Alright. Approaching the life cycle stage discovery. So as the name suggests, we are gonna be collecting a lot of key informations before we move on to the build phase. So during the discovery phase, we are gonna first know who are the stakeholders that are involved and how do we actually conduct the discovery workshop directly, and what do we actually do during the discovery workshop.

And the fun part, defining life cycle stages and its triggers. And then finally, what are the actions that you need to be taking place during the discovery workshop itself. So first part is the key stakeholders. Who are the key stakeholders?

So this will be, generally speaking, leadership folks and any other relevant champions or members of the following teams that is marketing, sales, customer success and operations. So these needs to be involved. So please make a list of all of the relevant people in your organization, whoever in in these following departments, and make sure you have a time slot booked with them. Generally, it will be a one hour workshop, so you get full alignment with them.

Next part is conducting your discovery workshop. And before that, we will first prepare for the workshop.

And once your preparations are done, your pre work is done, then you will actually run the workshop. Once you have finished your workshop call, then finally you will align with your stakeholders asynchronously and if needed, you also may need to do another workshop as needed. So before we jump on to the actual discovery workshop sheet template and jump on to that and actually see how do you fill the information before the discovery workshop happens, during the discovery workshop, and after it. So how do you work through that?

Let's talk through some of the outlines of the discovery workshop. So first part is defining the lifecycle stages. What do they mean for your unique organization? Because there are definitely general definitions of MQL, SQL, and other things.

But how do you define that? And are all of your stakeholders aligned with that definition?

Because we don't want a further chaos when we are building out the systems that, hey. I thought MQL was supposed to be x and SQL was supposed to be that. So we don't want these discussions to happen. That's why we are conducting a full workshop to get an alignment on these things.

And second is collecting the trigger. So what are the triggers that happens in your HubSpot instance that will promote a contact from one life cycle stage to another? And remember, they cannot move backwards, which we will cover more in the next video, but we set the expectation upfront. Finally, once we have noted down all of the definitions, alignment on those definitions and the triggers, we now need to align on what needs to happen once a contact or a company reaches a particular life cycle stage.

Do we need to send a Slack message to a particular Slack channel or do we need to assign a task or do we need to rotate this contact to the sales, account executive or do we need to create an onboarding ticket? So all sort of these things. So these are couple of things that you will be running in your workshop. So once you have collected all of the names and emails and relevant information of all of the stakeholders, now it's time to actually run the workshop.

And before you do that, again, we have to do some pre work ourself so that we save time and effort during our workshop and we can get right to the point and be as productive as much as possible. So let's jump on to the discovery workshop sheet template and I'll walk you through how that looks like. Alright. So you can see the first column is lifecycle stage, your unique definition, stakeholder alignment trigger one, two, three, four, and as needed, but don't try to go overboard.

Try to keep it as simple as possible. As you can see, there is a adoption and version control sheet, which we will be covering more in-depth during the last part of the video. So don't be afraid to keep it as simple as possible because this will be an agile and iterative process. It's not a set it and forget thing that you do just once and be done about that because your business is constantly growing and evolving.

Thus your systems and processes specifically with regards to life cycle status needs to evolve and grow with it. As you know, CRM is a product and not a project, so think of it that way. Then we have an action sheet, and you can see the same app for a company and for, actions for the company. So you have triggers and action both for contacts and company.

So four different sheets that you will be filling out. So first things first, make a copy of this sheet. I'll be providing this, the resources. Please check the link to the resources to get this sheet template and, make a copy and get started.

So first thing is what life cycle stage do you have right now and what do you want? So I have color coded this. Blue are mostly owned by marketing, red is mostly owned by sales, and green is mostly owned by customer success.

Again, all of the departments impact every single stage at some capacity, but this is to, you know, create a clear alignment between these three team and have a set of ownership.

So you can name whatever life cycle stage you have. Subscriber lead, MQL. I'm just keeping it simple what HubSpot provide, but in your case, subscriber could be a a general contact or a prospect, which is fine. So you can have that.

And then every single definition that you know of. Please note that down. So for my case, a subscriber is a general contact that our organization interacts with. Lead is, you know, converted on our website and showed some kind of intent, but very light intent.

A marketing qualified lead is, heavy intent one where they are ready to engage with the sales team, but have not yet talked to a salesperson yet. So sales qualified is a person who has actually had a chat with our sales team and, met and qualified as a potential customer. So now we can promote them to an opportunity and they actually have a deal associated with them. That moves us on to the next phase which is a customer who is basically a contact with at least one closed won deal, Alive in my case, and this moves on to Beyond customer.

So in your HubSpot instance, you might be seeing just these. So don't worry about this. We can always create custom lifecycle stage. You just have to be cognizant about that.

In next video, we will be actually covering how do we create and edit lifecycle stages, move those around, and then build the automation surrounding this. So rest assured, this is coming. So live is a fully onboarded customer. Impact is a very variable one.

It has to have a lot of discussion within your internal teams. But basically, whatever purpose the customer bought your product for or your service for, they have now achieved that particular impact. So maybe it was for increasing revenue, cutting costs, or improving their operations, increasing efficiency, employee retention, Whatever service line or or product line you might be in, impact is gonna be that particular stage. It's really hard to track, but generally speaking, the trigger is onboarding is completed, and you have received a positive NPS or something like that.

LTV is a customer who has renewed and decided to stay with you for another year or another two years based on whatever contract length you have and so on. And then you have this column for stakeholder alignment. Basically, you noted all of these down And now during the call, you will be asking your stakeholders, are we all aligned on these? And whatever they're not aligned on, you can quickly share the sheet with them and ask them to comment what they are not aligned with and, you know, you can circle back on this. And then trigger, you need to enter the exact triggers that needs to happen that will move a particular contact from one life cycle stage to another. Companies, the concept is the exact same thing. The triggers and the conditions might be different, so I won't be covering that because it will be redundant.

For actions, again, same thing but in a different flavor. So once someone becomes MQL, what happens after that? Do you send internal emails? Do you create a task?

Do you, enroll the lead in a particular workflow? What happens when they're an opportunity? Okay. So we create a deal, and then we assign that deal to a sales manager or team.

And then we generate a summary email or whatever. Like, these are some example things I've written. It's not necessarily stuck in stone just for your inspiration.

And then what happens when they are a customer? Do we create a onboarding ticket or send them acknowledgement marketing email, like a congrats email or a sign up email? What happens when they have successfully completed their onboarding or they are live in your system or product or whatever they have bought from you? What happens when they reach the impact phase?

So they have successfully finished or achieved whatever they were trying to achieve. It's really hard to track, but if you can nail it, it's really powerful. And LTV, you celebrate in your Slack team or whatever. So please make it your own.

Write down as much actions as you can think of. And if you cannot, then let your stakeholders write those. So this is how you'll run your, successful discovery workshop. And once your workshop is finished, you will send a recap email to all of your stakeholders aligning them with all of the assets that you have and all of the documentations that you have done so far and move forward with that.

And if there is any misalignment, please collaborate with them and get it aligned before we move on to build. So that's pretty much it. I wish you a very good luck on your next discovery workshop and stay awesome. Keep doing it big.

I'll see you in the next video. Bye.