Lead stages keep your account organised, ensuring leads and relevant visit information is distributed to team members at the right time, leading to better conversion rates.
Just like any sales (growth) process, arranging company identifications into stages is an important step. Helping you create a systematic approach to:
1️⃣ Finding ideal leads
2️⃣ Booking meetings
3️⃣ Closing deals
This guide will help you create a basic lead stage framework in Snitcher 👇
Why Stages are needed in Snitcher
You might be asking yourself what lead stages are applicable to Snitcher. Isn't it just new leads and that's where the stage ends?
While it's possible to use Snitcher purely as a source of new leads, that would be like only making use of the tip of the iceberg and leaving a lot of valuable information in later stages of the sales process on the table.
So we recommend a setup similar to the one below 👇
Here's an example of valuable info in later stages of the sales process 🔍
Imagine you lose a deal or a prospect went cold 6 months ago.
A Slack message (or email) lights up your Lost Deals channel. The company is on your website, you know which office visited and who to get in touch with.
The Deals on again 😎
Without organising leads into stages, it's not possible to send the Lost Deal notification to the right place and team member. Put differently, lead stages allow you to cut out the noise and ensure relevant information by stage is distributed effectively.
What Stages should be used
To keep things simple and get the ball rolling from day 1, let's work with 6 stages.
1️⃣ All ICP leads
2️⃣ High Intent ICP leads
3️⃣ Qualified leads
4️⃣ Opportunities and deals
5️⃣ Lost Deals
6️⃣ Customers
As you get a feel for the information Snitcher provides and what insights will help progress leads to the next stages of your sales process, complexity (more stages) can be added.
Depending on the size of your team, you may consider also subdividing each stage by owners. For example 'Rohan's Opportunities and Deals'.
🚨 If you are using HubSpot and Snitcher, head to the guide to continue from here.
All ICP leads
If you need to familiarise yourself with creating segments, please check out the guide.
So what's the purpose of the new ICP lead stage? This is the bucket of all the companies visiting your website that match your Ideal Customer Profile filters. Think of it like the top of your funnel filled only with good fit leads.
To set up 'New ICP leads' simply create the set of filters that include all of the types of companies you want to target. This is typically done using a mixture of Industry, Size and Location like the example 👇
🚨 Note the OR filter in the location. In this example we want companies matching any of the industry and size filters in which the company OR visitor is from a target location.
Take a moment to consider if target customers are headquartered (company location) in target countries or if it's a representative / office in the correct location
💡 Aside from sales use cases, you may want to retarget this Segment of leads.
High Intent ICP leads
Next up, it's time to add behaviour into the mix so you can refine All ICP leads into a stage filled with highly engaged leads (High Intent).
This will be the primary stage your sales teams uses to find new leads and should be closely monitored. We like to send new leads through to a Slack channel 'High Intent ICP'. Check out the options to stay notified on High Intent ICP leads.
Play around with the behavioural settings to find the optimal level of engagement. If you have a lot of ICP leads and not enough sales resources to work them all, set the bar high or vice versa.
🚨 Tags are used to either qualify or disqualify leads so by filtering out leads with the tags 'Qualified' or 'Disqualified' the stage will only contain new high intent leads.
Qualified leads
There's a lot of varying definitions of qualified leads. MQL, SQL etc.
To keep things simple, we define a qualified lead as a company that you have marked as 'Qualified'. Typically this also implies you are yet to begin working (contacting) the lead.
Configuring this stage will ensure your team systematically qualifies High Intent ICP leads. Keeping the previous stage filled with new leads (time saver) and making sure the best fit leads are actually getting worked.
Of all the stages, this is the fastest to set up!
To move a company to the 'Qualified Leads' stage, simply tag the company as qualified on the left hand sidebar.
From here you can easily set up Automations to send leads to your CRM or into retargeting flows (if you decided not to use an earlier stage).
Opportunities and deals
Progressing opportunities to deals and closing them benefits a lot from a deep understanding of the behaviour of your prospects.
👉 Are there particular pages they spend more time on indicating you've left potential questions unanswered?
👉 Don't they engage with the website at all?
👉 Is there an office (stakeholder) regularly visiting the website you aren't yet speaking with?
For simplicity sake, let's group opportunities and deals in one stage. To get more granular info, segment opportunities and deals to create a stage for each and further segment by owners.
Next up, head over to Lists and import your lists of Opportunities and Deals. If you need to familiarise yourself with Lists, here's the guide.
From there, go back to the main dashboard and select 'Account List matches opportunities and deals'. Then save the segment and you're ready to go.
Lost Deals and Customers
Repeat the process for each of these stages as you did the one above. And yes, it's really that simple.
Once again, it's worth considering if you would like to subdivide Lost Deals by owners so that you can send activity notifications to the right person and avoid the chance of it getting missed in group notifications.
💡 If you offer multiple services or products, it's valuable to divide your customer lists into groups based on the products or services they have purchased. By doing this you can create an upsell or cross sell notification when customers spend time consuming content on new products or services.
Using Stages to filter out
Once you have configured your stages in Snitcher, it's valuable to go back and filter out companies in later stages such as removing Customers from earlier stages such as High Intent ICP leads.
The results is only new High Intent ICP leads, making it easier for your team to stay on top of leads without existing customers and prospects getting in the way.
To filter out companies from previous stages, simply use the filters 'Account List doesn't match opportunities and deals' etc👇
This process can be repeated for each stage based on the company stage that should be excluded.
Notifications by pipeline stage and owner
At this point you might be wondering how to set up notifications by stage (or owner).
Head over to the Automations tab and check out the full guide to setting up notifications and reports.
If you would like to send new leads to team members via email (or a Slack channel). Use the trigger 'New Lead' and select the Segment (stage) you want notifications on. Just keep in you won't receive notifications on return visits with this approach.
To get notifications on a stage like Lost Deals, use the event 'New session'. This will send a notification when a company in this stage visits your website for the first time and for subsequent visits 👇
Lastly, if you would like you would like reports on a stage, the head over to the Automated Reports tab.
As always, if you have any questions, ideas or would just like to say hello, please drop us a message. Team Snitcher 👋