How to Optimize Deal Stages in HubSpot for Better Sales Efficiency
Deal Stages in HubSpot is an effective tool for setting and navigating through the sales process and the status of a particular deal. These deal stages must be optimized to minimize clutter, confusion, and obstacles in a fast-moving pipeline to ensure sales reps have the tools and strategies to prospect, follow up, and engage with leads at the right time. Here is how to best set up HubSpot Deal Stages to make sure that conversion is optimized and the sales process is smooth.
1. Define Your Deal Stages Clearly
The first way that the deal stages can be optimized for the HubSpot platform is to commit to a detailed understanding of each stage and the progression of the customer through each of them. The first step involves a subjective audit of your existing conversion funnel, excluding channels that are not marketing qualified, and defining the critical stages that each qualified lead must traverse to become a customer. Some of the normal stages include: Qualified Lead, Demo Scheduled, Proposal Sent, Negotiation, and Closed Won/Lost. Try to have one stage per action the sales team performs or the observed lead behavior.
Tip: However, avoid extraneous steps that do not contribute to the process because multiple stages often contribute to a cluttered process and longer ways to get through the pipeline. Keep it simple and relevant.
2. Customize Stages Based on Your Sales Cycle
HubSpot’s default deal phases may not always correlate with your business structure or the sales process. If your sales cycle is below or above average or if you have some extra points of contact with your customers, maybe it will be useful to change it a little. There is flexibility in using HubSpot because it permits the addition and deletion of stages and renaming them in the process.
Tip: It is important to find meaningful names for each of the phases distinguished. For instance, while one status might be “In Progress,” one might possibly use a status like “Awaiting Proposal Approval” which will give a clear meaning of the action required.
3. Leverage Automation for Efficiency
The automation feature is one of the strong skills that HubSpot has and it can assist in decreasing the amount of work that must be done manually, actions can be set up in order to happen when the deals get to a certain status. For instance, one can create an email notification, a task, or a reminder whenever a deal is moved to or from a stage. This helps to maintain the flow of the process and guarantees that no deal will be left on stand-by, because of delayed subsequent communications.
Tip: Automate based on your team’s process to set up sensible automation on the platform. For example, if an opportunity is in the Negotiation state, an assimilated task may be created that the sales rep has to contact the client within a certain span of time.
4. Implement Deal Scoring to Prioritize High-Value Deals
It is clear that not all customers are created equal so working with top-tier clients increases your chances of closing them. Criteria for determining the deal scores enable HubSpot to easily determine which deals are most likely to be closed according to the level of engagement, the size of the deal, the source, or any other factor. With each sale, your team reaches important goals and can focus on the most valuable opportunities, and direct efforts to the right deal.
Tip: Consider your scoring criteria and adapt them according to statistics of previous evaluations This will assist in reducing the update of the scoring model since it will be in tune with the current trends.
5. Use Deal Stage Analytics to Identify Bottlenecks
Using HubSpot’s reporting functionality, businesses can learn how the deals flow through each of these stages. By doing so, you can identify areas of the funnel that need optimization based on given metrics. For instance, if value selling proves to be an issue that slows down deals’ progress, an effective demonstration technique may be necessary.
Tip: Schedule an appointment where you, along with the sales team, can review deal analytics that is on a monthly basis. Which of the stages are below par and which strategies could be employed to correct the common bottlenecks?
6. Align Deal Stages with Sales Enablement Content
Doing this and that for a sale is making sure the right content is given to the sales reps at the right time. For instance, during the Proposal Sent stage, you can present examples of how your firm has succeeded. As with deal-making content, make sure that reps can easily access the material that works best for them during that specific stage of the deal.
Tip: In HubSpot’s library, categorize the sales enablement content by their relevant stage, applying tags to the assets. Such a structure allows reps to quickly and easily scroll up content that is pertinent to a specific instance.
Conclusion
As it will be recalled, the management of deal stages in HubSpot entails customization, automation, prioritization, measurement and analysis, and coupling with content. Through optimizing the stages, there is increased speed at which the sales teams get through the funnel, and the conversion of opportunities that would have been lost is reduced, hence increasing rates of losing the deals.
