How to Build a Cumulative Lead Funnel in HubSpot That Accounts for Skipped Stages | Clay

How to Build a Cumulative Lead Funnel in HubSpot That Accounts for Skipped Stages | Clay

Aaron J.
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Jad A. it might take a bit of testing, but Hubspot usually tracks datestamps specific to the stages in your pipeline; you could cohort by created date or last mql and then count where 'date marked SQL' is not blank. Alternatively use formula fields to create the 0/1 boolean for each stage, and use a workflow to stamp those fields (including prior stages in cases of skips)
Aman K.
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Used datestamps and cohort by create date and it was not pretty. Why is your reason for your process to hae leads skip stages? We had eventually decided to not have leads skip stages.
Jad A.
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Aman K. Yeah, thanks for the advice! We've considered that approach, but the main reason contacts skip stages is that our sales team doesn't always follow the process consistently🙄 How did you go about enforcing it on your end?
Aman K.
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Jad A. this is where I charge for my time. J/k.
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What u described is very common. And we couldn’t enforce initially.
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I did a few things to minimize friction.
talked to sales to understand why they were doing what they were doing. It was really that they were moving fast and didn’t remember. So we solved this by building a workflow that when a specific thing happened and it gets logged into system updates the stage. This only was possible once we locked down the definitions of each stage, actions in each stage and then used the system. This reduced most of the problems. It was really working with sales team to build the system for them.
We enforced/penalized sales team only if they never entered notes because I used words from the notes for my workflows.
There were flags built in where sales team couldn’t do certain actions if something critical was not updated. Because sometimes its really that members didnt remember updating so those flags helped.
I did weekly updates/standups with the team. Also, had office hours to understand what sales team was doing and where they were having issues. Most importantly, became good friends with the head of Sales team 😀 Depending on the size of the team you use different methods to solve. But I find the most important thing is to understand why sales is doing what they are doing and how are they using the tool so u use the tool to build systems and change behavior rather than expect people to follow orders. That’s a long answer and hope it helps. If u need quick help regarding system, we can connect so long we are abiding my this channel’s bylaws.
Jad A.
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Thank you so much! We recently transitioned from Salesforce, and sales people don't react well to change 😅 So I'm definitely going to have to make it easy and try to remove the choice from them as much as possible!
Hardi B.
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Hi Jad A. on HubSpot Funnel Report, except the 1st and the last step, other steps can be marked as optional. It means that you can allow contacts to skip the middle steps (MQL, SAL, SQL, for eg.)
Olga K.
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Jad A., this is a very common issue that every Marketing Ops person has to deal with at some point. My solution was to create a custom date stamp property for every stage e.g. Became MQL, Became SQL, Became Opportunity etc. Since you can edit custom properties, but can't edit system date-stamps, you can create workflows (or manually update) to populate these date-stamp fields. In cases when stages progress in the right order you can simply map system date-stamps too these custom date-stamps. if stages are skipped (e.g MQL goes directly to Opportunity, skipping SQL), you can copy Became Opportunity date to Became SQL etc. Ultimately, your custom "Became <stage>" date-stamp properrties become the foundation for your funnel reporting.