Discover how to build your sales process in HubSpot.
Flat-pack furniture. That software update. The weekly food shop. Whether you’re building something, installing it, or wandering down the supermarket aisle, we all love a list of instructions.
To help you get your sales process into HubSpot quickly and correctly, I’ve jotted down this walkthrough. It’s easy to follow and you can get in touch any time if anything isn’t clear.
I’ve also added some pointers for what you should think about before you start building because in my experience, this is something many people overlook.
Work through the article section by section or use the Contents to jump ahead.
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Contents
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The path to revenue starts with process
You need to have a sales process in place before you can build it in HubSpot.
This might sound silly, but you’d be surprised by how many people think they can build a process in HubSpot from scratch without actually having defined it beforehand, got the team’s buy-in, ironed out the kinks… You get the idea.
Making it up as you go along is only going to mean you have to go back and rebuild it later when you’ve hit the inevitable snags and refined the process in line with how it actually runs.
Think of your sales process as a map or pathway that leads to revenue rather than a series of random hoops your team has to work through. Speaking of which…
How to map your sales process
Mapping your sales process is much easier than it might sound.
Tools like draw.io or Lucidchart allow you to collaboratively map out the process. Get the team together and whiteboard it or use Post-it notes. This will help you build buy-in from the get-go, but it will also help you to map a process that genuinely works for your business.
If you take the time to map your sales process in the way I’ve suggested below, you’ll find it very easy to build in HubSpot.
A simplistic version might look like this:
Go deeper
With your top-level process mapped out, it’s time to go deeper.
This will help you and your team to understand what’s involved at each stage.
For each stage of the process, aim to add information such as:
Deal stage |
E.g. Discovery call booked |
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Notes/description |
E.g. an initial meeting has been booked with the prospect |
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Buyer/prospect actions |
E.g. the prospect has accepted the meeting, invited all relevant stakeholders, and submitted the required questionnaire |
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Seller actions |
E.g. the seller books in the meeting, submits a request for a deck to design, and send the questionnaire |
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Exit criteria |
E.g. the meeting has been conducted and relevant post meeting info added to the CRM |
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Automation |
E.g. email to the prospect setting expectations, alert to design to create the deck |
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Mandatory fields |
E.g. names/job titles of the attendees, date, time |
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Alignment with other processes/departments |
E.g. design team deck creation process |
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Resources required |
E.g. email templates |
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Reporting required |
E.g. ratio of prospects to first meetings, success rate of first meetings |
Finding the friction
In any process, there’s always friction!
This is exactly why you can’t build an untested process straight into HubSpot (or any platform, for that matter).
Friction can appear anywhere. It’ll slow the process down. Sometimes, it’ll halt the process altogether — not what you want when that process is your revenue-generating machine.
If you’re lucky, you’ll know where it is. Where possible, highlight this in your process map. This will provide a great opportunity to think with your team about how you can remove it.
When you build out the process in HubSpot, you (or your HubSpot solutions partner) can also look at enhanced reporting, alerts, automation, and better data flow to further mitigate against it and get ahead of problematic deals before they actually become a problem.
Before you build, beware of…
…tracking deals too early
It’s easy to create a deal as soon as a prospect gets in touch, but is that an actual sign that money is on the horizon?
Build your pipeline to help your team avoid creating meaningless deals that will never close. In HubSpot you can add mandatory properties when a deal is created and use them to ensure the prospect fits your ideal customer profile (ICP).
…graveyard stages
Most sales pipelines have at least one of these. They have names like “Pushed out” or “Waiting” and are full of deals no one’s looked at for six months. Avoiding these stages when building encourages your team to work the deals through the process or qualify them out.
…over-reliance on automation
When you first start looking at putting the process in HubSpot, you’re going to be wowed by the possibilities for automating your sales process. But just because you can, doesn’t mean you should!
Automation definitely has its uses and you’ll want to use it strategically across the sales process, but remember that a big part of sales — especially B2B — about building trust. It’s relationship-building. So make sure not to automate your people out of the process.
…text properties
A “fill in the blank'' property may seem like a good idea, and great for names or notes, but free text is hard to report on and can lead to messy data and missed opportunities.
Consider “Lost reason” (this being the datapoint you want your team to add so you know why a deal is lost). Sales teams will tell you that every lost deal is different, but realistically deals are lost for a select number of (say 5-8) reasons.
Freetext has its time and place, but generally speaking, a drop-down property will allow you to report more effectively and see more trends than if the data was inconsistent freetext.
How to build your sales process in HubSpot
1. Define your pipeline stages
Each stage in the process should be:
Buyer-centric: a sales process is a journey that you embark on with your prospects. When naming your stages, it is good practice to consider the milestones you’ll encounter together on the way. Give them names that make sense to the prospect. No prospect really wants a demo but most would like a product evaluation.
Factual: is there a number or a “yes or no” answer to the key data points at this stage?
Inspectable: can the data be verified in the CRM? Can someone look at a deal in the pipeline and see, at a glance, that it should be there?
Required: is it actually part of the process? What’s needed to move on from this stage? Do you need a document from the prospect, or a particular piece of information before you can continue? HubSpot allows you to add mandatory properties that pop up when a deal is moved, ensuring you have the data you need at every point along the journey.
2. Build new properties, update the sidebar and deal cards
Going through the process-mapping exercise is likely to expose areas where data is missing or where the views your team is seeing aren’t quite right.
When this happens, you’ll want to make some changes to your CRM. Build new properties to collect the data you need and change the data points that appear on the deal cards in the system.
3. Build the deal pipeline
Now you have all your stages mapped out, you can build your pipeline in HubSpot. Take care to add all the mandatory properties and automation you discovered in the mapping exercise.
4. Reporting and analytics
HubSpot’s report builder and analytics module will allow you to build out the dashboards you need to see what is happening in your process. This is great for enabling you to make tweaks where needed and see lead indicators of problems down the road.
You can also start to see data like deal push rate reports and close likelihood.
Want to know more?
Did you know HubSpot will tell you how long it takes for your average deal to close? Consider using this data to automate the setting of the close date, for example.
Or how about that you can create properties against deals that use emojis and add them to the deal cards. I like to create ‘traffic light’ properties and automate them based on whether a deal is past its close date or missing data. This adds a nice visual element to the deal board.
There’s so much more you can do when building your sales process in HubSpot to bring out the best in your team and your results. I hope this article helps you to get started with yours.
If you’d like to learn more about building your sales process in HubSpot (or the many other ways you can use HubSpot to improve sales performance and sell more), just get in touch. I’d be happy to help you get the most out of the platform and unlock HubSpot’s potential.
