I’ve seen hundreds of early-stage CRM setups. Most of them were a hot mess. If that sounds like yours, don’t go buy a new one before you’ve read this post.
It lays out the 7 most common CRM issues, the benefits of fixing them and how to easily implement the fix in Hubspot/Attio/Salesforce.
1. Separate leads from deals
Leads represent prospects (people) that you would like to connect with, whereas deals are active conversations with prospects. You need to keep them separate because connecting with prospects (prospecting) and talking with prospects (closing) are distinct sales motions.
If you mix them together, like many founders initially do, you lose visibility into the results of your prospecting motion (connect rates from calling, emailing, going to conferences, inbound etc) and the results of your closing motion (sales cycle, win rate etc).
Don’t have a pipeline stage called Leads. Instead add the people as Contacts (Salesforce and Hubspot) or People (Attio) and the company they work for as Accounts (Salesforce) or Companies (Hubspot or Attio). Make sure you associate each person with the company they work for so that you can easily see all the people at the target company (prospecting always works better when you have >1 contact per company)
2. Use as few deal stages as possible
Let’s start with deal stages you don’t need
Stages that track lists of Leads e.g. Conference, Key Targets, Strategics. These should be lists of people and companies as described above.
Stages to track tasks e.g. Meeting Complete, Demo Complete, Proposal Sent. These don’t tell you anything about how your deal is actually progressing, only that you’ve gone through the motions on your end.
Stages to track the number of meetings e.g. 1st meeting, 2nd Meeting, 3rd Meeting. These also don’t tell you how your deal is actually progressing and you don’t need stages to track how many meetings you’ve had.
Stages to track stalled deals e.g. Pending SOCII, Nurture, Not Qualified, Ghosted. These can be combined into Closed Lost, with a loss reason used to explain why. Remember closed lost now does not mean closed lost for ever.
Here are some typical pipeline stages and how to choose the one that is right for your business. Note how the stage names are numbered — it makes it easier to analyze the data:
4-stage pipeline: 1. Discovery → 2. Proposal → 3. Closed Won → 4. Closed Lost. Use if you’re selling services in a process where you have one or two discovery calls, a proposal review call and a yes/no decision call.
5-stage pipeline: Couple of flavors:
1. Discovery → 2. Proposal → 3. Pilot/Trial → 4. Closed Won → 5. Closed Lost. Use if you’re selling software in a process where you run a free pilot before getting into an annual contract. Very common with AI startups because AI is still relatively new and most customers want to try it before they commit.
1. Discovery → 2. Demo → 3. Proposal → 4. Closed Won → 5. Closed Lost. Use if you’re selling software where you run a custom demo using the prospect’s data but not a full pilot. More popular when selling a replacement for an existing product where the buying criteria are more about features and price and less about how it feels to use it.
6-stage pipeline: 1. Discovery → 2. Demo → 3. Proposal → 4. Pilot/Trial → 5. Closed Won → 6. Closed Lost. Use if you’re selling software where you have to do both a custom demo and a pilot. Typical with very large enterprise deals where there are a lot of stakeholders and they need a lot of proof points before committing. (Note: if you’re early-stage and in this situation you need to rethink your approach, ideally to break off part of your product into a simpler, faster and cheaper way to land. Long sales cycles are the death of startups).
3. Use loss reasons instead of multiple lost stages
Loss reasons enable you to track your losses without using individual stages for each reason. Combining all your losses into one Closed Lost stage also keeps you honest about your win rate whereas when you use reason-specific stages you tend to cherry pick the denominator and cheat yourself.
You usually have to manually in your CRM. Start with these 7 and make them required whenever a deal is lost:
No-show: prospect booked a demo but didn’t show and couldn’t be re-booked.
Not-qualified: discovery call held but prospect was not qualified as ICP size/tech stack/use case. Important to track this so that you can add the relevant criteria to your demo booking form.
Stopped responding: one or more calls held but prospect is ghosting / non-responsive despite multiple attempts to follow up.
Timing not right: buyer is not ready to move forward with a purchase and is sticking with their existing solution.
Feature missing: buyer rejected you due to missing features.
Price too high: buyer rejected you due to price / budget constraints.
For extra credit create a second field called Loss Reason Detail to capture additional context from the buyer e.g. if you lose and have a debrief call you can use AI to summarize the loss reason and populate the CRM.
Over time, loss reasons become invaluable in finding the gaps in your sales process and re-prospecting to fill the top of your funnel.
4. Close lost your stalled and dead deals
Closing your stalled or dead deals cleans up your pipeline so you can focus on the deals that actually have a shot at closing. It also keeps you honest about if you have enough real pipeline to get to your goals. If you leave them open to pad your pipeline for optics purposes you’re just setting yourself up to fail.
If you find this hard to do, use the following scenarios to get started: