you to be able to come in and say, okay, this is where all my deals are at this point in that pipeline. You know what stage they're at.

Okay. So when you take those sales qualified leads and put them into the deal, then you can also put a price tag on that deal, like how much you can expect to get from it.

Yes, exactly. You can track all of those sorts of things through there so you can track the price often, particularly when you're selling to a business as opposed to an individual. You might have two or three or four people that are involved in that sales process as well. So you might have the finance person, you might have a procurement person, you might have somebody from the legal department and then you have Maybe an end user or a project manager or somebody. So you might have three or four different people that are involved in that. So the deal, you can put all of the people that are working on that particular sales opportunity together and tag them all in that one place.

And that is great. So everybody knows the current stage of each deal. Yeah, exactly. With it.

Yeah.

Okay. So, and if you have like. Let's say 10 deals in your deal pipeline and all of them already have a price tag on it, then you can actually calculate how much revenue you're going to get for each month, right?

Yeah, exactly. So. I talked about these deal stages a minute ago. So for each stage in the pipeline, you can say this is the potential that this deal or the probability that this deal will close. So maybe at the very beginning of the pipeline, you might say this deal has a 10 percent chance of actually becoming a customer. Halfway through the pipeline, it might have a 50 percent chance of becoming a customer. When you've sent them a contract, maybe there's a 90 percent chance that they will become a customer. And then what HubSpot will do is for each of those stages in the pipeline, it will give you a predicted revenue. So if you've said that this project is worth 10, 000, it will say, okay, if it's in the middle of the pipeline, actually your projected revenue potential is only 5, 000 because it's got a 50 percent chance of closing a 10, 000 deal. Mm hmm. If it's in that contract stage, it will say you've got 9, 000. So what you can do in there is not only see the total value of all of these deals that you've got in your pipeline, but you can actually see what the likely revenue is that you will get back out of all these deals in your pipeline. And that's really important overall, from a planning perspective.

Okay, so HubSpot also takes the probability for each deal and also calculates this. To give you a real sum that you can expect.

Yeah, exactly. It gives you the likely amount of revenue that you would get out of this pipeline. Yeah, precisely.

That's pretty smart, actually. So, you talked about the stages, right? In the pipeline. Can you tell me concretely which stages I should have in the pipeline?

Concrete's a bit difficult. I would say this is going to vary based on company, you know, some of the smaller companies and companies that sell simpler products, you might only have three or four stages in a pipeline. Big companies that sell much more complex sets of products or services. I've known companies to have nine or 10 or even more stages in a pipeline, but I would say that's the exception. To give you an example, I would say probably about five, maybe six stages is relevant to most, certainly B2B type companies. So a first stage that I would typically create would be that sort of initial contact stage. So when you've got this person as an SQL, you know, they've expressed an interest in talking with you. You put them in this initial contact stage and you say, yes, Let's have a proper conversation now. So that's your sort of holding stage. Then you go in and you have a what we call typically a discovery call with them. So the discovery call is that first telephone call where you sit down together with the team of people on their customer side and you ask them what the problem is that they've got. So actually going back to our talking points for the story, that's really good. You can focus on the problem, you know, and also listen here because that can help you to tune your problem. Yeah, you're asking them about the problem that they've got, they're telling you about that problem, and then you're going to come back to them and you're going to make a decision and say, Yes, potentially, we've got something that can help you to solve that problem. That's the next sort of gate point is can you offer them a solution? You know, it might be that that company is too small or that they've got a problem that you can't help solve. So in which case you would unqualify them again. But if you think you can help them, then you move to the next stage. So typically what I would do then is I would have what I would put a recommendation stage. So now you understand their problem and you think you've got a way of solving that, you make a recommendation to them and you say, this is how I would suggest that we solve that problem. And then there's typically some backwards and forwards, you know, yes, we like this, or we don't like this, or you've understood the problem wrongly. So there's a bit of backwards and forwards in there. And eventually you get to a point where. You've got an agreed solution. So that would be the next gate is you've got a solution agreed. So that would be step four, sort of solution agreed or solution proposed, something like that. All

right.

So from there, once you've got that, now you've got an agreed solution, you can start as a salesperson to put a proper price on that. So you can say, we need to have these products and these services to deliver those. So you can set up a price in there and then basically send them through the price process. And the contract effectively for it. So you might have then again, some people might have a pricing step in the middle here where we have pricing agreed or something can then contract sent, or some people might just jump straight to a sort of a contract sent stage in there. And then the last stages in your pipeline, typically you have two stages that are the same in every single pipeline. You will have a closed one state. So if at the end you get your contract signed, perfect, you move them into this closed one state. If at some point in this whole process, something goes wrong, they decide they're not interested, you're not interested in them, they can't afford it, they don't agree with your T's and C's, whatever it happens to be, then you'd have this closed lost state there. And the closed lost state is basically saying, yeah, Thanks very much. This is the wrong time for the conversation. So again, you can put a reason in there like bad timing, but you put them into that closed loss state to flag the fact that this deal is no longer actively being worked on. So they're the steps that I would put into there.

So you mentioned now what six steps?

Yep.

Okay. All right. I get it. It makes actually sense in the order that you put this. So first, there are sales qualified leads and you reach out to them. That's the first stage. Yeah. When they show interest, they get into the next stage where you have the initial call with them.

Yeah, this discovery call. Yeah, the

discovery call. And then when you have the feeling that it fits, that you could offer them a solution, then you put them into the next stage, which is the recommendation stage. Yeah. And then you give them the recommendation. And if they like it, then you put them into the solution proposed stage. Yep. Okay. And then from there. If you see that they are showing interest, you can create a contract and send it to them. That's the next one. The contract sent. And after they get the contact, they either agree or disagree. And then you have to close the deal in both situations. And if it's a positive outcome, you put them into the closed one. And if it's negative, then you put them into the closed lost.

Yeah,

exactly that. All right. Actually, it's pretty simple.

Yeah, it's not too complicated as I say that process might vary or will vary depending on the company. But that exact one that you went through there is a good example for most things. The other thing is, and the other reason that you track the lost stuff as well, is actually it can be good to look back over deals that you lost and say, well, why did we lose these deals? Maybe our pricing was wrong or maybe, They didn't understand what we did. So maybe we can modify some of our marketing or our sales message at some point and see if we can get more customers, or maybe they were just a bad fit in the first place. So we want to modify our lead scoring criteria to exclude more people. Yeah. So it's very important to track the lost ones as much as it is the one ones.

To reflect on those, to see if it's something that we can improve. Yep. So we also really improve that. All right. Good. Yes. Is there anything else that deals can do for me?

Uh, I think that's probably the main two things that you're going to be using deals for number one is tracking the process. So that's what we just talked about a minute ago. And then the other one is that revenue tracking. So they're the two primary things that. Um, you're going to get out of deals and of course you can build reports around those in HubSpot as well. There's all sorts of dashboards and funnel reports and things that you can use to track the revenue through all the deals through that process, which is always good to have from a management reporting perspective.

Okay, then I guess we covered everything about the deals.

Yeah, I think so.

All right. Thank you very much, Simon, for giving me that interesting input. And, uh, yeah, I first have to finalize my lead scoring system and then I can move on to the deal stuff, but I guess it will take a while.

Yeah, you get there slowly. Exactly. We're starting to get a little bit more structured in advance now, so, but, uh, good to see in any case. Well, have a good week and, uh, yeah, catch up with you again next week.

Thank you very much. And yourself.

Thanks again for your time, Daniel. Some great questions as always. And I know that you've come away from that with a little more structure, hopefully in the way that you're, you're managing your deals. So if you're having problems setting up and managing your sales pipeline, then 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 in the show again, where I like to give you a set of specific steps, things that you can take away to improve your sales and drive business through your pipeline. Today, we've been talking all about deals. So what I want you to do is to head to your CRM or your HubSpot instance, and we're going to set up our own deal flow today. So the first thing that I want you to do, is to consider what the most important stages or the gates are that each of your prospects needs to pass through on their sales journey. So we talked a bit about that with Daniel earlier on. Think about these as the actions that your sales teams need to take in order to progress that sale. If you look online, there's loads of examples of all of these things. Uh, so I definitely urge you to do that. One word of warning though, you'll find some of these stages have 12 or maybe even 15 steps in them. If you're a small business or if your sales process is simple, I really do urge you not to overcomplicate that though. If I look at our business, I'd say that our sales process is what, five stages, I think something like that. We have a discovery call at the beginning where we meet up with customers initially and talk about the sorts of things that they want and introduce our company. We have a solution proposal section in there where we get back together with that customer and we come back to them and recommend or propose our solution to their specific problem, you know, whether that be services or product. Once that's taken place, basically then we send out a contract or we send them a quote, whichever way. So we've got a sort of a quote sent stage. And then finally we've got two closed stages here, a closed one and a closed lost stage. So if the deal closes, we mark it as that, or if at any point in time it gets lost and doesn't go any further, we move it into that closed lost stage. So simple as that, really keep it easy and keep it to something that you'll use. It's better to have something there. that's partially or mostly reflects your sales process but is something that you're going to use on a regular basis rather than having this great long process where people add leads in or deals in at the very beginning and then they skip six or seven steps as they move it through there because those things move so quickly or they don't reflect the reality of your actual sales processes. Having done that, then for each of those stages, I want you to think about how likely it is that a deal in the stage will actually make it all the way to the closed one stage. For example, you might already know from experience that maybe only one in five of your discovery calls is going to end in a one deal. So the likelihood of that is 20%. Once they get to the solution proposed stage, I might know that approximately 50 percent of my deals succeed. And when they get to the contract sent stage, then that's much more likely 80%. What you can do within your CRM or specifically within HubSpot, you can add this information into your deal pipeline and then The tool will use that to actually provide you with a forecast of your upcoming revenue. And that really is incredibly valuable information to us as business leaders. You know, that's what we can use to not only see the money that's going to be coming in the bank in the next 30 days, but what's likely to be coming in the bank much more realistically over the course of the next 3, 6 or even 12 months there, depending on your pipeline. So anyway, That's all for today's episode of the authentic marketing podcast. Thanks once again for joining us. And if you haven't already, don't forget to bookmark the podcast, being a small business advocate yourself. The most valuable thing that you can do for me is to share this podcast. If you know somebody else that's running their own business and you've found this useful, then they're going to as well. So thank you very much for listening and I'll see you next time.