How To Setup Your Hubspot CRM for Early Stage Startups

Managing customer relationships is a critical task for any business, but it can be especially challenging for early-stage startups.

Hubspot, Salesforce, and Pipedrive are some of the most commonly used CRMs by early-stage startups.

I have always used Hubspot and Salesforce and if you are thinking of one, I’d say Hubspot. (disclaimer, Hubspot doesn’t pay me a dime).

Introduction

Before we dive into the details, let’s briefly discuss the importance of setting up a CRM for your startup. A CRM system helps you manage your customer interactions, automate your sales processes, and improve your marketing efforts.

With a CRM, you can track leads, monitor the progress of your deals, and analyze your sales data to improve your sales strategy. This is why setting up a CRM system, such as Hubspot, is crucial for the success of your startup.

However, it is important to avoid unnecessary features that may make the system redundant. Salespeople are often resistant to using CRM, so as a leader, it is essential to set it up properly to encourage their adoption.

Things to Avoid When Setting Up Your Hubspot CRM

Here are some quick tips to avoid over-structuring your CRM:

1. Have no more than two pipelines: new business and existing business. Having too many pipelines can be overwhelming and difficult to manage.

2. Avoid adding too many properties, workflows, and dashboards. Instead, keep it simple and focus on the most important information.

3. However, ensure that you don’t miss any mandatory properties. This could cause issues down the line, such as inaccurate reporting or incomplete data.

Setting Up

New Business Pipeline

The new business pipeline is where you track and trace all your new business acquisition sales cycle. Here’s what you need to include:

• Deal type (new or existing)

• Closed date (from the discovery stage)

• Amount (from the discovery stage)

• Anything else that is crucial for your business to track during the sales cycle.

It’s important to ensure that each step is active and that you move deals into the next step when the action has happened.

For example, the deal should move to the demo stage only when the demo has been delivered.

Existing Business Pipeline

Once the deal is won, you can move into the existing business sales cycle.

Create an automation that, as soon as the deal hits the closed won stage in the new business pipeline, you create a record in the existing business pipeline under the stage “new.”

Then onboarding, live, churn, renewal and upsell. All stages need to be tracked and used by your account management or customer success team.

• New: new clients

• Onboarding: deals you are onboarding;

• Live: deals that have hit their first usage milestone;

• Churn: deals you are dealing with cancellations or not happy;

• Upsell: deals you are upselling;

Dashboard & Reports

Here again, less is more. I would recommend max 3 dashboards.

Revenue & Pipeline

Here, you should track all of your closed-won deals, pipeline creation, deals won by reps, and deals created by reps. Each of these reports should be created weekly or monthly, not daily.

Activities

We want to view all emails, calls, and contacts created, as well as all activities grouped by the representative and in total.

Conversions

Compare new leads to those in the discovery stage, and compare those in the discovery stage to those in the proposal stage. Finally, compare those in the proposal stage to successfully won deals. Additionally, track each step of your sales cycle using the funnel reporting feature on Hubspot. The funnel report provides a wealth of incredible data, making it an invaluable tool for analysing your sales process.

Conclusion

Setting up your Hubspot CRM can be overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be.

Most of the time you don’t even need expensive agencies or implementation costs. It can be done by your head of sales or sales ops person.

Remember, the key is to keep it simple and focus on the most important information.

With the right system setup in place, you can streamline your sales processes and drive business growth and scale your startup faster.