Welcome to the Hubspot Guide

• Toggle for the table of contents

<aside> 🔔 This document is a glossary, not a book.

</aside>

Please do not see this lengthy document as required reading.

Guiding Principles

Less is More

Lean on automation and simple, single-variable fields to reduce how much we’re expected to manually enter.

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.

Manual entry vs Automatic entry

Rely on humans as little as possible for updating fields that can be updated by other processes.

Also, don’t ask for manual labels or interpretations of data that’s already stored. “Priority” is a manual field that asks for manual interpretation of existing fields - Deal Amount, Number of Adoptions, Readiness to buy (stage). This is like putting a dry erase board next to a light switch and writing “on” when you flip the switch up and writing “off” when flipping the switch down.

Formatting

Capitalization - Because Hubspot has a lot of proper nouns that can be confused with common terms, I Capitalize Hubspot-specific words

Examples: “We have three Contacts in the optometrist’s contact lens department.” “I’ll take the lead on following up with these Leads.”

Contacts

Contacts are individuals in the CRM and are usually where salespeople work pre-funnel activity.

Lead Status

Lead status is a label for the state of engagement of the Contact.

New - This Contact has just been created and has not yet been claimed by a salesperson or been engaged.

In Progress - This Contact is currently being managed by a team member.

In Review - This Contact is not currently being managed but should not be engaged without speaking to their Contact Owner. Examples of this are a prospect who says “I don’t have any budget until October, and you had better not call me until then!” or a former customer who was aggressive with us during offboarding. It could also be

Open - This is a Contact that is not being worked and is fair game to be communicated with by marketing and for entry level salespeople to add to their roster (with consent).

Lifecycle Stage

Lifecycle Stage is the label for the depth of engagement of the Contact.

Subscriber - This is someone who receives our info and is in our CRM but isn’t of relevance to our active sales operation. Occasionally a Subscriber will respond to regular communications and enter our sales process.

Lead - This is a Contact that needs sales follow up and could potentially sign up with us.

Marketing Qualified Lead - These are leads that have been qualified by marketing. Until we have a marketing team, this is automated based on whether or not the Contact shares qualities of the types of people we sell to. Do they run a shelter?

Sales Qualified Lead - These are Contacts qualified by a salesperson. In a growing organization with few SDRs, this label applies to a Contact once they’ve booked a meeting with sales.

Opportunity - This is a Contact that has been added to a Deal and is actively in our sales funnel.

Customer - When a Deal is won, all associated Contacts are moved to Customers. Nice!

Evangelist - These are Customers that go a step further, usually be displaying significant engagement in our features, active engagement with our customer success communications and marketing, referral programs, reviews, and more.

Other - People that we want to track comms with but aren’t sales Contacts. These are investors, media & publishing partners, vendors, etc.

Sources

💰 Original Source

This is maybe one of the most important fields. The fields are rather self explanatory and auto-populated in most cases, so this is just a reference.

Paid Search - Paid ads on major search engines

Organic Search - Traffic from being ranked for the users search query

Direct Traffic - People that typed our URL into their browser directly

Paid Social - Ads on social media

Organic Social - People that clicked through our profiles or shared links on social media.

Email Marketing - New contacts created from outbound or shared marketing emails

⚠️ Referrals - This is referral traffic online, namely blogs that contain links to our site or content aggregators. This definition is flagged because a common error is to group interpersonal referrals into this group.

Other Campaigns - Catch-all for other ideas

Offline Sources - This is the default for contacts that are created by import from CSVs, the Hubspot Sales extension (most common), or other forms of offline or non-browser entry.

Origin Source

This helps us differentiate which business unit the Contact came in from. 🚧 This name might be a little confusing with Original, but we’ll leave it for now.

⚠️ Adoptions

<aside> 🚧 Under construction. We have fields for “Annual Adoptions” that is single line text and “Yearly Adoptions” that’s a drop-down select for form intake. Adoptions aren’t conducted by a person but rather via their organization (Company) or the estimate for their contract (Deal).

</aside>

⚠️ Currently, we have fields for “Annual Adoptions” that is single line text and “Yearly Adoptions” that’s a drop-down select for form intake. Adoptions aren’t conducted by a person but rather as a function of their organization (Company) or the estimate for their contract (Deal), and I think we should shy away from relying on user-submitted text in either of these fields for the source of truth for adoptions.

Hubspot Score

<aside> 🚧 Under construction until we have better understanding of what factors influence lead quality.

</aside>

Contact Type

This field denotes how the contact engages with us.

Vendor - They’re a supplier or service provider that sells us something.

Prospect - They’re an organization interested in using our product or a customer.

Partner - These are organizations that we align and collaborate with.

Press & Media - These are publications and similar that we use to help amplify our message and public relations efforts. 🚧 Construction Point - these could go under Partner, too 😕 🚧

Other - Anyone that doesn’t fit the above descriptions can go into Other.

Companies

Companies are the objects that track organizational data. For information that’s general to every member of the company, it’s better to put it here than in the Contact record. Think things like number of employees, location, annual revenue, number of adoptions, intake numbers, etc.

Often, Companies are the point of reference for customer success teams and salespeople working with target accounts.

Intake - The number of animals taken in by the organization per year

Yearly Adoptions - The number of estimated adoptions conducted by the organization each year.

Organization Size - The number of people that work there

Type - Same format as Contact Type

Animal Shelter Software - What shelter management software are they currently using?

Deals

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

<aside> 🚧 Under construction: We have too many pipelines doing too many things with too many stages. Need to simplify before we can build.

</aside>

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%)

This is the start of our funnel and is for people that know what our software does, knows generally what it costs, and is still interested in talking about how ShelterBuddy or Adopets works in their specific environment.

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.

Engaged <name TBD> (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.

Decision Maker Bought In <AKA Mutual Action Plan>

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.

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.

Closed Won

The contract is in and they’re customers! Be sure to enter a Closed Reason at this stage.

Closed Lost

At some stage, the it was decided that our products aren’t a good fit for their organization. This could have been encouraged by the salesperson or decided by the prospect. Be sure to enter a Closed Reason at this stage.

Deal Fields

Associated Contact Create Date

This is the date that the initial contact was made by the first associated Contact in the Deal.

This field is manual entry and, if we end up having a lot of inbound leads, is incredibly important.

Create Date

This is the date the Deal was created and is automatically input when creating the Deal.

Close Date

This is the expected date or actual date a Deal is either won or lost.

When the Deal is still in the sales process, this field serves as the expected date for the Deal to close. Once the Deal is won or lost, it is cemented as the actual date the Deal is closed.

Closed Reason

This might have to be split into closed won or closed lost reason, but it’s elegant if all reasons can be worded in such a way that we can identify the same factors for both to see the split of how we win and lose these deals. More on this another time.

• Process - Features - The Deal closed because of the features we offered.

• Process - Ease of Use - The Deal closed because of our user experience and how smooth our product or experience is.

• Process - Service - The Deal closed because they loved our service & support or their relationship with the salesperson or customer success manager.

• Financial - Pricing - The Deal closed based on how our pricing compared to competitors or in-house solutions.

• Financial - Donations & Revenue - The Deal closed based on the donations or revenue generated by their use of shelter management software.

• Financial - Budget - The Deal closed because of their budget timelines and ability to spend.

• Social - Organization - The Deal closed due to affinity or social pressure from how the Deal Contacts relate to us via a professional or social organization.

• Social - Other - The Deal closed because of how the prospect feels about our position in the industry, our values, and what working with us means for issues the prospect cares about.

<aside> 🚧 Note: Reasons might need supplementary notes. Like, if a person buys based on Features, what specific features do they like? Better to keep Reason as general but then document the specifics somewhere.

</aside>

Contract Start Date / Launch Date

This is the date they begin service. This is key for customer success, as this serves as the basis for certain check-in communications.

Contract End Date / Contract Renewal

This is when their contract ends. Also key for customer success, as it informs renewal, rebooking, and churn-related conversations & timelines.

Processes & Protocols

AKA: “How do I?”

Accept a new lead?

Click to view your New Leads.

Starting in September, Leads that come into the system will have a Lead Status: New.

1. Filter by

   1. Contact Owner is: Me

   2. Lead Status is: New

2. Enroll in an email sequence or call to follow up

3. Add LinkedIn Bio to their profile (🚧 is this necessary for shelter industry?)

4. Add Job Title from LinkedIn or web search (🚧 is this necessary for shelter industry?)

5. Only after the above is done: update Lead Status: In Progress

Create a new deal?

Deals reflect a Contact that has proactively indicated interest in purchasing the product after knowing the general costs and features. This is usually following a discovery sales call or if a person has sent a very specific, proactive inquiry email.

1. Name the deal 🚧 Naming conventions under construction

2. Add an amount - for a Deal to really be a Deal, we should have enough information about them to ballpark an amount. We can narrow it down later. If you need a placeholder, put our average contract value in this space.

3. Add all associated Contacts to the Deal record.

4. Add an Associated Contact Create Date - This is a very important manual entry field and can really only be done manually. This is the date that the initial contact reached out to us. For new Deals that’s pretty simple, it’s just the create date of the initial 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 some human touch. This is crucial as it defines our sales cycle length, a top-5 metric.

5. 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).

Sending a Contract

1. Enter the Contract Start Date (Launch Date)and Contract End Date (Contract Renewal)

2. Ensure the product or quote in Hubspot matches what’s being sent to the prospect.

3. <use an IF/THEN contingency in the communication>

Win a deal?

• Move to Closed Won

• Ensure contract is totally signed, not just verbal

• Take care of all of the financial stuff - make sure invoices are sent, accounting is notified, etc.

• Introduce the CS manager

Lose a deal?

Accepting a Deal (CS)

1. 🚧 A workflow should send the welcome email and schedule a call with them 🚧

2. Ensure the Launch Date (Contract Start Date) and Contract Renewal (End Date) is accurate.

Keep up with my current deals and pipeline?

Campaign Opportunities

1. People who requested a demo but haven’t been worked by a rep since the CRM migration: Demo request date is: known, Contact owner is: unassigned. Note that this demo request date field is very outdated.

🦝 RC Changelog

Notes

Pipelines

Consolidating pipelines is the first step to getting some clarity in the model

Current pipelines:

1. Sales Pipeline

   1. Keep this, rename to ShelterBuddy Sales, reduce stages, standardize fields.

2. Adopets Sales Pipeline

   1. Keep this, just reduce the number of stages and standardize fields.

3. Customer Success

4. Adopets BFAS Leads Pipeline [List, delete]

5. Adopets Customer Success [Export, delete]

6. New Customer Onboarding [This should be ChurnZero or automated, not a pipeline]

7. Partner Pipeline [Only to track vendors and integrators. Delete it.]

8. Adopets Onboarding Flow [This should be automated, not a pipeline]

9. Adopets Partner Opportunities [This is a Contacts or Companies static list, not a pipeline]

10. Client Offboarding [This is a checklist, not a pipeline]

Are Adopets and Shelterbuddy products in the new system, or are they entirely different sales processes? How often do people buy just one versus buying both?

Sales Process

Right now, salespeople are expected to manually enter

1. Deal Notes

2. Priority (3% compliance)

3. Decision Makers Engaged (0% compliance)

4. Add Associated Contacts to Deal (100% compliance)

5. Shelter Focus Areas (0% compliance)

6. Close Date (7% compliance)

7. Deal Amount (92% compliance)

8. Product Subscriptions (0% Compliance)

9. Product Needs (2% compliance)

10. Go-Live goal (0% compliance)

11. Shelter Software (0% compliance)

It’s important for a salesperson to know all of this, but with all of these manual entry fields, it’s going to be very difficult to ensure 90%+ compliance on these.

It’s better to automate some of these (Close Date, Decision Makers Engaged, Deal Notes, Shelter Software), push some of these to later in the sale (when Contract Sent, update Deal Amount and Go Live Date), and simply surrender some of these (Product Subscriptions and Goals are synonymous with Closed Reason).

Recommended

Overall defining notes for all objects:

1. Properties are static information that is meant to be searched, parsed, filtered, and reported on. In many cases, we’re using them as sticky notes to document something about a Contact. In our current state, this is only a hygienic issue, but it’s important to have an understanding of how these fields work to empower our team members to use the CRM versus treat it as a complicated spreadsheet.

2. Understanding the difference between Contact and Company objects. We have a lot of fields under Contacts that aren’t specific to that person, but rather to their Company. This creates a ton of redundant data entry, inconsistent things (what if there’s conflicting info?), missed opportunities (what if we’re emailing sub-500 shelters and the POC was manually created and the field is blank, and the person who filled out the form who is no longer there has the info? The POC won’t get the email). Likewise, understanding objects gives a layer of understanding to team members to feel empowered by the CRM.

Sales & Deals

Defining Deal Characteristics:

1. Each funnel is speaking a different language.

2. Many funnels are being used incorrectly because our non-technical team members like the visual, kanban-style display of these Deals.

• [x] Consolidate Pipelines: Customer Success, Sales. One each, then one per business unit.

• [ ] The Priority Deal field seems like something that should be dynamic based on Deal properties, not something we manually set.

• [x] Customer Commitment also feels like something that’s not a good use of manual data entry. This should probably be captured in the Deal Notes on the discovery call or by gauging sentiment from a form field.

• [x] Go Live Goal field should probably be the anticipated Close Date, right? Or maybe “Contract Start Date” (new field)?

• [x] Go Live Goal and Go Live Date are the same thing. (note: Go Live is Adopets Launch, Go Live for ShelterBuddy is Contract Start Date)

• [x] Decision Makers Engaged is too dynamic to be kept up in a busy sales environment. If I’m a salesperson with 30 active deals in my funnel, I am bouncing emails and conducting calls everyday that would change this field. My recommendation would be to lean on the salespeople to accurately add the correct Contacts to the Deal and then infer the roles based on tight compliance in the Contacts section.

• [ ] Customer Health Score is a good thing to track, but again, should be automated. What conditions make them at-risk? Plug those in as filter into an active list and then send notifications to the Company owner when a customer is auto-added to the list

• [x] Shelter Software should be a drop-down, not open text (There’s a drop down - keep that one and delete this one)

• [x] Product Needs is too general to be a field; just toss this into templated Deal Notes (to add later)

• [x] Consider adding an Associated Contact Engage Date when we get inbound marketing set up.

• [x] Audit the default fields, try to reduce them or break them into sections to reduce the emotional burden of them.

• [x] Is Close Date the same as Contract Start Date? Or can we have a Contract Start and Contract End Date field that removes the need for the Customer Success Pipeline?

• [ ] “Contract Sent to Andre” is a foul play in fields. They should be as general as possible, definitely don’t entrench a proper noun or person’s name into a field. Also, “Contract Sent” is a Deal Stage, not a field.

• [ ] “Contract Info” as a Yes/No field doesn’t make sense to me. Does it mean that it’s been sent? This is a deal stage.

Pipeline-Specific Recommendations

• [ ] The Customer Success Pipeline is a list of customers denominated by when they joined. This could be a Deal Filter with contract dates or perfect Launch Date, where offboarding checklist includes putting in their end date in the contract.

• [x] It appears that the Adopets customer success pipeline is merely a check-in schedule. I’m massively in favor of this (proactive success versus reactive check-in), but I’d contend that we can isolate this by Contract Start/End Date, CS Check-In Schedule (new field), and Last Contacted Date.

• [x] Demo Complete Stage and Qualified to Buy are the same. If they complete the demo and aren’t qualified, just lose the deal.

• [ ] If sending a quote is the automatic next stage after a buyer is qualified, then this is also unnecessary. “Demo Complete” implies the quote is sent. Better to automatically create a Task when a Deal is moved into Demo Complete and stay accountable to being on top of tasks.

• [x] Is “Awaiting Contract Award” the same as Contract Sent?

• [x] Verbal Win is the same thing as decision maker bought in. Delete this.

• [ ] Closed Won is the same thing as Send to Onboarding. That’s what you do when you win a new customer. (onboarding often takes place pre-contracting; these are likely separate activities all placed into one pipeline)

• [x] Bad Timing is just a Lost Reason, not a Deal Stage. Lose the Deal, create a Task to follow up, and quarterly review Lost Deals by Reason and see if there’s value in there.

• [x] SBI Lost and Closed Lost are the same thing.

• [x] Pushed Deal Amount into Yearly Adoptions. This paves the way to get Deal Amount back to being a Deal Amount.

Contacts

• [ ] I’m guessing “Annual Intake” is referencing animal intake. This is a single line text field (not number) and is honestly a Company field. People don’t take in animals, organizations do.

• [x] Annual Adoptions, same. It’s totally possible that it would be hard to put this number in the Company from a Contact Form, but we should look into it. Also it has to be a number field and not single line text. Migrated to Company input but not deleted as a Contact field yet.

• [ ] Attended reception is a Note, a List, or a “Zoom Meeting Attended” auto-populated field and shouldn’t be manually maintained in a Contact record.

• [ ] BFAS Adopets Interest should probably be a Source for a form they filled out or a static list that’s maintained by a salesperson, not an intrinsic quality of the Contact.

• [ ] Demo Request Date shouldn’t be single line text and should be automatically stored by their Form data.

• [ ] Event Attendance, same as “Attended reception” and “Demo Request Date” - their activity is automatically logged so this isn’t a static field.

  • [ ] There are 2 redundant Event Attendance fields

• [ ] All of the Areas of Need aren’t good uses of fields

• [ ] I generally don’t like personas in small companies. Once we have a full-time sales manager and CRM admin, worth revisiting.

• [x] What’s Origin? Origin Form, and contains form data that was lost in the migration or in the Hubspot script not being connected. It shall live.

• [x] Market Segment is just a filter on top of info we already have (number of adoptions); which should probably be a Company field 🙂

• [x] Lost / Churn Shelter Software probably isn’t a good Contact field, but I need context. Only has 2 records, so archived.

• [ ] Shelter Software is OK as Contact, but probably should be a Company field.

• [x] Identify if incoming leads are from the Adopets or ShelterBuddy. Figure out how to capture this as overall, most recent, etc.

• [ ] Persona Other is actually a great field, but it should not be single-line text.

• [ ] Job Position feels like it should be contained in Job Title, unless we foresee campaigns where we specifically target people based on degrees of responsibility. This might be OK to keep, but feels too error-prone to rely on.

• [x] Organization Logo got toasted.

• [x] Merge Organization Name and Create name - they’re the same thing

Company

The main issue here is that we don’t use Companies, and that’s not that bad.

• [ ] How much does Industry vary with us? Can we create our own items for this or just remove it from the default view?

• [ ] We ask the Contact to tell us what country they’re in, but that’s really a Company field. I don’t think City, State, or Postal Code is an appropriate default

• [x] Remove location info from Company default properties, added Country (as that’s part of the lead form)

Executed