Hi. I'm Frank Devine, solutions engineer here at RevPartners, and wanted to put together a quick video. I run into a common, objection when I am presenting the documentation that I create to, prospects. Typically, it's like an SOW or proposal.

And then they see line items in there that are called out, and they say, Frank, it's really cool. Thanks for putting this all together, but you said that we need to do sales stages. We already have sales stages. Why do we have to spend time on it again?

And, realistically, all that is doing is highlighting a fundamental flaw in how they think about their CRM in general.

What we talk about here at RevPartners is that your CRM is a product.

It's not a project.

Nobody asks Apple why they come out with a new iPhone every year. It's because you know it's a product. It's getting better. They're always adding new things.

Your CRM is the same way. And particularly things like sales stages, they're gonna be semi dynamic. Things will change with time. You should get a better understanding, and you may need to tweak things as you go through.

So wanted to just walk through quickly how we help our clients here at RevPartners with this. So sales stages, we know what they are. It's the steps of a repeatable sales process.

And as research has shown, you're gonna be much more successful if you have a structured sales process and you're following it and you are iterating on it. These are important pieces of your business. You should take it seriously.

It's gonna help you in those ways that you see there. And not everybody has an opportunity to work with us. So I wanted to share on this video, if you're not able to, or you're thinking about going through this process, here are some of the best practices and, common errors that we see people make. So you can start to think about these two as you evaluate your whole process.

First off, sales motions. If you've got varying sales motions, each one of those needs to be a separate pipeline. So renewals, for example, if you do channel or partner sales, those should be separate pipelines. You can't combine them all.

Second, it's the buyer's journey, not the salesperson's experience. It's tempting to say like, okay, salesperson, move it to here and then to there and then to there and title the stages based on what action you want the sales rep to take. But it's important to map this to the buyer's journey. It's what that person who's evaluating you, the steps that they need to go through to make a decision.

So with that said, the next three sort of all fall into different things to watch out for. No prospecting allowed. Prospecting is not a part of your sales funnel from the perspective of sales stages. It's it's beyond the funnel.

It's it's the very top outside of it. So don't have a prospecting stage. We're a fake stages. These are typically gonna be those sales actions that you've put into your pipeline, well intentioned, but not delivering the right results.

And I'll show you how to identify those in a little bit. And then lastly, no zombies. These are those undead living dead deals, things that fizzled out, but a sales rep just doesn't wanna get rid of them yet. So you create a stage for them called nurture or holding or long term.

It's all the way to the right after close lost. That's just a dumping ground for deals, and it's not best practice. So don't include those.

Now when it comes to actually walking through this process, at RevPartners, we wanna have a very consistent repeatable process for taking our clients through this. So first off, we're gonna spend a lot of time in the discover phase, understand your business, who your clients are, and how to craft that buyer's journey, as well as what are all the data points that we need to collect along the way. Then we'll go through building that out into HubSpot and then delivering it and measuring it. So it's not just building your sales stages. It's building in the reporting and the training that goes along with it to make sure that adoption is happening.

It's really not that difficult to put this all together. And, realistically, what you're going for is an output that looks something like this. In one quick view, you can see your full sales cycles or excuse me, sales stages with all of your entry and exit criteria.

So we could understand exactly how people get into the funnel, where they may fall out along the bottom here, and how they ultimately end up in closed one.

So getting to this state step isn't that difficult, really. You can use something like Google Sheets. It's great because it's collaborative, so you can get other stakeholders involved as you go through defining all of these different pieces. And once it's then built, it's real easy to jump into HubSpot and take what you've defined in that spreadsheet and implement it here.

So you can find the deal setup by clicking the gear icon, coming down to objects, and then deals. And then under pipelines is where you wanna go. This is where you're gonna establish your sales stages. You'll put in your sales stages.

You'll make your probabilities. You'll add your pipeline rules. You'll add all of your required fields. You can even do cool things like, I wanna prevent deals from moving backwards in the funnel.

I can prevent deals from being made in any stage other than stage one. You can prevent deals from being edited once they reach closed won or closed loss. These types of things are, again, new features that HubSpot has released because HubSpot knows it's a product too. And so they're constantly developing this platform for you.

Once your sales stages are set up, you now have the access to great new reporting that is available to you. So I wanna just, show off three quick ones that I like.

The first one is deal stages with skips. We've all heard about, well, I wanna see good conversion rates. I wanna know when things are going through the funnel. But being able to see when dealers skipping stages is also really useful because remember I said watch out for fake stages. So we can see right here in this example, almost every deal is skipping this stage called decision maker bought in. That sounds more like maybe a sales action than an actual step in the buyer's journey, and that's why reps are skipping it. So as you're going through this process, you now learn this isn't a necessary stage, and we can remove it and go through another iteration of our sales stages.

Additionally, HubSpot has several cool new types of reports as well. I love the pipeline waterfall, being able to see where you started, where you ended, in a month, in a quarter, but then also being able to dig into what deals went up in size, which ones decreased, what was won and what was lost. So you can really get a finite view of what happened.

And then this one is just the coolest. The the deal journey report allowing you to look at each and every stage. What happened to the deals that hit that stage? Where did they go?

Did they fall out of the funnel? Did they go to close loss? Did they go to close won? Really different views of your business.

So what I say to those people say, Frank, why is this necessary? I I don't wanna have to go through this again.

I would challenge you right back and say, do you have this level of visibility?

Do you have this understanding of your sales stage sales process? Do you have documentation in place for all these things? If you don't, then this absolutely makes sense to do for you and your organization.

And maybe do this annually even. It's something that's important, and so you shouldn't just leave it to chance or set it and forget it.

So if you enjoyed this video, please let me know. Drop a a comment if you agree or if you disagree. If you think I'm totally wrong, I'd love to have that conversation too. But if you wanna see how RevPartners can help you improve your experience in HubSpot, hit us up at the link below. Thanks.