How To Build Better Sales Handoffs In HubSpot
Each stage of a customers journey is a dependency to their success in the next.
Back in 2016, Ben McRedmond (then Director of Growth at Intercom) defined growth as a function of helping customers make progress in their lives, and a growth team as a group that solves business problems.
This week, I stumbled upon a post from Pavilion CEO, Sam Jacobs that compared old and new GTM motions. The sentiment of this post struck me as very similar to what Ben had shared 8 years ago.
The operating cadence of the business is built around GTM not any one department.
Today, the lines between the traditional business functions of marketing, sales, and customer success don't align with the holistic experience customers expect and it’s the GTM operators role to fix it. That’s what we’ll be exploring together each week.
Individual business functions may be responsible for isolated stages of the customer experience, but the most effective GTM motions are deeply connected throughout the journey.
Let's start by exploring the connection between sales and the newest entrant to GTM: customer success.
Want a more connected GTM motion - start with your handoffs
The handoffs between your people, process, and tools can make or break your entire GTM motion.
When your handoff process isn’t adopted by your internal teams, you battle incomplete customer data, a lack of accountability for customer experience, and a sprawling array of ad hoc processes.
When your handoffs leave customers guessing, you’ll get pushed down their list of priorities, adoption will stall, and ultimately churn will follow. But it doesn’t have to be that way. What if…
→ Customers knew exactly what to expect before the deal closed
→ Your post-sale teams had everything they need to maintain momentum
→ Leadership always had visibility into the progress customers were making
Use these 5 principles to avoid customers (and a whole lot of 💰💰💰) becoming a churn risk before going live!
1. Introduce the next stage of the journey early. Set onboarding expectations in the sales process to align the work everyone involved needs to do with the value delivered as a result.
→ Align and documented the plan
→ Introduce the post-sale team
→ Identify who will be accountable
2. Clearly define the internal handoff process. Don’t leave handoffs to chance, define and document who needs to do what and when.
→ What information is required from customers
→ Who needs to be in communication
→ When customers should be introduced
3. Put guardrails in place. Not everyone will follow the golden path, just make sure they don't fail silently.
→ Add required fields in your CRM
→ Send an automated reminder when things get off track
→ Add a manual check of information before looping in the customer
4. Provide transparency. Everyone is busy, things slip through the cracks, but there’s nothing worse than not knowing what’s next for your team or the customer.
→ Share a collaborative action plan with the customer (Try Arrows if you use HubSpot)
→ Assign and communicate action items
→ Set due dates aligned to the target go-live
5. Create a feedback loop. Handoffs aren’t a set-it-and-forget-it item. Build a system that keeps everyone in the loop on what is going well and what can be improved.
→ Add a report visible to sales & onboarding for time from close to live revenue
→ Add a report for time from close to onboarding started
→ Provide space for teams on either side of the handoff to provide feedback
Step-by-step HubSpot handoff automation
This HubSpot workflow will help you enforce a repeatable sales handoff process and remove the need for manual data entry (and error).
We get very little information about the customer from {insert cross-functional silo here}... which puts us in a bad position from the get go."
Because let's face it, no one likes copy + pasting data in the CRM.
Here’s how it works step-by-step:
1. Trigger the workflow automatically using the “When an event occurs” type
Trigger Criteria: The “Deal Stage” property has a new value of any of "Closed Won (Sales Pipeline)”
💡 Use required fields to verify critical properties are updated (Principle #3 Guardrails)
2. Use an AND/OR logic branch to check all the data we want to handoff to our post-sale team is available
Action: Create a branch called “Handoff Data Ready” that checks if:
1. “Deal Owner” is known
2. “Amount” is known
3. “Business Goals” is known
4. “Stakeholders” is known
5. Deal is associated to: “Any Contact” and associated Contact has all of: “Is Onboarding Point Person” is any of “Yes”
💡 If you’re integrating call recording software such as Grain with your HubSpot account you can automatically populate deal properties such as “Stakeholders” with data extracted from calls transcripts using AI.
💡 The final check ☝️ makes sure you always have an appropriate associated contact on the deal to communicate with post-close, as the primary contact in implementation is often different than the champion during the sales process.
3. IF all the data is set: Create a renewal deal
Action: Create a record with the type “Deal” assigned to the existing owner of the deal, the deal name should use the format “{{Deal Name}} - Renewal {{ Close Year }}”, the Deal Pipeline and Stage will be “6-12 Months (Renewal Pipeline)” and the close date will be in 365 days for annual renewals.
You can also set and copy additional properties to power renewal automations and provide more context.
1. Set “Deal Type” to “Renewal”
2. Copy “Amount” from the deal property “Amount”
3. Copy “Business Goal” from the deal property “Business Goal”
4. Copy “Sales Deal Name” from the deal property “Deal Name”
💡 If you have a separate account management team who handles renewals you can assign the new renewal deal to them by creating a custom user property for deals and selecting it when you assign the record.
4. IF all the data is set: Create an onboarding ticket
Action: Create a record with the type of “Ticket” with the name “{{ Deal Name }}” in the Ticket Pipeline and stage of “Ready for Onboarding (Onboarding Pipeline)” and assign it to no one (we’ll automatically assign the ticket using a synced user property from the company record).
To make sure the onboarding team have everything they need we can also copy the property values of our required handoff fields to the newly created ticket:
1. Copy “Business Goal” from the deal property “Business Goal”
2. Copy “Stakeholders” from the deal property “Stakeholders”
3. Copy “Migration Required” from the deal property “Data Migration Required”
4. Copy “Competing Solutions” from the deal property "Competing Solutions”
💡 We’ll soon be able to replace many of these copied properties in a workflow with synced properties from the onboarding ticket. But to ensure we are syncing properties from the correct deal we need to add an association label which at the time of writing (May 2024) must be done manually until the workflow action is released in public beta.
5. IF all the data is set: Update the associated primary company record.
Action: Copy property value from the Deal “Amount” to the “ARR” property on the Primary Associated Company record.
💡 We can use this ARR property to report on company revenue, account expansions, and contractions.
6. IF all the data is set: Send an internal notification via Slack or email
Action: Send Slack notification to celebrate the new deal closing AND share some context on what this customer is hoping to achieve. For example:
”🏆 A new account ({{ Deal Name }}) is ready for onboarding!
They're hoping to achieve: {{ Business Goals }}”
7. BUT if data is missing: Create a task to escalate the account for review
Action: Create task with the title “Missing Handoff Data”, due immediately, and assigned to the deal owner. Set the priority to high and include all the required properties from step 2 and their values in the task note using the format: Property Name: {{ Property Value }}
Building a repeatable (and automated) process for sales handoffs lays the foundation for a connected workflow for your internal team and a connected customer experience that drives customer expansion.
Create a buying experience that makes customers' life easier and in turn they’ll help you close deals, avoid pipeline bottlenecks, and get to live revenue faster 🤑
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Thanks Stuart! Under step 5, you have the duplication of a property for ARR. When you say we can use this to "report on company revenue, account expansions, and contractions."—what form does that take?
Assuming subsequent renewals will overwrite the value for ARR on the associated company, how do you track growth or expansion when the property value is going to be changed by this workflow?
Very useful, thanks