What to Expect During a HubSpot Sales Enterprise Implementation

Once you’ve decided to move forward with HubSpot’s Sales Hub Enterprise platform, there’s a lot that needs to happen between you swiping your company card and having your team up and running with the tools.

It can be daunting to think about all that needs to happen during your implementation, so we’ve broken down the major steps you can expect during your Sales Hub Enterprise setup process so you know exactly what to expect.

Step 1: Audit your current sales processes

Before you ever jump into your new HubSpot portal, you need to to take a step back and make sure you have a clear picture of what your current sales processes are, and what you want them to be. 

You may be in a position where you have no documented sales process — it’s the wild west on your team. If this is the case, this is your opportunity to put some consistent processes in place.

A few questions to make sure you answer during this stage:

How many different product/service pipelines do we have?

These will translate to your deal pipelines. Be aware that just because you have different products or services doesn’t necessarily mean you should have different pipelines for them.

The major way to determine whether or not to create a separate pipeline is to answer the question: Do we have different processes for selling these products/services? If the answer is yes, you’ll want to create separate pipelines with different deal stages. If the answer is no, you’ll likely be better off keeping everything in one pipeline.

What are the steps in our sales process?

Once you’ve determined your different pipelines, laying out the steps in the sales process for each of those deal pipelines will translate into your different deal stages for each. 

What information do we need at each point in the sales process?

These will be your required fields for creating deals and moving them across deal stages. With your Enterprise-level features in HubSpot, you can require your team to fill in different pieces of data at every deal stage. Think through what’s important for your reps and your managers to know at each stage of the sales process and make sure you require those fields.

HubSpot has standard deal properties like Deal Amount, Deal Owner, and Deal Stage that are ready for you to use right away, but you also have the ability to create custom deal properties for any information you need to collect that’s specific to your organization.

How will you standardize your new processes?

Documenting your processes, especially if you’ve got a large sales team, is important to your success with the tools. With Playbooks in HubSpot, you can easily create standards for different parts of your process, including specific types of sales calls or meetings.

Make sure you know which parts of the process you want to standardize. Then, create the necessary playbooks during your portal setup.

Step 2: Set up your portal

Once you’ve answered the above questions and have clearly laid out what your high-level sales process should look like, it’s time to get your portal set up.

At this point we do not recommend giving your reps access to HubSpot. It is significantly easier to have a few team members (like Sales Leadership team members) get everything set up and make a plan for rolling it out to the team than letting everyone loose in the tools before everything is properly set up.

Here are the major pieces you need to get implemented before bringing your reps into the platform:

• Deal Pipelines
• Deal Stages for each of your pipelines
• Custom Deal Properties (for the information you want to track on your deals)
• Required fields for deal creation and each deal stage
• Playbooks

There are plenty of other tools and features in HubSpot that you’ll want to use in your portal, but these are the most important when it comes to the initial build-out. Ultimately, it will allow your sales team to start tracking deals and collecting data in your portal as soon as possible.

Step 3: Plan your rollout

The first step in planning your rollout is testing out all of the things you’ve set up in your portal to make sure it all works like you envisioned. We recommend bringing in one of your reps for this as well. Make sure they understand that this is still a work in progress, then give them a demo of what their day to day will look like in HubSpot.

Make sure you get their honest feedback and concerns — this will ensure that your boots on the ground (i.e. your sales reps) will feel heard and bought in to the new system, rather than them feeling like this is a change being mandated by managers that won’t really benefit them.

Once you’ve worked out any kinks (don’t worry, more will come), think through rolling it out to the entire team. This is especially important if you have a large team with many sales reps.

We highly recommend doing on-site trainings for your rollout, whether it’s all at once or with each separate sales team. Your portal should be ready to use at this time, so, as you’re training your teams, they can be getting themselves set up and used to how the tools work.

Step 4: Train your team

This step can make or break your success with Sales Hub Enterprise. The way that you present your new platform and processes to your team can dictate whether they’re excited and engaged in the process, or apathetic and checked-out.

It’s important to lead with the value that Sales Hub Enterprise will provide to your team members, especially on an individual level. This is a great opportunity to bring in any reps you brought into your build-out process to share their experience and why they are excited.

If you can paint the picture of a day in the life for one your reps using HubSpot, they can catch the vision for how it’ll make their lives easier and will help them to do their job better.

These trainings should be technical, making sure that reps know exactly how to use the tools, as well as strategic, making sure your reps know exactly why they’re using these tools — and why it’s important for them to follow these new processes.

At this point, your reps and managers should begin to use the new portal. Be prepared, as soon as this happens, everything will likely hit the fan.

You may have thought your reps needed to collect certain pieces of information on each call, only to find out that prospects are getting frustrated by this. 

Or, maybe you thought the playbooks you created for your team were easy to understand, but you find out quickly that they’re causing confusion. Don’t panic. If you’re ready for it, you can roll with the punches and power through!

Step 5: Iterate, iterate, iterate

While it may be easy to think that once you train your team and get them onboarded, your implementation job is done, that’s just not the case.

When your entire real-life team is using the tools every day, issues will come up. You’re going to have to put your problem-solving hat on and get creative to help keep the team’s momentum going.

Don’t be afraid to iterate on the processes you’ve set up. You may realize that something you initially thought was a great idea just really isn’t, in the reality of how your reps operate.

Set the expectations that the team will be learning and growing together. That way, you can ease the pain of having to figure everything out as you go.

Still not sure you’re ready?

If you’re feeling overwhelmed about the whole process, you’re not alone! It’s a big project to take on. That’s why we’ve put together our Sales Hub Enterprise Package to help guide you through each of the steps in this process. We’d love to help!