ClearPivot

New podcast episode now live. 🤘 Maia Morgan Wells and I tag-teamed on this episode to interview Travis Johnson, who runs marketing operations for @VELO3DMetal. We talk through the operational side of marketing: the systems, the data, and the processes.

We migrated our @ClearPivot quote-to-cash process 💸 from Adobe Document Cloud and Quickbooks into @HubSpot last year. We built out quote templates in HubSpot for the 3 main ways we do contracts: ➡️Time & materials contract with a project deposit ➡️Retainer contract with first month’s payment included ➡️Retainer contract with first month billed separately Our time & materials contracts line-item out 10-20 hours of pre-paid time on a pre-payment table as part of the contract document. After us and the client both sign the contract, then a Pay Now button on the contract becomes functional for them to complete the pre-payment. After that, we start the project and then do our remaining invoicing through Quickbooks, with the pre-paid amount subtracted from the next subsequent invoice. Our retainer contracts work the same way for signature and payment, except instead of a specific pre-payment amount, the payment amount is for the first month’s retainer billing. We then set up the following months’ retainer billing as a recurring invoice in Quickbooks. We might at some point move those recurring invoices into running through HubSpot as well. For time & materials contracts and retainer contracts with the first month’s payment included, we don’t mark the deal in our HubSpot pipeline as Closed Won until after the contract is signed and paid. A signature alone is not sufficient for logging the deal as won! We use the retainer contract template with the first month billed separately for unique circumstances, such as when a client’s legal/procurement department needs to manually sign a PDF version of the invoice or needs to process the contract through their own internal document signature tool. In cases like that, we’ll generate a manual invoice in Quickbooks to accompany our HubSpot-generated contract. But it’s a more cumbersome process, so we try to avoid it where possible. We’re rolling out this quote-to-cash functionality in HubSpot to our clients as well: we recently built out a series of 6 custom quote templates for one of our clients who also does professional services work like us. We built out functions like project description fields, payment schedules, line-item tables, supplemental services, and change orders. 🛠️ A lot of this functionality only became possible in the HubSpot quotes tool within the last year. It’s been exciting to see it develop! We’ll definitely be leaning in to building out more quote-to-cash processes in HubSpot for clients going forward. How do you run your quote-to-cash process at your company? What processes and systems do you run for it? I’d love to compare notes. #quotetocash #cpq #crm #hubspot #revops

I recorded a whole podcast episode on how we run our @ClearPivot sales pipeline, and why. Check it out here: YouTube: youtu.be/mq5gN0JMJU0?si=Exq2… Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas… Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/4DP…

We used to have a “Put On Hold” deal stage in our @ClearPivot sales pipeline. But we recently decided to eliminate it. When we’re selling to other companies, timing and priorities are big factors in the sales process. Oftentimes deals can get moved back by a couple of weeks to even a couple of months due to new priorities or initiatives being asked of our points of contact at the prospect companies. Or sometimes they have to wait for the next quarterly or even fiscal year budget cycle to have the funds to start a project with us. So we originally had created a Put On Hold stage in our HubSpot deal pipeline as a place to store deals in that state. But we eventually found that it was way too easy for deals to just pile up in that stage and rarely looked at again. And it’s especially easy (emotionally) to just mark a deal as Put On Hold rather than admitting to yourself that it’s more likely just Closed Lost altogether. So we eliminated the Put On Hold stage, and now we either keep deals in an active pipeline stage or move them to Closed Lost. If a prospect asks to push a deal back a few weeks due to other projects on their end, but we feel that they’re actually genuinely still interested, we’ll keep the deal in the pipeline in the Explore stage or one of the other active pipeline stages. If the prospect is pushing the deal out and we’re not getting any sense of urgency from them about it, we’ll just suck it up and mark it as Closed Lost, so that the deal isn’t just sitting there giving us a false sense of hope that “it will close one day eventually.” When we mark a deal as Closed Lost, we’ll make a task for ourselves to follow with that prospect in a few months to see how things are going with the road they chose for themselves. If they’re interested in resuming the conversation, we’ll then move the deal out of Closed Lost and back onto an active deal stage. How do you handle manage timeframe pushbacks with your prospects? How do you decide the criteria for keeping active deals in your pipeline? Post a comment below - I’d love to compare notes. #RevOps #RevenueOperations #Sales #SalesPipeline #HubSpot #Salesforce #CRM

We’ve been going deep into CRM implementation and RevOps services at @ClearPivot this year, and we’ve been learning the art of process mapping as part of it. I had never done it before this year, so it has been an exciting new journey for us. 🤓

The biggest stage in our ClearPivot sales process is the second stage: the Explore stage. This stage comes after the initial “coffee date” Connect call. It’s where we do the full dive into the prospect’s situation:

The first step in our @ClearPivot deal pipeline is the Connect stage. The goal in this stage is to — well, connect. 💁‍♂️ It’s to have our first conversation with the prospect. It’s not even intended to be a super-long conversation. We usually keep it to about 30 minutes.

Finished our new podcast episode walking through how we run our sales pipeline at @ClearPivot. @ryanalanwright and I are running a tight ship in our sales process these days. 💪 And I’ve seen enough business flub their own sales process that I think a lot of people could learn from us. In this clip I go through the very first part of our sales process: qualifying the inbound leads and creating deals in our @HubSpot CRM pipeline. How do you kick off the start of your own sales process? Comment below if you start your pipeline differently - I’d love to hear it. #revops #hubspotcrm #sales

When I ask people what their CRM is like, the most common answer I hear is “it’s a mess.” It doesn’t have to be that way! You’ve spent enormous amounts of time and money building up your contact list in your company’s CRM. It’s worth taking the time to keep it clean so that it’s actually usable. It just takes some time and some systematic thinking. Here is something that I was doing recently to improve the data structure of our ClearPivot HubSpot CRM portal. Give it a watch! What do you do to keep your CRM streamlined and usable? #revops #crm #hubspot

Luckily we can do some spreadsheet-jockeying using data exports from Salesforce and HubSpot to update the HubSpot Deal records with the actual original create dates. Our @ClearPivot teammate Chelsea shows how to do that here: #hubspot #salesforce #revops #crm #sfdc

One of my goals for this year is to start using AI tools in our @ClearPivot workflow. We’ve started with #ChatGPT and our team is EATING IT UP.

When I first started @ClearPivot, I developed websites in @WordPress. However, I now believe that WordPress is a severe liability that most companies should avoid. “But Chris!” you might say, “Isn’t WordPress the ‘industry standard’ for websites? Doesn’t everybody use it?”

@zwenthe joined us for episode 38 of our ClearPivot Marketing Hero podcast to talk about creating purposeful engagement in your marketing. In he shared real life learnings from his experience doing product marketing for @TreasureData. Here are some of the key highlights:

I've been seeing some jaw-dropping statistics on TikTok over the past several months. That platform is exploding! So I've started to test it out for my company @ClearPivot. 👇

We just hit two big milestones in our @ClearPivot Marketing Hero Podcast: - We published our 30th episode - We hit a record number of monthly downloads: 180 downloads in a month