Lead Statuses – How to use them, best practices and what not to do!
I’ve audited and worked with numerous Hubspot accounts and come across over complicated processes and poorly implemented Hubspot systems. A few pointers for various scenarios on what not to do, and suggested solutions
Setting up and defining your lead statuses for an organisation is one of the most important tasks to get right and requires some thought. Get the sales department and marketing team together and work as a team to define the lead statuses. Before I recommend how to customise your lead statuses, here are a few guidelines, DO’s and DONT’s to get you started.
A. Don’t Create More Lead Statuses than Necessary
Don’t Abuse Lead Statuses. It’s easy to get carried away and create too many lead statuses. Often this is the contact property that becomes the default for all situations. For example, on some occasions I have seen over 30 lead statuses.
A real life Scenario: A company were using lead statuses to represent the a new campaign, in this case created a lead status called ‘New 2020’ which respresented ‘high value’ leads which were imported into the system for a new campaign. Of course they needed to be differentiated from the existing leads, when filtering and adding contacts to task queues. So they had created a new lead status called ‘SALES NEW 2020’ Sounds ok, but you can see how the lead statuses could grow very quickly, every time new leads were imported or required to be segmented by campaign. It would get cumbersome with a huge ‘lead status’ drop down list!
In this situation, it is much better to create a new custom text field to represent the campaign, say ‘CAMPAIGN NAME’. Give it the value ‘HIGH VALUE JAN 2020’. You can then filter on the custom field, add it as a column in your contacts view and off you go with your call task queues!
B. Make the names Obvious. What’s in a Name? (Lead Status name)
May sound like an obvious one, but I’ve seen some very generic and ambiguous lead statuses where people have even used acronyms as lead statuses. Ensure that the lead status names are obvious and easy to understand. * You still need to describe your lead statuses in a document so the whole team have a common understanding. Just a side note, I did see a contact filter called ‘FILTER 1′ and FILTER 2’
C. Assign a Hubspot Administrator
You really need a Hubspot administrator to manage day to day issues with Hubspot. They need to be Hubspot trained and preferably be certified in Hubspot. This role would centrally approve changes to processes, add and modify custom fields, add workflows update the Hubspot definition document and inform all Hubspot users of future changes and how the will effect the saels and marketing team. It’s ok to have an admin person from sales and marketing to work together.
Lead Status is a lead management tool. Every business is different so, will always vary depending on the lead process., but it allow you to customize the different “stages” Put simply, the Lead Status is used for indicating what’s next for the sales rep for this contact, rather than who the contact is, or what the contact has done on the website.
According to HubSpot Academy’s page about lead status, “The default options for the Lead Status property are New, Open, In Progress, Open Deal, and Unqualified, but this property can be customized to work with your sales team and process.”
I propose changing the default lead statuses to something like this. This will create smarter better lead management in HubSpot CRM.
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New (Inbox)
This is the Inbox that should be checked and cleared every day. No contact should live in this status for more than 3 business days.
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Connect & Qualify (Actively Working)
This is the Connect & Qualify Queue. These are the prospects that are being actively researched. The Sales staff are currently attempting or are in contact with the prospect. The goal here is not to generate a sales opportunity, but to determine if there is an opportunity.
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Open Deal
This status removes the lead from the Connect & Qualify Queue, and should reflect the current open deals.
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Check Back Quarterly
There could be an opportunity here someday. Accounts with this status should be checked on each quarter.
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Dead Opportunity
Accounts where a deal falls through, but could have happened should live in this section and “re-prospected” from time to time.
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Bad Fit
For whatever reason, the prosppects are not a good fit for your business, so no need to keep on chasing. Don’t waste time onthese prospects – maybe add them to a email sequence as a final good bye.
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Current Customer
This is to avoid accidentally working on current customers
Startadesign helps companies onboard Hubspot CRM with our Hubspot consultancy services; marketing and Sales Hub and assist with data planning, cleansing and importing data, integrations and setting up custom data properties
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