Deal Tags: Building Buyer-Centric Intelligence in HubSpot

[00:00] **Introduction** Joshua Oakes: Mr. Oaks, um, I've been having some issues collaborating with others on the team, uh, maybe some others at Hubspot to get some deals across the finish line. [00:26] Joshua Oakes: Uh, I feel like we've got the buying we need at times and then um, you know, somehow we we don't get there. [00:35] Joshua Oakes: Uh, I feel like we've got all the contacts, you know, associated, we've identified, you know, the people that are going to be impacting this stuff and uh somehow there's there's new stakeholders that come out of nowhere. [00:48] Joshua Oakes: Yeah. [00:48] Joshua Oakes: And like, how do we, like I've heard, you're the guy uh to talk to you about uh deal tags. [00:58] Joshua Oakes: I've been looking for ways to you know, utilize them. [01:02] Joshua Oakes: Uh, I know they help with situations like this and I'm looking for for some help today.

[01:08] **Deal Tags Tattoo?** Joshua Oakes: Uh, I guess you've heard about my deal tags tattoo, huh? [01:15] Joshua Oakes: I do not, but it doesn't surprise me that might exist. [01:20] Joshua Oakes: Um, yeah, the uh that that's a common uh story, right? [01:26] Joshua Oakes: Like when you are multi-threading with um prospective customers and uh also with partners or vendors, uh or even like internally if you're multi-threading with um somebody at your organization who has a connection with somebody at the prospective customer or you have a VP or C-level executive who's in the same, you know, trade group or counsel or something as somebody at the target customer and trying to keep everybody on the same page and get that surfaced in the CRM. [02:15] Joshua Oakes: I mean, there's a lot deal tax can't solve all of those problems for you, but one of the challenges that organizations have in these situations is the data is complex and it's all over the place. [02:34] Joshua Oakes: And if you don't know what's there or even that something could be in the system and you have to go look for it, um that is a major problem because not a lot of reps, for example, have all day long to go figure out what all the properties in Hubspot mean, even if we name them clearly and have good descriptions. [02:58] Joshua Oakes: Like, you know, uh the a lot of junior admins, uh we've all experienced this at some point. [03:08] Joshua Oakes: And maybe um you as as you've grown, are admins or stakeholders. [03:19] Joshua Oakes: Uh you say, well, where is that in Hubspot? [03:23] Joshua Oakes: And when we were junior admins or a junior admin might say it like, well, it's obviously in the property called multi-threading with CEO checkbox, right? [03:34] Joshua Oakes: And it's like, well, I don't, a, didn't know that existed. [03:37] Joshua Oakes: B, um, I didn't uh know that that's what I should search for. [03:44] Joshua Oakes: Uh, C, I am busy like making calls and uh working with customers on defining the shared future we are trying to create together. [03:59] Joshua Oakes: Uh, I I can't be all day wondering if it's multi-threading or if I should add a deal split or if I should add our CEO as a association or as another owner property to the deal or checkbox or whatever. [04:16] Joshua Oakes: I don't know any of this stuff, right? [04:19] Joshua Oakes: Um, the advantage of deal tags, the thing that I like about them so much is that if you were, let's pull up a, I'm going to pull up a pipeline if you would drop my I've got one ready. [04:36] Joshua Oakes: Okay, yeah, pull it up. [04:37] Joshua Oakes: The same. [04:39] Joshua Oakes: Um, uh, let's see here. [04:42] Joshua Oakes: Yeah. [04:44] Joshua Oakes: So this is what most pipelines look like, right? [04:47] Joshua Oakes: Like the uh we have deal names, we have amount, we have a couple of important properties here. [04:54] Joshua Oakes: Maybe you've even got these customized so that they show other things or that the quick actions there at the bottom right, which uh $5 to everybody who knows what they all do, um are tune for your organization. [05:14] Joshua Oakes: I I would say that easily 80% of portals look like this. [05:22] Joshua Oakes: They don't have any customization to these records whatsoever, these views. [05:27] Joshua Oakes: Um, plus reps are going to look at it from a table view or they're just always going to search whatever, right? [05:35] Joshua Oakes: And so like this view is meant to be scannable. [05:40] Joshua Oakes: Uh you should be able to quickly identify the column, the the stage of the um process that this deal is in and critical information about it. [05:51] Joshua Oakes: And then maybe you expand the preview or you drill down into the deal. [05:56] Joshua Oakes: And uh there are more properties visible there including like a, you know, usually left-hand side bar where uh 90% of the properties available on the deal have been dumped at some point and they're completely disorganized. [06:11] Joshua Oakes: Uh maybe you have a center column card and you have right-hand call right-hand column association cards that probably still have all of the defaults like tickets and things on there that don't uh matter to your sales process. [06:28] Joshua Oakes: That is the opposite problem, right? [06:31] Joshua Oakes: Too much useless data. [06:35] Joshua Oakes: in this view that we have here, it's uh some orientation data but not enough useful data.

[06:44] **A lot of Noise** Chris Carolan: Right. [06:45] Chris Carolan: And just a lot of noise when it's come together in an unintentional way, right? [06:51] Chris Carolan: Like cuz let me tell you, you show this to people and they get like sales sales people, like they get excited at the concept of doing everything from one place and not having to go and search for. [07:07] Joshua Oakes: Yeah. [07:07] Chris Carolan: When we don't take the time to say like, do these buttons matter to you? [07:13] Chris Carolan: And this is where the break between admin and user. [07:18] Chris Carolan: Like from my perspective, right? [07:22] Chris Carolan: I'm not the guy that's making a canban board first, right? [07:26] Chris Carolan: Like I like the list views, I like to work out of tables, I like, you know, the whole like edit it like Excel, right? [07:37] Chris Carolan: But I know that a lot of people in the world love their board views, right? [07:43] Chris Carolan: But it's hard for me to look at this from their perspective because it's not my first go to. [07:54] Chris Carolan: Like obviously create a quote, like note, email, uh yeah. [08:00] Chris Carolan: Get a get a summary from Breeze, open up the preview panel. [08:04] Chris Carolan: By the way, this is now a different way to do this from everywhere else in the platform that you might be used to. [08:12] Chris Carolan: Uh and now we see, you know, our our associations, right? [08:20] Chris Carolan: So it's all here very quickly, especially when, you know, in most cases we won't hold four deals like on this page. [08:33] Chris Carolan: Like it's just we've got to avoid the mode of like there's a bunch of value here and it's like, oh no, let me just uh which one am I trying to work on Meridian. [08:43] Chris Carolan: All right, I'm getting out of here as fast as I can. [08:45] Joshua Oakes: Right. [08:46] Chris Carolan: Right? [08:48] Chris Carolan: Meanwhile, they tell you that they want to be able to prioritize and understand who needs to be worked on and where the value is, which is what we're going to do with deal tags. [09:02] Joshua Oakes: Yes. [09:03] Chris Carolan: But it's a it's a balance, right? [09:05] Joshua Oakes: Yeah, yeah, and that's a great way to put it. [09:07] Joshua Oakes: It's a balance. [09:08] Joshua Oakes: Like the the there's a little bit of like the faster horse thing here, which is if you ask a rep, like, look, what do you tell me what you want your perfect view and I will get as close to it as possible. [09:20] Joshua Oakes: They will say, you know, uh various forms of look, I want everything in one place because I I don't want to go like around and look for stuff. [09:31] Joshua Oakes: And often what that means is um that uh they don't want like no hunting or searching, but it means um that how how would I describe it? [09:48] Joshua Oakes: That they they need the framing to be consistent, right? [09:52] Joshua Oakes: Which is which is a like they don't want a mode where when you're doing when you're creating an email, you go into this view and where and you're creating a note, you go into this view or this place, right? [10:05] Joshua Oakes: That's why quick actions exist. [10:09] Joshua Oakes: Um, I don't know. [10:12] Joshua Oakes: I think I probably can't count on one hand the number of reps that like click the create a note quick action on a deal. [10:20] Joshua Oakes: But um the but if you put everything in one view to try to meet that request, the letter of that request, then it is going to be too much detail, too much noise, overwhelming, right? [10:35] Joshua Oakes: And the Canban board overview orientation, help me see it a high level, drill down into a deal for the details is a common interaction pattern. [10:50] Joshua Oakes: And uh there's a, you know, we can go down a rabbit hole here, but one of the um things like you can't put everything in one view to see all of the important information about all the deals, right? [11:05] Joshua Oakes: It's just not possible for companies. [11:09] Joshua Oakes: But there shouldn't be important information in some views and not in others, and the most important information should be the most important in the interface, right? [11:21] Joshua Oakes: Um, so what I love about using deal tags for clients is we can take that um complexity, that depth. [11:31] Joshua Oakes: Like, yeah, we our sales process, you know, we need all the default built-in Hubspot properties for deals and we need 5, 10, 50, 100 custom data points that get encoded as properties or relationships. [11:51] Joshua Oakes: But the um actual work of closing these deals doesn't correlate with those properties, right? [11:58] Joshua Oakes: Like, yes, in a stage of a pipeline, a rep needs to like provide one of those pieces of information, right? [12:05] Joshua Oakes: Like we might require look, we're not advancing to generate a quote until we have these like five critical pieces of information to be able to generate an accurate quote. [12:14] Joshua Oakes: That is absolutely a legitimate business process. [12:18] Joshua Oakes: Their job is to collect that data and get it into Hubspot in support of everything else they are doing in the sales process. [12:31] Joshua Oakes: And we can use deal tags to pull the complexity of the relationships and the properties and all of that stuff and surface it at the top level of the deal without them having to worry about like, well, which property is what, blah, blah, blah. [12:50] Joshua Oakes: Uh, and we can just say like, look, here's a here's a status or mode that the deal is in. [12:59] Joshua Oakes: And um it's defined by rules that touch these five, six, seven, 10 places on the deal. [13:07] Joshua Oakes: And we can just turn that into a deal tag. [13:10] Joshua Oakes: The complexity of remembering like all of these different pieces goes away and they can get a deal tag that that tells them yes, no or on a scale or don't forget to kinds of things and then we can use that for reporting, list building, everything else. [13:31] Joshua Oakes: So let's take a look at a a little bit of a complicated use case. [13:36] Joshua Oakes: You you mentioned like trying to collaborate with reps or with partners on stakeholders that get brought into deals. [13:44] Joshua Oakes: So we've got some deals here and as you can see, looks like each of them has at least yeah, like three or four contacts associated with the deal. [14:01] Joshua Oakes: And so just pick one of those and click in. [14:16] Joshua Oakes: All right, so Bright Line Financial, we're doing a revenue architecture proposal or opportunity with them. [14:24] Joshua Oakes: So, uh fly out the right hand column and let's look at who's on this deal. [14:31] Joshua Oakes: So, uh we have a champion, Ethan Brooks there, that's good. [14:35] Joshua Oakes: Uh Mia Delgado Economic Buyer, CFO, okay, we got a center column card, that's great too. [14:42] Joshua Oakes: And uh Raj Patel end user and uh we've got a decision maker. [14:49] Joshua Oakes: So that's a pretty good buying committee. [14:54] Joshua Oakes: Um, but in order to even like start to understand what the buying committee identified for this deal was, we had to click in here and we had to read each of these um association labels on the contact cards. [15:17] Joshua Oakes: Um if you have, if you're working 10, 15 deals in a stage of the pipeline and you uh cannot keep in your head, which most of us can't, which do or don't have the decision maker uh identified and associated with the deal. [15:40] Joshua Oakes: A and B, engaged in the sales process. [15:47] Joshua Oakes: Uh if you are is if you can't keep that in your head is the goal or the action like, oh, well what I do is uh uh I just go like think, well, what what what's my high leverage activity for the day? [16:03] Joshua Oakes: And I click into each deal one by one, the 10 st 10 deals I have open in the commit to value stage of the pipeline and I check for decision maker. [16:13] Joshua Oakes: And if there isn't, then I go back into my email and I uh email my champion and say like, okay, can we get a decision maker on this? [16:24] Joshua Oakes: Uh or is it you as I call it, you work the top of the inbox. [16:29] Joshua Oakes: If people are responding to your texts, your WhatsApps, your emails, then you are trying to remember like, oh, do we have a decision maker on this? [16:41] Joshua Oakes: Is this person's role champion? [16:44] Joshua Oakes: Like what am I what do I do how do I what do I need to do on this? [16:48] Joshua Oakes: And so then you go open the deal in Hubspot and uh go down, scroll to contacts, look and see if you have decision maker association label. [16:58] Joshua Oakes: Uh oh shoot, there's a contact here with no association label, what's their role? [17:01] Joshua Oakes: I forget. [17:03] Joshua Oakes: Oh, they're the EA for the CEO, but the CEO is not the decision maker. [17:11] Joshua Oakes: Like that's too much. [17:13] Joshua Oakes: You're asking too much of the rep. [17:16] Joshua Oakes: This is the thing, these are the things that we want Hubspot to do for us, right?

[17:24] **Bringing Stakeholder Challenge to Deal Tags** Joshua Oakes: So, let's bring some visibility to this stakeholder challenge with deal tags. [17:34] Joshua Oakes: Yes. [17:35] Chris Carolan: And just a little bit like just to show the why here again, um and you can see so we're like halfway through the value pass stages on this show. [17:50] Chris Carolan: We're talking about the buyer stage and understanding that we're in a world where it takes more than one person on the buyer side to move forward, you know, with the organization, right? [18:07] Chris Carolan: And even in the way that these stages are structured, like we're we're setting it up to understand like, oh, just because the quote was done, doesn't mean it's going to move forward. [18:18] Chris Carolan: Just because we got the demo done, like we have to evaluate value and there's people on the other side, not an executive assistant that can evaluate that value, right? [18:36] Chris Carolan: There's people technical buyers that can say, let me let me understand how it's mapped. [18:42] Chris Carolan: Yeah, that's better than ours. [18:45] Chris Carolan: Like and that's going to save us this amount of time in this part of the organization, like yes, validated, right? [18:55] Chris Carolan: And then commitment. [18:58] Chris Carolan: And this commitment part, right? [19:01] Chris Carolan: Like this is where like so for Bright line, like in in like usually we're on the sales meeting, truly understanding all of the nuance, but sometimes they're missing it because we we've got a decision maker here, right? [19:21] Chris Carolan: But in our system, if it's at this stage, it's 80%, right? [19:27] Chris Carolan: It's 80%, good, right? [19:30] Chris Carolan: This one has a decision maker? [19:32] Chris Carolan: Yeah. [19:33] Chris Carolan: It looks like we've got all the people that can commit to value and actually like close us or activate it. [19:40] Joshua Oakes: Yes. [19:41] Chris Carolan: Then here, um fresh here, like also in commit to value, right? [19:54] Chris Carolan: And that might be because right? [19:59] Chris Carolan: We had somebody evaluate it. [20:02] Joshua Oakes: Right. [20:03] Chris Carolan: Right? [20:03] Chris Carolan: We had somebody else validate it. [20:06] Chris Carolan: Like, yep, this going to work for ours, but we don't have the decision maker yet, right? [20:11] Joshua Oakes: Yep. [20:12] Chris Carolan: And if we don't get the decision maker, it will not close. [20:19] Chris Carolan: So now we have two deals sitting at 80% that is not real, right? [20:27] Chris Carolan: Meanwhile, we have like we in these two cases, we have everybody we need already involved and engaged. [20:42] Joshua Oakes: Right. [20:42] Chris Carolan: Then there's a chance that a little bit more effort or focus on this side probably close faster than the one where we don't have the decision maker. [20:53] Joshua Oakes: Right. [20:54] Joshua Oakes: Yeah, uh that yeah, might close faster, but at the very least won't stall out in the commit to value stage where we are saying like, okay, now this is this is where we are saying go no go, right? [21:08] Joshua Oakes: And we don't have the person who has the authority to say that uh at the table yet, right? [21:15] Joshua Oakes: Yeah. [21:15] Joshua Oakes: And over time we can of course like analyze this, right? [21:20] Joshua Oakes: Um, it's uh every everybody will tell you, look, whoever the real decision maker is, they should not be identified uh, you know, once you have um entered negotiation, right? [21:36] Chris Carolan: Right. [21:37] Joshua Oakes: Right. [21:37] Chris Carolan: Yeah. [21:37] Chris Carolan: They're going to make the decision, you don't want that to be. [21:40] Joshua Oakes: Right, or you what it means is you're going back to the start. [21:45] Joshua Oakes: Um, so yeah, so like we we want to be able to see here in this high level overview, what how are we doing on this? [21:55] Joshua Oakes: Have we checked off our checklist, uh which is not a property. [21:59] Joshua Oakes: We don't want a property that's like check all of the items that are done on this property and then that signals that the deal can advance. [22:07] Joshua Oakes: Uh that's that's too much. [22:10] Joshua Oakes: It's too prescriptive. [22:14] Joshua Oakes: Um, we also want to be able to see that in other contexts, right? [22:19] Joshua Oakes: Like, I'm a multimodal. [22:21] Joshua Oakes: I go canban to table to report uh and then jump over to segments and uh work across all of these different views and you prefer to work in a table view. [22:32] Joshua Oakes: Well, if we're surfacing this complexity so that multiple parties can participate in this and be on the same page, you need to be able to see that. [22:43] Joshua Oakes: I need to be able to see that. [22:46] Joshua Oakes: The sales manager needs to be able to see that. [22:50] Joshua Oakes: So, uh we we're those we're trying to solve for all of those use cases. [22:55] Joshua Oakes: So let's create a deal tag that or let's create two actually, that track our um decision maker association with our deals. [23:11] Joshua Oakes: So, yep, there you go. [23:13] Joshua Oakes: Uh we're going to jump over to the settings pipelines, is where you want to go. [23:22] Joshua Oakes: And then make sure we're on the right pipeline, which we are. [23:25] Joshua Oakes: And then there's an opportunity tags that will read deal tags if you haven't changed the name of your object. [23:33] Joshua Oakes: And now you have to for some reason click again to manage and that takes you to the view where you can actually edit them. [23:40] Joshua Oakes: And then add tag. [23:45] Joshua Oakes: And we get some uh uh presets. [23:50] Joshua Oakes: Those aren't some of those they're okay, but we're going to start from scratch. [24:02] Joshua Oakes: All right, so this is our tag setup. [24:05] Joshua Oakes: We need a name. [24:08] Joshua Oakes: The uh no decision maker. [24:11] Joshua Oakes: That works. [24:12] Joshua Oakes: The um we're going to create two. [24:14] Joshua Oakes: We're going to create a yes decision maker and a no decision maker just to to show this. [24:21] Joshua Oakes: Um one of the uh I like these as red green, right? [24:25] Joshua Oakes: So are no. [24:27] Joshua Oakes: Another um just like pro tip here is um you have access in your name field to an emoji picker there. [24:38] Joshua Oakes: And uh these deal tags, it's better if they're shorter, but they should always be clear. [24:49] Joshua Oakes: So, uh I have some deal tags that are uh like uh I use uh a coffin, like just a coffin if a deal is violating the aging policy and is about to be auto killed by the system. [25:10] Joshua Oakes: Um and uh for decision maker, you know, I might use a instead of no, I would just might use a prefix it with a like red light decision maker, um and uh then red colored tag because then you can just do the same thing to green and the tag uh flips it looks like it changes its mode. [25:43] Joshua Oakes: Um, which is a really handy Yeah, this is how you know we're talking to the expert on deal tags folks. [25:52] Joshua Oakes: Like Yeah. [25:53] Joshua Oakes: Playing around with the interface like this. [25:56] Joshua Oakes: I mean, it goes so far in terms of getting the adoption that we need. [26:01] Joshua Oakes: Yes for this stuff to matter, right? [26:03] Joshua Oakes: The I a couple of times I've had this where I rolled out a deal tag um without telling anybody uh with the intent of like I want it to, you know, populate the interface and blah blah blah so that when we review it on our next call with the stakeholder, we can I can say, all right, here's what is rolled out, here's where it occurs and blah blah blah. [26:33] Joshua Oakes: And uh they the first thing they say when we get on that call is like, oh, I love the deal tags. [26:39] Joshua Oakes: They show me XYZ and I'm like, all right, well we're done here with that part of the agenda because uh it fortunately, it was so clear that uh took care of itself, right? [26:54] Joshua Oakes: you don't always you don't always hit a grand slam like that, but um but it's it's surprisingly possible to do that with these. [27:01] Joshua Oakes: So um we're going to apply this go ahead. [27:04] Chris Carolan: I think most of like we see them as quality of life updates or yeah, like you can match the colors in your spreadsheet now and we can bring them in like like the visuals that they keep updating the system with. [27:24] Chris Carolan: Again, like this is why like the way that you were talking about it about picking this icon specifically and managing it knowing that this is going to be there and we don't need the word no and now like all of these things start to go in instead of just like, okay, we're just going to add one of each of these colors and right? [27:51] Chris Carolan: Like that level of intention is what leads to the the the the home runs like when they do happen because it's like it inherently says, you understand me as a user. [28:09] Joshua Oakes: Yes, right? [28:11] Joshua Oakes: Yep. [28:12] Chris Carolan: Cuz like almost every sales team is constantly asking for stuff like this. [28:22] Chris Carolan: And you know, there's been other tools that we could use and other Chrome extensions and all this stuff, right? [28:30] Chris Carolan: But like now that you can build it in, um you you have opportunities to do this stuff that you haven't had before. [28:43] Chris Carolan: And that like these things, these are the little things, little that get adoption like you've never seen before. [28:51] Joshua Oakes: Yes. [28:52] Joshua Oakes: Yes, exactly. [28:54] Joshua Oakes: The well, you know, we uh invented uh emoji and we use color as signals because it is super fast for us to process things like that. [29:07] Joshua Oakes: There is additional cognitive load to reading the words, but we can also recognize words by sight. [29:15] Joshua Oakes: So the combination of uh the shape of the words decision maker and those colors make that recognition instantaneous, right? [29:25] Joshua Oakes: And we want to just keep using those patterns. [29:29] Joshua Oakes: You know, uh people will say like, oh, it's just a quality of life update for things like this. [29:33] Joshua Oakes: It's like, well, hey, look, I will take every quality of life update I I can get. [29:40] Joshua Oakes: I don't want uh I don't you know. [29:41] Chris Carolan: We want high quality of life. [29:43] Chris Carolan: That's what we want. [29:43] Joshua Oakes: Yeah, what else would you be what are we doing here? [29:50] Joshua Oakes: Um, all right, so uh go ahead and click add here and we'll add a filter. [29:54] Joshua Oakes: This is how we determine whether this tag is going to appear. [29:59] Joshua Oakes: Now you will see here, we have a filter building interface like we have with a lot of other um places in Hubspot. [30:09] Joshua Oakes: So scroll up and hit opportunity properties there. [30:13] Joshua Oakes: Um and you can see we can just choose, you know, again, this is the deal object in this context having been renamed to opportunity. [30:20] Joshua Oakes: So these are all the the the deal object properties, amount, you know, we can create a filter here like anything that we can create for a list almost not anything, a lot of the things we can do with lists or with filters on index views or reports, etc. [30:48] Joshua Oakes: Um, it is a little bit limiting, but you can, you know, do things like a common, we're not talking about this today, but a high value deal, right? [30:56] Joshua Oakes: If you have a distribution of amounts that says like, look, above this amount, uh this is like super important. [31:06] Joshua Oakes: You don't want to have to make that a filter. [31:08] Joshua Oakes: You can just say like, you, you know, pick them out, simple from here. [31:14] Joshua Oakes: Um, for a checking whether we have our buying committee associated, this approach of filtering on deal/opportunity objects is inadequate. [31:28] Joshua Oakes: So we need to cancel and back out of this and go back into or there you go, all categories. [31:34] Joshua Oakes: So, we are going to use that list membership item. [31:47] Joshua Oakes: And we now have, you can see here, we have some um premade lists for us to demonstrate here including one that is decision maker. [32:00] Joshua Oakes: Now, these are samples, so name your lists uh more clearly. [32:05] Joshua Oakes: But uh if the deal is a member of decision maker apply this tag. [32:11] Joshua Oakes: Now this list um is uh is including deals that have a decision maker contact associated with them. [32:24] Joshua Oakes: So, yes, we need to say if they're not on this list, then they are going to get decision maker red.