Welcome to the Hubspot Guide
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Please do not see this lengthy document as something to be read front-to-back.
Guiding Principles
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Keep It Simple. Keep It Clean.
Lean on automation and simple, single-variable fields to reduce how much we’re expected to manually enter. Before creating a field, investigate if the contents of the field can be extracted from information that’s documented in other fields.
Single Variables
Fields are meant to contain single variables are are meant to convey one piece of information. The more we adhere to this, the more elegant things we can do by combining fields.
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Deals are records that roll up all communications with attached Contacts and Companies specific to the transitory engagement of a contract. Deals have start and end dates and contain fields that apply to all associated Contacts and Companies but may not be permanent or intrinsic traits.
Pipelines
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Under construction: We have too many pipelines doing too many things with too many stages. Need to simplify before we can build. |
Overarching principles:
While pipelines are displayed in a Kanban-style, they’re not Kanban boards. In an isolated environment, this is fine. As we grow, it requires that we violate a key principle…
CRMs sing when each field is dedicated to a single variable. “Deal Stage” as a variable works best when it exclusively points to the progress of a lead. Using pipelines for post-sales activity will…
Overwrite a Contact & Company’s Lifecycle Stage field, which is a top-5 field and super important for post-sale nurturing and re-engagement of churned customers.
Impact pipeline and forecasting, as many default Hubspot reports look at how much revenue is in the funnel. To retain this functionality, we’d have to do a lot of additional workflows and documentation that could get messy as we grow.
Deal Stages
Proactive Inbound / Qualified to Buy (10%)
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Deal Stages
Proactive Inbound / Qualified to Buy (10%)
This is the start of our funnel and is for people that know what our software does, knows generally what it costs, and are still interested in talking about how ShelterBuddy or Adopets works in their specific environment.environment.
Qualified / Discovery Call ✅
This person has spoken with sales on a discovery call, had an in-depth written discussion, or contacted us proactively through a referral or through having used us before.
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they know our pricing, they have a follow up scheduled with us to review their proposal, and we think it’s a good idea to continue engaging them. At this point they should still be interested in talking with us after knowing our price, features, and limitations.
Presentation Scheduled (50%)
This person has been through one conversation and is ready for a second. By this stage we’d like to see more stakeholders added, details shared about their desired launch date, what they’re looking for in shelter management software, and why their current situation is lacking.
This follow up conversation can be more technical and applied to their specific environment.
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Gaining Approval (60%)
You’ve had your second call or your second round of deeper data collection, and everyone seems ready to go.
By this point the person should have a specific price in hand, technical and legal personnel involved to make sure the integration works with their current policies and protocols, and we should have a solid relationship with the stakeholder to where we’re not in the dark and sending “just checking in” emails.
The customer has everything they need to know how we’ll work in their environment, and it’s just about getting everyone on the same page in agreement to start.
Contract Sent (90%)
The contract is sent and in their hands! We’re fully expecting this one to come back and launch, but we just hold it here to account for unfortunate interventions.
Note that this stage is a formality on the way to close. These deals should be as good as closed. Just sending someone a contract without a full expectation of it being signed does not qualify a Deal for this Stage.
Closed Won
The contract is in and they’re customers! Be sure to enter a Closed Reason at this stage.
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The Help Desk is the central hub where we receive incoming customer concerns via Forms and email (support@shelterbuddy.com and support@adopets.org/.com). Help Desk is where we field incoming tickets and track tickets that we are actively solving as support coordinators. Help Desk is not meant to be a repository of existing & known customer issues.
Pipelines
Pipelines are where known tickets are allocated for long-term service. Currently, there are 3 Pipelines:
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Name the deal -
<Company Name> - <Product (Adopets or ShelterBuddy)> - <Time Period>.
“Animal Welfare League of Arlington - ShelterBuddy - 2023”Add Amount - We should have enough information to ballpark an amount. We can narrow it down later. If you need a placeholder, put our average contract value in this space or multiply their adoptions by our expected income per adoption.
Add the Currency, which is just their locality
Add all associated Contacts to the Deal record.
Add an Associated Contact Engage Date - This is a 🔑 key field and can only be done manually. This is the date that the initial contact reached out to us. For new Deals that’s simple: it’s the create date of the Contact. But for referrals or recurring business it’s the date that the person reached out and said “hey, we’d like to extend a year or add a feature,” and that requires human touch.
Estimate the Close Date (Hubspot default is the final day of the current month, but update this manually based on what you’ve learned about the deal or based on our average sales cycle length. This is important for follow up).
If call recording has finished processing, add a Google Drive link to Discovery Call Recording or attach the recording as an attachment.
Enter the Products Subscriptions field for what product or feature set the person is evaluating.
NOTE: Please maintain separate Deals for Adopets and ShelterBuddy opportunities. Why? Adopets recognizes variable revenue in hindsight, SB forecasts predictable revenue. Each has a different customer success cadence.
Engaging Opportunities
Under construction - This will eventually be a ‘structured routines’ guide on how to manage many Deals with a sense of personalization.
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