Essential Guide to HubSpot Sales Pipelines + Stages

Sales pipelines are an essential component of a successful sales strategy. They provide a systematic approach to managing and tracking sales opportunities, ensuring that no potential Deal falls through the cracks. HubSpot offers one of the most powerful and user-friendly sales pipeline systems on the market.

With HubSpot, sales teams can easily visualize their sales process, identify bottlenecks, and prioritize leads. The customizable Deal stages allow businesses to tailor the pipeline to their unique sales cycle, ensuring that every prospect is moved efficiently through the sales funnel.

In this blog post, we will delve into the world of HubSpot sales pipelines, exploring their benefits and providing practical tips for optimizing their effectiveness. So, if you're looking to supercharge your sales operations and close more Deals, keep reading!

What is a Sales Pipeline?

A sales pipeline is a visual representation of the journey a prospect takes from initial contact to closing the deal. It's acrucial tool for any business looking to streamline their sales process and maximize revenue.

With HubSpot's powerful sales pipeline system, businesses can easily track and manage their sales opportunities in a visual manner. With this comprehensive understanding of their sales pipeline, businesses can make data-driven decisions to optimize their sales efforts and ultimately close more deals.

Organizations may utilize one Sales Pipeline or multiple, depending on the needs of their business and sales organization. Common use cases for having multiple pipelines include multiple distinct products, teams or regions.

What is a HubSpot Deal Stage?

A Deal stage is a crucial component of the HubSpot sales pipeline system. It refers to the specific phase or step in the sales process that a prospect or Deal is currently in. By customizing Deal stages to align with their unique sales cycle, businesses can effectively track and manage their sales opportunities.

By default, HubSpot includes a sales pipeline with seven deal stages:

• Appointment scheduled
• Qualified to buy
• Presentation scheduled
• Decision maker bought-in
• Contract sent
• Closed won
• Closed lost

As a lead progresses through the sales pipeline, they'll likely travel through most of these stages. By utilizing Deal stages, sales reps, their managers, and leadership have a shared understanding of the state of their sales.

How do I build a Sales Pipeline?

We've discussed what HubSpot Sales Pipelines and Deal Stages are, and why they are beneficial to your organization. Now, it's time to take action and start building your Sales Pipeline(s) using HubSpot's powerful system.

1. Define Your Customer Journey

To begin, you need to define your customer journey. This involves understanding the different stages your prospects go through from initial contact to closing the deal. By mapping out this journey, you can gain valuable insights into the specific touchpoints and interactions that occur along the way.

The customer lifecycle outlines the steps taken by a customer as they progress through the marketing and sales funnel. The steps can be aligned with stages such as subscriber, marketing qualified lead, sales qualified lead, and customer. In HubSpot, these are called Lifecycle Stages.

It can be helpful to use a template for these efforts. Broadly, customers will go through the following overarching periods:

• Awareness: The buyer becomes aware of a problem or opportunity that needs to be addressed.

• Consideration: The buyer carefully evaluates their needs, establishes criteria for evaluation, and explores various potential solutions.

• Decision: The buyer makes a final decision on their strategy and compares different vendors or specific solutions.

By mapping out your Customer Journey, you'll understand the journey your leads take from the first spark of interest with your brand to becoming devoted advocates. All of your customer-facing teams play a role in this experience: Marketing, Sales and Service. The middle of the Customer Journey is often where Sales is most present, and what will translate into your Sales Pipeline.

2. Define Your Deal Stages

Once you have a clear understanding of your customer journey, you can then identify the stages of your sales pipeline. These stages should align with the key milestones in your sales process and reflect the actions and decisions that prospects typically go through before making a purchase. By defining these stages, you create a structured framework for managing and tracking your sales opportunities.

From mapping out your Customer Journey, you should have learned when, where and how Leads are passed from Marketing to Sales. You will also know when, where and how Customers are handed off from Sales to Service.

Now, it's time to define the sweet spot: how do Sales Qualified Leads become Customers?

Consider what steps must occur between these points. Your organization may already have some extent of a sales process, in which case you can look to translate this into Deal stages.

Remember, by default, HubSpot includes a sales pipeline with seven deal stages:

• Appointment scheduled
• Qualified to buy
• Presentation scheduled
• Decision maker bought-in
• Contract sent
• Closed won
• Closed lost

You will always have a Closed won and Closed lost stage. At the end of the day, did the customer move forward with the order? Beyond that, consider tangible actions that take place between New and Won. Does your sales process include a meeting or two? How about discussions with multiple stakeholders?

With Sales stage, you want to eliminate as much guesswork as possible. To achieve this, every deal stage should possess these three essential characteristics:

• Factual - A step is factual if it’s based on actual actions that have been taken rather than a feeling or intuition you or the buyer might have. This makes it easy for sales reps and their leaders to be on the same page about the sales in their pipeline.
• Inspectable - A step is inspectable if there’s some sort of record that can be used to prove that the action has been taken. Again, this allows a shared understanding of what qualifies a stage move.
• Buyer-centric - Ultimately, it's the buyer's actions that will close the sale. The sales rep is just there to help. So as much as possible, base your deal stages on actions the buyer takes.

Build your Deal stages with these requirements in mind. Then, document what qualifies as "entry criteria" into the stage, what occurs in the stage, and "exit criteria" that allows the prospect to move to the next stage.

3. Customize Your HubSpot Deal Stages

Now, it's time to take your sales pipeline mapping and customize your pipeline(s) within HubSpot. To customize the stages in a pipeline:

• In your HubSpot account, click the settings settings icon in the main navigation bar.
• In the left sidebar menu, navigate to Objects > Deals.
• Click the Pipelines tab.
• Click the Select a pipeline dropdown menu, then select the pipeline to edit.

• To add a new deal stage:

  • Under the existing deal stages, click + Add stage.

  • Enter a deal stage name, then click the dropdown menu in the Deal probability column and select or enter a probability.

• To change the name of an existing deal stage, click the stage's name, then enter a new name in the text box.

• To reorder stages, click the stage and drag it to a new position.

• To delete a stage, hover over a stage and click Delete. If there are deals in the stage you're deleting, you'll need to move these existing deals to another stage. To do this in bulk, navigate to the deals index page, and in list view, bulk edit the Deal Stage property.

• Once you're done editing, clickSavein the bottom left.

Who Should Utilize Sales Pipelines?

While traditionally HubSpot Deal pipelines represent the sale of products or services, this tool can be applicable to a variety of use cases. Any staged process can benefit from a pipeline, whether it be the Deal or Ticket pipeline in HubSpot. Generally, Deal pipelines are tied to revenue in some way, but they don't have to be.

Sales pipelines can be adapted to manage workflows and track progress in a variety of contexts.

Non-Profits

Non-profit organizations can benefit from using sales pipelines to manage and track donations. By creating a customized sales pipeline in HubSpot, non-profits can visualize the journey a potential donor takes from initial contact to making a donation. This allows them to identify bottlenecks in the donation process, prioritize leads, and optimize their fundraising efforts.

The deal stages in the sales pipeline can be tailored to align with the steps involved in the donation process, such as prospect identification, cultivation, solicitation, and stewardship.

With a clear understanding of their donation pipeline, non-profits can make data-driven decisions to maximize revenue and effectively close more deals, in this case, securing more donations for their cause.

University Applicants

By utilizing a sales pipeline, universities can monitor the status of prospective students from their initial inquiry all the way through to application submission, acceptance, and enrollment.

This allows admissions teams to have a comprehensive understanding of where each applicant is in the process and ensures that no one falls through the cracks. With a sales pipeline, universities can easily track and manage the various stages of the admissions journey, from scheduling appointments and qualifying potential students to presenting information and securing contracts.

By having this visual representation of the admissions process, universities can make data-driven decisions to optimize their efforts and ultimately increase enrollment rates. The use of a sales pipeline in the context of university applicants provides a structured framework for managing and tracking each student's progress, ensuring a smooth and efficient admissions process for both the university and the prospective students.

Real Estate Rentals

Follow potential tenants from initial property viewing through background checks, lease signing, and ultimately to moving in.

Each stage of the pipeline can represents a key milestone in the rental process, allowing real estate professionals to have a clear understanding of where each potential tenant stands. This enables them to effectively prioritize and manage their leads, ensuring that no opportunity falls through the cracks.

Additionally, by customizing the deal stages to align with their unique rental cycle, real estate rental businesses can gain valuable insights into the efficiency and effectiveness of their rental process. They can identify bottlenecks or areas for improvement, allowing them to optimize their operations and enhance the overall tenant experience.

How to Take Your Sales Pipeline to the Next Level

Now that you've mapped out your customer journey and sales process and created a HubSpot Sales pipeline, you can take it to the next level. So what does that look like?

Automate Your Sales Pipeline

Did you know that HubSpot offers the capability to automate your sales pipeline? You can input rules into HubSpot workflows based on events or property values.

Automating your HubSpot Sales pipelines saves time, protects data integrity, and encourages process. Learn more about pipeline automations or get some pipeline automation tips.

Add Visual Cues to Your Pipeline

The deals board in the pipeline provides an elegant visual representation of each stage in the pipeline as they progress. Did you know that you can customize how this looks and functions for your team?

One method is through tags. Deal tags are created via filtering Deal properties, functioning similarly to Object views. They can be as simple or as complex as you'd like to make them, but should help towards the ultimate goal of organization and prioritization for those who use Deals in your business.

Require Data Entry at Certain Stages

One common challenge faced by sales teams is the task of data entry. While their expertise lies in closing deals, they may not always prioritize entering the necessary details of those deals.

Luckily, HubSpot provides a solution to this problem by allowing you to set data entry requirements for each stage of the sales pipeline. For instance, at the initial stage of the process, it may be important for sales representatives to confirm the qualification of leads based on industry or annual revenue. Towards the end of the sales process, you may require purchase order (PO) numbers or other data related to the handoff from sales to service.

By implementing data requirements in your sales pipeline, you can ensure that sales professionals enter the necessary information without constant reminders. This ensures that everyone has access to the data they need, empowering your organization to make informed, data-driven decisions.

You can set required properties for moving between deal stages in your Deal pipeline settings. Click "Add Properties" under the "Update Stage Properties" column for the stage you'd like to set required properties for.

Review Reporting

Speaking of data, one of the best ways to supercharge your use of your Sales pipelines is to review data about how they are functioning. Check out pre-made reports in your Sales Analytics area, or create your own sales reports. Regularly reviewing sales pipeline reports is important for several reasons.

First, it allows sales reps and their leaders to have a shared understanding of the sales in their pipeline. By basing deal stages on factual actions taken by the buyer, rather than intuition or guesswork, everyone can be on the same page about the progress of each deal.

Second, reviewing the pipeline reports allows for inspection of the actions taken at each stage. Having a record of these actions provides proof that the necessary steps have been completed, further ensuring accuracy and transparency in the pipeline.

Lastly, reviewing and cleaning the pipeline periodically is essential to remove any outdated or irrelevant opportunities. This helps sales teams focus their efforts on the most promising prospects, maximizing their chances of closing deals. By regularly reviewing and cleaning the sales pipeline, businesses can optimize their sales process and increase their revenue.

Conclusion

Sales pipelines are a crucial tool for managing and tracking sales opportunities, and HubSpot offers one of the most powerful and user-friendly systems on the market. By defining your customer journey, customizing your deal stages, and utilizing HubSpot's automation and reporting features, you can take your sales pipeline to the next level.

Whether you're a business looking to streamline your sales process, a non-profit organization managing donations, a university tracking prospective students, or a real estate rental business prioritizing leads, HubSpot's sales pipeline system can help you optimize your efforts and close more deals.

By following the steps outline and leveraging the power of HubSpot's sales pipeline system, you can confidently manage and track your sales opportunities, make data-driven decisions, and ultimately close more deals. So, don't delay, start building your Sales Pipeline(s) today and supercharge your sales efforts!