Automatically Identify At-Risk Deals in HubSpot Using Grain Call Recordings

Knowing how deals are progressing through your sales pipeline and having a system to identify those that might be at risk especially when they are included in your revenue forecasts is critical.

Grain call recording software automatically tracks budget, authority, needs, and timeline (BANT) and when integrated effectively with HubSpot CRM can provide a proactive way to identify deals missing important discovery insights.

This combination leverages the structured approach of BANT and the deal management capabilities of HubSpot, significantly improving sales processes efficiency:

Budget: Understanding if a prospective client has the financial resources to afford your product or service is crucial. Tracking budget data in custom HubSpot properties helps sales teams quickly gauge financial readiness and prioritize leads accordingly.

Authority: Identifying who actually has the power to make purchasing decisions is vital. Mapping out the decision-makers within an organization efficiently using associated contacts in HubSpot enhances the focus on engaging the right individuals.

Need: Discovering the prospect's needs allows sales teams to tailor their pitch. With HubSpot, this information can be used to customize communication, aligning it with prospect's specific challenges and pain points.

Timeline: Determining when a prospect plans to purchase should dictate the sales strategy. HubSpot’s automation tools can trigger specific actions based on this timeline, such as sending timely follow-ups and ensuring sales efforts are synchronized with the prospect’s buying journey.

We can build a HubSpot report using data from the Grain app integration to surface at-risk deals in the final stages of pipeline for manual review by an AE or sales manager.

Tracking how well leads meet BANT criteria within HubSpot, sales teams gain valuable insights into their sales activities. This data is instrumental in refining strategies, forecasting more accurately, and maximizing the effectiveness of the BANT framework.

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📌 This tactical setup was a part of the discussions at the Happy Customers Festival, where HubSpot experts shared even more valuable insights and strategies.

Here’s how it works:

First we’ll need to configure the HubSpot integration in your Grain. When you connect Grain’s call recording software to your HubSpot account you’ll get AI call summaries and quick access to what your prospects are actually saying inside of HubSpot contact and deal records (or Slack if you prefer). Grain can also provide structured data about what information is being collected during sales discovery in synced Deal Qualification Properties.

To report on what information is being collected during sales discovery we need to turn on Deal Qualification Properties from the HubSpot integration page in Grain.

Doing so will create a new group of Deal Properties in HubSpot that Grain will use to store meeting information related to deals or sales opportunities. Meeting information is added to the Grain Properties section of your HubSpot deal properties. A unique property is created for each section of the Grain discovery notes template.

Now your Deal Qualification Properties in Grain are being automatically populated in properties on HubSpot Deals whenever an associated contact is identified in a call recorded by Grain we can move on to creating our reports.

Report #1: Deals Missing Discovery By Rep

1. Create a custom HubSpot report and select Deals as the primary data source.

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2. Setup the report using the Pie chart type then add properties for:

→ Break down by: Deal Owner

→ Values: Count of Deals

3. Add deal property fields:

→ Deal Name

→ Deal Owner

→ Close Date - Daily

→ Competition - A list of competitors mentioned during calls populated by Grain.

→ Stakeholders - Who are the stakeholders in the customer's organization populated from Grain call recordings.

→ Customer Needs - A list of moments where the customer discusses their needs in a solution populated from Grain call recordings.

→ Customer Budget - A list of moments where the customer discusses their budget.

→ Next Step - A list of time stamped action items from your meeting.

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4. Add Custom Filter Rules

Setup filters to include only deals beyond where we expect discovery to be completed in our sales pipeline and where our Deal Qualification Properties being synced from Grain call recordings do not have a value.

We’ll use parentheses to split our filters into 2 groups:

Group 1: Deal Pipeline is any of “Sales Pipeline” AND Deals Deal Stage is any of “Agreement Sent” or “Evaluation” AND

Group 2: Deals Stakeholders is known OR Deals Customer Needs OR Deals Next Steps OR Deals Customer Budget OR Deals Competition.

Your custom filter rules formula should ultimately look like this:

1 AND 2 AND (3 OR 4 OR 5 OR 6 OR 7)

Report #2: Late Stage Deals Missing Discovery

We can also create a report to quickly identify which discovery information is missing for our at-risk deals based on the same filter criteria.

You can either recreate the filters from scratch or clone Report #1 and modify it.

1. Select the Table chart type

2. Add Deal Properties to the table columns - these will be the same as in the previous report.

→ Deal Name

→ Deal Owner

→ Close Date

→ Competition - A list of competitors mentioned during calls populated by Grain

→ Stakeholders - Who are the stakeholders in the customer's organization populated from Grain call recordings

→ Customer Needs - A list of moments where the customer discusses their needs in a solution populated from Grain call recordings.

→ Customer Budget - A list of moments where the customer discusses their budget

→ Next Step - A list of time stamped action items from your meeting

Being able to proactively identify missing discovery can help avoid unforeseen problems late in a deal cycle when an unexpected objection is raised.

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Bonus: Don’t forget you can automatically send an email with your report to your team on a schedule (I prefer late Sunday night) so everyone has visibility ahead of pipeline reviews.

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You could also use Grain’s call recording software to power enhanced lead scoring and further automation. Integrating the BANT criteria synced from Grain into HubSpot’s lead scoring models enables a more comprehensive assessment of lead potential. Automated workflows can be set to activate based on BANT criteria, proactively driving the sales process through targeted engagement and efficient lead management.