Gain Control Over Lead Management in Hubspot
Once a lead has been routed to sales, it's helpful to understand the limited number of potential outcomes that can occur. Since the same few options tend to repeat over and over again.
Why it’s important
Everyone likes to focus on the positive aspects, but it’s a fact of life that most leads are not going to close. The solution is relatively straight forward and so it’s worth asking yourself “what happens when sales and marketing is not immediately successful?”
Here are the downsides of ignoring lead situation outcomes:
Potential revenue is ignored. Unless you have a > 50% close rate, most of your leads will not close. It kills me to see teams totally ignore these once they make their way through the funnel. What’s stopping them from becoming customers? Why not try again with a different approach?
Marketing and sales energy is wasted. If a contact has converted on your page and had a deal created, they’ve experienced your sales and marketing, and hopefully had a positive experience. These contacts in a lot of ways are already primed for your product or service, since they're aware and were interested at one point. It’s worth another shot.
It’s guaranteed these situations are going to happen. Once nurture tracks are set up, automation takes care of the bulk of the work. Why not get this out of the way?
The most common things that will happen post-form submission
What will happen to the new lead that comes in? It’s probably one of these:
Likely situation #1 - They’re not a good fit and will never be.
Likely situation #2 - They’re not interested right now, but could be in the future.
Likely situation #3 - A deal was created for them, but it stalled out or was closed lost.
Likely situation #4 - A deal was created for them and it was closed won.
1 - They’re not a good fit and will never be.
Remove the contact, then mitigate longer-term issues with better marketing qualification, targeting, and data enrichment.
Delete the contact. More problems stem from keeping too many contacts around than removing them. The valuable goal is an engaged database, not a ton of people who are bad fits. Setting “Lead Status” to Disqualified and purging the database every month or quarter is a good practice.
Update the form fields you ask website visitors for. If the website visitors submitting are not qualified to your standards, use different or more form fields to filter them out. This is often the easiest solution and should be tried first.
Optimize the marketing approach. Once forms are handled, it may be good to review where these people are coming from (e.g. using Hubspot’s source properties, Google Search Console, etc.) and why they’re attracted by your website. From there, you can find ways to attract the right people and repel the wrong ones.
Assign a simple lead score (e.g. A, B, C) by taking into account basic demographic information (e.g. job role) and firmographic information (e.g. # of employees, annual revenue). This will create a fundamental structure for prioritizing leads, even if that’s not a critical need at the moment. It takes time to validate and looking back at what types of deals you win over time will hone this in.
2 - They’re not interested right now, but are a good fit.
Keep them as a contact and enroll them into slow-drip, targeted marketing campaigns.
Nurture them with as targeted information as possible. Have the salesteam set “Lead Status” to Nurture and “Lead Status - Nurture Reason” to the specific reason they need to be nurtured (e.g. they are aware they have a problem, but don’t realize you can solve it). From there, a simple workflow can enroll them and start sending relevant information over time.
Get reminded to check in. This is particularly useful when the salesperson has built significant rapport with the prospect. As a part of the marketing nurture, an “alert contact owner” action can be sent as a task to the sales person to send a personal reach out after a few months. They can choose to ignore it if not appropriate, but now that the contact has seen targeted information, they may be open to revisiting the sales conversation.
Review the most common nurture reasons and optimize sales and marketing as needed. What can you do to get sales and marketing assets to preemptively target the most common reasons contacts need nurture?
3 - A deal was created but it stalled out or was closed lost
Nurture relevant contacts, similar to those that aren’t interested at the moment.
The only difference between this and the previous step was that a deal wasn’t created, so the same ideas apply. In my mind, having a deal created just means these contacts likely feel more strongly about your product/solution.
Create nurture tracks for the ones with strongly positive feelings. Marketing and Sales should collaborate on how often outreach should be sent and what the content should focus on. The answers are probably in phone call recordings.
Tread carefully with the ones that have strongly negative feelings. These can be taken on a case by case basis. They may have had a bad experience with a salesperson, or maybe they are extremely sold on the idea that you’re not a good fit for them. Still, one major product update could totally reverse those feelings.
4 - A deal was created and it was closed won.
Ensure a smooth transition to Customer Success.
Onboard the new customer by ensuring all relevant information is handed off to the Customer Success team. This can be done via Hubspot automation (e.g. closed won onboarding automation) or by @mentioning the Customer Success team or owner.
Create retention and upsell customer marketing campaigns. Given the data is solid around customer status by product, Marketing and Customer Success teams can collaborate to create these opportunities.
Takeaways on lead management by situation
You may have additional scenarios, but the point remains - it’s good to have a clear plan for each.
Bad fits should likely be deleted for the near term, unless there’s a really good case to keep them around. It’s possible to stop attracting them by editing form fields (simple) and adjusting your marketing message (longer term). Simple lead scores can help sales prioritize good vs. bad leads.
Good fits who aren’t interested for whatever reason don’t necessarily need to be “burned to the ground”, but you might benefit from thoughtful, persistent outreach to them in case they’re more open in the future. Automate outreach with Lead Status and automated check in alerts. I’ve had success reviewing nurture reasons over time and optimizing marketing based off their performance.
Stalled deals are similar to non-interest, but often have stronger feelings about your company, products, services, employees, etc. I like to create ongoing outreach with this in mind.
Closed deals are often celebrated, without a plan for continued engagement. Beyond a smooth onboarding to Customer Success, there may be opportunity for upsell/cross-sell campaigns and customer marketing.
