https://www.loom.com/share/903eb85db6d849008fe7a75d6872d12e

Most details below are flexible. These are best practices, not strict requirements. If you have questions, let us know, and we are happy to work with a custom set up to handle your specific nuances.

Above all, we need 4-5 pieces of information for each deal, however they are stored:

• Customer
• $ amount
• Start date
• End date
• Product (optional)

Pipelines

• Keep separate New and Renewal pipelines
  • This allows you to keep all deal data, including changes to current customers, in the CRM without affecting your sales pipeline metrics in Hubspot

Companies

• Whenever possible, add segmentation data on the company, not deal
  • Helps ensure segmentation fields are all filled out and usable in reporting analysis
• Assign parent companies if applicable for your business model
  • holding company←subsidiary, district←school, resale partner←end customer, etc
  • This allows us to look at child customer churn as downsell of the parent, rather than churn

Deals

• Line items/products
  • You can set default billing types and durations on the product defaults (billing frequency)
  • Include implementation fees and other services or one-time revenue as line items with a one-time billing type
• Start and end dates
  • If possible, set these on the line items, allowing for different timing per contract item
    • Use a “custom” start date to define the exact go-live date for the contract
    • The end date (at which point we’ll no longer be recognizing revenue) is determined by start date + term months
  • If you are not using line items, we will need start and end dates stored elsewhere in deal properties
• Month-to-month deals
  • no end date is necessary until the deal changes or the customer churns
  • If a month-to-month deal changes, it’s best to add a term to the line item or an end date as a custom field on the deal, then create a new deal for the updated amount/product etc.
  • Churn is captured if there is an end date but no following deal
• Multi-year deals
  • it’s best to set a baseline amount for the duration, then add following years’ ramp up amounts incrementally
  • This allows us to see the entire deal as ending at the same time, as opposed to having the multiple line items with no overlap, which creates multiple separate transactions each with their own up-for-renewal date