Step #1: Organize Your Leads
Using HubSpot default properties to your advantage
The CRM comes with default contact properties that give you a head start in setting up your CRM.
Lifecycle Stage vs. Lead Status: Lifecycle Stage indicates the level of engagement a contact has with your business. Ask yourself, is this contact a lead, opportunity, or a customer? Lead Status is customizable, and should be used by your sales team to track your progress in nurturing prospects or leads.
Still need help importing your contacts? Check out the "Organize & Manage Contacts in CRM" learning track for more help getting started on importing your contacts.
Resource: How to Use Lifecycle Stage (Article)
Using Lifecycle Stage & Lead Status
Key Takeaway: Tag all of your contacts with a Lifecycle Stage so you can easily find your leads.
Step #2 Create Views for Your Leads
Create views to organize your contacts
Once you have your contact data populated in your account, you’ll need a way to find what you’re looking for. To help narrow your search and prioritize your outreach, filter your contacts and create "views."
Last Contacted and Last Activity Date: these properties update automatically when you log an engagement or activity to a contact, which makes it easy to filter your database for customers that you haven’t followed up with in a while.
Resource: Create Views to Organize Contacts (Article)
Resource: Organize + Segment Contacts (Video)
Ready to take filtering a step further? Check out this blog post on three CRM views every Sales team should use.
Prioritize Leads with Views
Key Takeaway: Setup 2 or 3 views that help you to organize your leads using Lifecycle Stage and Lead Status.
Step #3: Build your Deal Pipeline
A deal pipeline helps your forecast revenue for your business.
Every CRM comes equipped with a deal pipeline that will enable you to track revenue opportunities for your business.
Setting up Deal Stages: Deal stages represent the distinct phases of your businesses sales cycle (e.g., discovery calls, in-person demos, proposals, sending product samples, etc). As you move from left to right in the deal pipeline, the likelihood of closing deal at any one of those deal stages increases. We refer to this a win probability at each deal stage.
Need help designing your deal stages? Check out this blog post.
How to set up your deal pipeline
Key Takeaway: Make your deal stages reflect your buyer's journey rather than your sales teams actions.
Applied Learning: Can you create a deal pipeline that reflects your business' sales cycle?
Navigate to the Deals section in HubSpot and add choose "Actions>Edit Deal Stages" in the top right. From here you can edit the deal stages on the win probability at each stage.
Step #4: Create Qualified Opportunities
Once you've qualified a lead, it's time to create a deal
The CRM allows you to create deals directly from the contact record. After qualifying a lead, now you're ready to open a deal so that you can track the revenue opportunity for your business. A resulting deal forecast will be reflected in your Dashboard.
How to Create and Manage Deals: you can create a deal from the contact record or by going into the deals section in HubSpot. When creating a deal, you'll see options to add information for deal amount, close date, and HubSpot owner.
Once your deal is created you can move the deal through the pipeline as your opportunities move through the buyer's journey.
How to Create a Deal
Key Takeaway: Only create deals for qualified opportunities and always associate a contact or company to the deal.
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