More than half of sales people spend up to 10 hours a week on a CRM platform. That makes sense, because CRMs can boost sales by 29%. That’s quite a bit of revenue gained just by leveraging technology!
Considering how much a CRM can contribute to the revenue your sales team brings in, setting it up to run efficiently should be a high priority. You want to make sure you have the right tools and workflows in place to support an effective sales process.
We’re pretty fond of HubSpot as a sales tool, and we find that a lot of sales teams have questions about setting up HubSpot to manage their sales process, save time and increase their effectiveness in closing revenue.
If that’s you, we’re going to walk through how to build a sales pipeline in Hubspot that will not only keep you organized, but add in some efficiencies that will give your team more time to focus on what they do best—closing those deals.
👉 Download Your HubSpot Pipeline Cheat Sheet
Deals - This is how HubSpot tracks potential revenue. Multiple contacts can be associated with a deal as well as one company.
Pipeline - Pipelines track the progress of a deal through the sales process, from creation to close. You can have multiple pipelines in your portal.
Stages - Stages are unique parts of your sales process within your pipeline. You may have a stage for “Demo Requested” or “Proposal Sent” or whatever makes the most sense for your team. You can add and subtract stages and they can all be customized for your organization’s needs.
Reporting on sales performance is essential because you need to show how much revenue the team is bringing in to identify opportunities to improve. Not only that, accurate reporting allows you to see potential dips in sales before they happen, so you can address and mitigate them before you miss out on revenue.
As you write out your reporting must-haves, think about a couple of things:
Your HubSpot sales pipeline will be based on the buyer’s journey you’ve mapped out for your prospects. Each stage in the pipeline will be a step toward sales that are closed, won or lost. This roadmap will help you better track, understand and qualify new leads as well as remove roadblocks from their journey.
First, you need to outline your sales process. This will serve as a guide when you build your pipeline. There are a few key considerations when deciding the steps in your process:
Now that you’ve outlined your sales process and reporting needs, you can start to work on your deal stages. We typically recommend having no more than eight or nine stages (including closed, won and lost). Any more than this and your pipeline becomes difficult to manage and ineffective.
Sometimes this isn’t so cut and dry. If you’re having trouble narrowing down your stages, it might be a sign you need multiple pipelines. An alternative to multiple pipelines is using custom properties to define specific sales activities in different stages. This can help you narrow the scope of each stage so it’s addressing a specific action or probability.
As you build your deal stages, you’ll also need to define the key indicators in your sales cycle that move a lead into the next stage. These should be obvious metrics that are easy to track and look at leads objectively.
At each stage in the sales process, there’s likely specific information your sales rep will need from qualified leads to move the deal forward. Whether this is through follow-up meetings or automated requests, you want to make sure your pipeline is set up with tools that will help you capture this information.
HubSpot offers a few ways to ensure the information you need is being consistently gathered by your sales people.
Automation is the secret to easy, effective sales pipeline management and one of the reasons HubSpot is so attractive to teams. Automating as much of the process as possible frees up your time to find and close more deals, increase your win probability and create more consistency in your database.
Hubspot has some pretty extensive capabilities when it comes to automation, which makes it highly customizable to your business. Some common HubSpot automations include:
When you thoughtfully build a sales pipeline in HubSpot, you can save your team a lot of time and increase your sales effectiveness which means MORE REVENUE *cue the church bells*. We know how difficult it can be to get people into your pipeline and move them through the sales funnel, so we’re here to help. If you have any questions about building a pipeline in HubSpot or just want to chat about ways to make it more efficient, give us a call! We’re a HubSpot Onboarding Accredited Partner and we love helping businesses build their HubSpot portals.
And if you didn't grab it already, download our HubSpot Pipeline Cheat Sheet to make sure you get all the critical components in place.