Managing deals of various shapes and sizes with HubSpot

When a company signs business deals, the large ones are relatively easy to monitor. They have a start date and an end date and come as a package. But others are not as easy to gauge. A company may get smaller orders from the same company at various points during the year, but tracking them is not as easy as simply adding them to the pipeline. It may be a different department or a different requirement. And the company getting the deals needs to assess future potential based on experience as well.

This was one of the questions that came up in the HubSpot community as a query: A. Hemingway wrote: We are in the early stages of implementing HubSpot and are currently struggling to determine how best to structure deals in the pipeline.

Our business typically creates opportunities with an end-user that are of an annual value (e.g., $100K), but rarely do we get an order for the full value. For example, the $100K may be broken down into a small first order, followed by routine monthly orders, that then comprise the full $100K deal over 12 months.

The issue we have right now is that if we break the deals down into multiple smaller deals, we lose visibility of the larger deal at play. If we enter the full annual deal value and mark it as close-won after receipt of the first order, we are seeing closed-won value for the full annual deal value rather than the first order, thus impacting forecasting.

Tracking deals, even from the same client which may be geographically spread or orders from various departments need to be structured well to capture annual aggregated value. That needs to be set up within HubSpot

As a business, we have an issue monitoring whether the annual value of a deal is realized in full after 12 months or whether ultimately the full-year deal is more or less than originally stated when closed-won. When the first orders are received, a rep would typically move onto the next deal and maybe lose focus on realizing the full annual deal value.

Monitoring deal sizes of differing value from the same client

Hannah Fisher came up with the following accepted solution: Based on the information you have given, and trying to keep it as simple and out-of-the-box as possible, I would suggest taking a look at Line items. 

You can add each of the orders as a line item using the “billing start date” to capture the date this revenue is expected to come in - which can then be used to build out your revenue report. Additionally, if it is a piece of recurring revenue, your “billing frequency” property can be set to “monthly" to denote this. 

A custom calculation property can be created that sums up the value of the associated line items, and a second custom calculation property can be created to subtract this value from the set Deal amount to see the outstanding amount of potential value within each Deal. 

Further, Quotes could be used to show you which of the line items associated with the Deal are linked to each order.

What happens when partners and associates are involved?

Here was another situation connected to deals. A company’s revenue came largely from partner and associate channels. Then, how could HubSpot be used to track deals?

Kili Siri asked: What's the best way to make sure that partners (e.g., distributors, system integrators, etc.) can easily share all the possible deals they are working on in our pipeline?

Extending the reach of deals beyond a company’s systems would require cooperation from partners, a willingness to share information and making diverse systems to unite along a common foundation

We are also trying to capture the potential value that our partners are working on in our CRM, whether the partner is also using HubSpot or not.

Ben M, suggested the following solution, which was accepted: There are potentially many disparate systems in play. I would reach out to some of your larger partners and try to figure out what they are using to measure their pipeline. Knowing that is the first step. They may be able to provide you with exports that you can use to look at individual opportunities or as a collective from their system as a larger opportunity in yours (ie: summary of all of their opportunities in their territory).  That could give you some initial insights.

Longer term, you will likely go down the path of building an API from their system to your HubSpot. Or consider looking for shared online storage where you could use an API to pull and store the information in a data warehouse (ie: Snowflake, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud).  Then you would layer a visualization engine on top of that to produce your reports (ie: Tableau, Sisense, Power BI, Qlik).

A Kjemtruk, responding to this solution, said that their company was considering the following: I am looking to share our Pipeline view with our investors and board members. Ideally, I would like to send them a view-only link to the pipeline. Is there an easy way of doing that, or does that require them all to have HubSpot profiles?

Schaefer suggested that the following options could be considered, even if exporting directly from HubSpot is currently not possible: Two alternatives would be to 1) export the view of your pipeline from the Deals menu and share your export with your investors and board members, and 2) Create deal-related reports in HubSpot and export their data to share with non-users.

You can contact expert consultants from Blueoshan to structure and streamline your deal pipelines. Based on your existing processes, we can work out optimal ways to manage both reporting and monitoring deals. 

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Blueoshan is a HubSpot Diamond -Tier Solutions Partner. Delivering worldwide from India