Improving Deal data quality using HubSpot Pipeline Tools

Have you ever been in the situation where you can't see clearly what value and quantity of sales your sales team have in their pipeline?

HubSpot have recently added extra functionality to Deal pipelines that will help with improving the data quality of your sales pipeline so that you can provide a few 'guardrails' to your sales team so that they provide you with the data without any real extra admin.

There are a number of steps to getting this set up depending on what you are trying to achieve:

Getting an understanding of Deal Time frames:

Making your Deal stages linked to specific events in the sales cycle can be further improved by:

• Limiting Deal creation to specific stages i.e. the first stage so that the sales team don;t skip stages and then you suddenly find closed won Deals appearing that you had not idea about/
• Restricting the sales people from skipping stages so you can make sure that they use each deal stage and don't just create a deal when they need to close win it.  This is more of a nudge idea.  But also it will get the team to start using the Deal view as a way of seeing where their Deals are for the month/quarter/year.
  
  

To activate this:

• Open a Deal in HubSpot
• Click on the cog to open settings:
  
  
  
  
• Then Select Pipelines:
  
  
  
  
• Then Pipeline Rules:
  
  
  
  
• Click the toggles (as shown below) and select the Deal stage that should be selected as the first Deal stage and/or restrict the the Deals from skipping stages by selecting the second toggle:

Another issue you may encounter is that the sales team don't add any products (in HubSpot speak: line items) to the deal until they are ready to progress it. 

This leaves you in the dark about the value of the pipeline and which products are converting/interesting your clients until they are closed.

I've found a good way of getting partially solving this and reducing sales admin time is to automate the adding of the products when a deal is created.  So that you have clarity over the primary product the client is interested in and then the sales person does not have have to manually add it.  They only have to add the additional products.  A workflow then adds the correct product

It's not fool-proof, but sales is not a science and the client may change their focus as they start their sales journey with you.

How to set this up:

A salesperson generally creates a Deal from a contact record using the Deal Form as shown in this help article.  So to make this work we need to add a new field to the Deal form called something like Primary product where the salesperson selects the product:

• Open a Deal in HubSpot
• Click on the cog to open settings:
  
  
  
• Stay in the Setup section and click on Customize Deal Form:
  
  
  
• Then add the field by clicking Properties on the left hand side (You will need to create the property first- see this article here - the property should be a dropdown with each product being one option of the dropdown, you can paste from from an excel sheet if you already have a product price list) . 
  
  Then start typing the name of the field here is the space (1) and tick the right field (2):
  
  
  
• You can alter the order of the fields in the form by dragging them up or down
• REMEMBER to remove the Line Item association as your aim is to automate this.
• Save and Close the form
  
  

• Here is Exelab's article on how to set up the app in your HubSpot platform
• Create a Deal based workflow:
  
  
  
• The trigger should be when the Primary Product (or whatever you called it!) field is known:
  
  
  
  
• Create a branch for each product (based on the dropdown options you created on the property earlier):
  
  
  
• Then on the next step click the + sign to add a new action and scroll down the left hand pane to Add Line Item to Deal - click on it and select Add Line Item to the Deal as this is NOT a bulk action we're doing:
  
  
  
  
• There are two ways this app works:
  • Use the SKU to drag all the details of the product library
  • Fill in all the fields in this workflow step and the app will create the line item each time.
  • The first option is better if you can the prices often as you just need to update the product in the library once rather than updating the product in the library AND remembering to update this flow.
• Here is more info on the standard fields:
  • SKU of the product to add (optional) - this will be the way to drag the data from the Product Library for existing products as stated above.
  • Name (optional)
  • Description (optional)
  • Product’s quantity
  • Line item price (optional, if not provided the price will be the one of the product)
  • Currency list (USD, EUR, GBP, etc.) (optional, if not provided will be used as the default account currency)
    
    
    
• Here is more info on the premium fields:
  • Once you activate a paid plan you can enable additional properties to add to the line items.
  • By selecting Activate in the Enable premium actions (optional) box you will have access to new features.
  • Payment type: One time / Recurring / Automatic Renewal
  • Billing Frequency: Monthly / Quarterly / Semi-annually / Annually / Every 2, 3, 4 or 5 years
  • Term in months
  • Start Date of billing: At payment / Custom date / Delayed start date / Delayed start month
  • Up to 5 custom properties valorization (only properties of the following types may be chosen: single-line text, multi-line text, file, calculation, phone number, html)
    
    
    
    

Improving Deal data quality

By Restricting Deals from skipping stages and Limiting Deal creation to specific stages, you can also enforce data quality automation, by making sure that the each team has entered the correct data at each stage.

Say you need specific data items to be present in order to send out a quote, you can enforce these data items to be entered BEFORE the deal stage is changed to one where a quote is sent out e.g. Quote Ready stage (or whatever Deal Stages you have) so that when the salesperson comes to send the Quote it will already have the correct data items present.

This is also good at Close Won stage so that any teams that are dealing with a client post-sale have all the info they need in order to provide the right level of support. 

You do this by setting up Conditional Stage Properties:

• Open a Deal in HubSpot
• Click on the cog to open settings:
  
  
  
• Select Pipelines:
  
  
  
• Then stay on Configure and scroll down to the Deal stage where you want to add the properties that need to be completed BEFORE you can move to this stage:
  
    In this example the Deal stage Select Business Considerations is going to be updated
  
  
• Click on Edit Properties
• Then a new dialogue box opens:
  
  You can see the Deal stage that you are working with. (It took me a while to get my head around this - the sales person won't be able to move the deal to this stage unless the selected fields are completed).
  • Click + Add dependent property to add the properties that you need to be completed before the deal is changed to this stage (1)
  • Make it Required (2)
    
    
• Now when a salesperson tries to change the deal stage to Business Considerations, the deal description must be completed:
  
  
  

Through a combination of Restricting Deals from skipping stages, Limiting Deal creation to specific stages and Deal stage Conditional Properties you can really improve the data quality of your sales data.   

Control who can edit a Deal and when

There are times when you need to control who can edit deals at certain points. 

The classic example of this is after a Deal is Closed Won, it should not be able to be edited by the sales team because the Deal is closed and you don't want them messing up your figures by continually updating the Deal value.

Another example is that you may have Cancellation deal stage to record closed Deals that have then cancelled. You may give your customer support/service operations editing access to to cancel the Deals, but not the sales team.

You can control who can edit Deals at different stages by:

• Open a Deal in HubSpot
• Click on the cog to open settings
  
  
  
• Select Pipelines:
  
  
  
• Select Pipeline Rules:
  
  
  
  
• Click the toggle (as shown below) on Control deal editing access:
  
  
  
• Then select the stage and the team who you want to be able to edit the Deal:
  

Summary

Using the techniques set out in this blog you have a good chance of being able to start to get a clear sales pipeline where you can:

• See the timescales Deals will take to close
• The value of these Deals
• The primary products of these Deals 

and you'll also:

• Gain a significant improvement in data quality 
• Lock down who can update Deals and when they can make those updates.

If you want to further explore the other options that HubSpot has for generating a clear sales pipeline, how to report on your sales pipeline or how I can improve your current HubSpot CRM sales processes click here to book an appointment.