In most cases, companies look to generate leads for sales departments within. But there are situations where the lead needs to be directed to associates like resellers or partners who do not have access to HubSpot. Typically, they are generated from contact form fills on the company website, or a landing page. One of the form fields asks the prospect to list the number of customers or subscribers.
The company wants resellers or associates to follow up with smaller customers, so that the company sales teams work with prospects above a certain size.
As a result, two requirements arise:
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Forward requests to the reseller or partner. This can be via a simple forward of the notification email that form fill generates.
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The next is to track progress on those requests - during regular calls with resellers they can be asked about the progress made on the leads that were forwarded to them.
How this can be handled
Karsten Koehler offered the following recommendations in HubSpot Community
Generating leads for continued business opportunities is essential. But equally important is what happens after the enquiry comes in
Permissions in HubSpot can be created in a way that the entities only see what they need to update record information. Depending on the framework contracts, non-disclosure agreements that you have with them and the opinion of your IT team, this is one of the options.
Or else, use contact-based workflow that branches based on the logic described above. You would then use the 'Send internal marketing email' workflow action to send these notifications. The biggest challenge is keeping these records up to date when the resellers aren't working from HubSpot.
This can again be managed in one of two ways. Save filtered views for each reseller on the contact index page (Menu > Contacts > Contacts). During a video call, you can go through this filtered view and update values (Lead status, Lifecycle stage etc) as you go, by clicking into any cell. (This was added recently to HubSpot.) Reports are read-only.
Alternatively, you can ask the resellers to track certain information in Excel files and bulk update their contacts via import. In this case, you should provide an Excel template along with your email notifications.
Use Custom Properties to organise leads better
Jacob Olle, a HubSpot Certified Trainer offered an interesting way to organise leads in HubSpot
Contact Type — dropdown property with "Prospect," "Current Client," "Former Client," "Vendor," etc. as values. This property lets you easily categorize contacts at a high level so that you know their exact business relationship to you.
Contact Status — dropdown property (separate from "Lead status") with "New," "Contacting," "Unqualified," "Not Interested," "Bad Timing," and "Do Not Contact," etc. as values. This property lets you track the prospect > MQL > SQL process leading up to when sales would create a deal for the contact.
New = the lead has never been contacted
Contacting = sales rep outreach is in progress, but they haven't had a direct conversion yet
Unqualified = sales rep connected with the lead and determined that they're not fit to do business with (there's a bunch that you can build upon here, like "Unqualified reason" and automated value updates)
Not Interested = sales rep connected with the lead and determined that they're a decent fit, but the lead expressed that they aren't interested. They can be benched in HubSpot for a while if you feel it makes sense to follow up again in the future.
Bad Timing = sales rep connected with the lead and determined that they're a decent fit, but the lead expressed that now is not the right time to do business. Having this category allows you to identify contacts that should receive ongoing nurturing (and your rep should also create a task to follow up within an appropriate timeframe)
Organising the HubSpot CRM to reflect internal processes helps faster adoption and the benefits of automation and efficiency are realised faster
Do Not Contact = sales rep connected with the lead and determined that they're a decent fit, but the lead explicitly requested not to be contacted again. These contacts should be unsubscribed from all email and added to your opt-out list
Your mileage will vary of course, and you may have different internal names/definitions, fewer values, or entirely different properties that make the most sense to your business.
Handling the complex stages of leads in the Sales Process
Apart from assigning leads to various entities and departments within, the leads themselves are at multiple points on their customer journey.
Lifecycle stages, lead status & deal stages can be confusing early on, so here are a few definitions:
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Lifecycle Stage: Describes a contact's relationship with your company
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Lead Status: Describes sales activities during the qualification process
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Deal Stage: Represents steps in your company’s sales process
Apart from this, companies have their own ways of defining Sales Qualified Leads (SQL) and Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) Since these tie in to how campaigns are managed and assessed, it leads to better alignment right down the line and better collaboration between departments.
Blueoshan has the expertise to examine a company’s operations to structure the HubSpot CRM, so companies can derive maximum benefits. The foundation of a company’s day to day operations depend on customer interactions and selling.
Once that is streamlined, the rest of the pieces fall in place.
A company starting off on HubSpot could probably import all their contacts, if they aren’t voluminous. But getting the segmentation right based on the company processes already being followed increases the buy-in from important departments within.
Talk to us and we’ll be happy to get it all aligned for you.
