Why we create Hubspot Deals on EVERY inbound lead AND outbound prospect that a salesperson is working

Do you do this already? OR do you wait until they are at a certain level of qualification before making the deal?

Those coming to Hubspot from Salesforce will be more used to the latter. When this happens in Hubspot though, we’re often blind to the data we need to make key decisions.

Here’s the key benefits we’ve found so far:

📈 REPORTING is much easier and extensive using Deals than using Contact lead properties—1) giving you a better view of conversion from Lead > Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)> Marketing Accepted Lead (MAL) > Sales Qualified Lead (SQL), and 2) making SDR pipeline reviews easier, and 3) aligning Marketing and Sales reporting

🎯IDENTIFYING YOUR MOST SUCCESSFUL CHANNELS: no deal should exist without a deal source, and when you have this, you can easily see your most successful channels and how they convert through the funnel. You will need to set this up as a custom property and set it on every new Deal (using workflows or direct in your integrations (but try and keep everything in Hubspot where you can)

💰ROI TRACKING: using deal sources allows us to work out ROI (time & money) for our inbound and outbound strategies/channels/tools

🔄MARKETING FEEDBACK LOOP: closed lost reasons tell us tons about the quality and behaviour of marketing leads, split by channel. Hubspot comes with Closed Lost Reasons as a default property but it's a text field—so to get proper quantitative data moving forwards you'll need to create dropdown options. If you have a backlog of qualitative text reasons, you can run these through ChatGBT and ask them to segment your reasons into groups

🖼️ GETTING THE WHOLE PICTURE: having deals for every MQL activity a lead does in their lifetime helps you better understand the whole sales cycle. You could choose to use the Lead Object instead, which is not a BAD option, but it does make life harder when you're trying to use conversion funnel reports to track conversion from MQL to Closed Won

🙅🏻‍♂️ AVOIDING HUBSPOT LIMITATIONS: using Hubspot’s Lifecycles for tracking is often extremely limiting and doesn’t work well for repeat MQLs. In fact, using deals allows you to build your own dynamic custom lifecycle stages 😏

⚠️SIGNPOSTING TO COLLEAGUES: a live deal on a contact is a sure sign that this lead is ACTIVE and someone is already speaking to them, which prevents mistakes

⏱️TIME TO CONTACT: allows you to work out an accurate “Response time to inbound MQLs” and set trackable goals to boost conversion—which you can read more about in our How-to guide here

How do you track your leads in Hubspot? We're always keen to learn new things!