What is changing
Every residential Offsite enquiry will be personally called by a Home Consultant, regardless of what they put on the form. At the moment the automation decides who is worth a deal based on their answer to the building journey question, and only those people land in the Offsite Sales pipeline.
Why
Enquiry volume has slowed, so we cannot afford to let anyone through unattended. We realised, after people leave the nurture and are closed/lost, (this may just be due to the timing not being right), aside from our newsletter email and event updates, they do not resurface or get further attention from the Home Consultants.
The approach
Enquiries land on a Leads board and are worked there by the consultant. They only become a deal at the point they are close to signing a Home Starter Pack and paying the deposit. So the Deal board stops holding enquiries and only holds people who are ready to commit.
Lead stages would be:
Qualified triggers the deal.
I should flag that this will make our deal count drop noticeably. That is expected, because the current number is mostly enquiries rather than real opportunities, which is why so many close as lost.
Key work as I see it
- Emails: remove the price, promise a phone call. EmmaConfirmed 26 August: no booking link in the automated email. The calendar contact lists still get built, because the consultants will want them for their own templates and sequences.
- Remove the preferred communication method question. Emma
- Decommission the automated pricing workflow that calculates a price from model, roof type and region. Deal amount becomes manually entered by the consultant at Qualified, from a real quote. AlyssaI'd keep it there in case anything changes in the future.
- Update copy on the model forms, which currently promise a delivered and installed price estimate by email. That is roughly forty forms. Emma
- Make the Offsite Leads board work: enquiry arriving in as a lead from all sources (get info or contact form), refine the stages, new tag properties / lead card set up. Alyssa
- Deal pipeline: remove Lead In and Contacted, with Qualified leads landing in Qualified deals (when we are ready). Alyssa
- Retire the building journey nurture logic entirely. Replace with a check in at 6 or 12 months for people sitting In Orbit, which is our stage for those who are real but further out. Near Ready people are being actively worked by a consultant, so they are not in the nurture stream.
- When a lead closes as Not a Fit, keep the contact but set them to non-marketing, so we are only ever emailing people who are genuinely interested.
Two more the build needs, neither of which exists yet.
- Lead properties and tags. Nothing the board needs exists yet. The eight properties the deal creation steps set today have to be recreated on the lead, and Building Journey Status, Client Priority and Response need creating from scratch with their values set. The lead stages also need to match the six on the board before a card can show what it needs to show. The full list is on the build checklist.
- A workflow to create the lead from a form submission. Nothing does this today. It is what turns an enquiry into a lead and sets the owner, so steps 1 to 4 all depend on it. In practice it is the sixteen existing deal creating workflows cloned and rewired, rather than one new workflow.
Current Deal board
How easy or hard/manual is it to move current Deals to Leads that we are working through at present? I.e. this will be the people who are currently in Deals: Contacted → Qualified who would become either Lead: Attempting → In Orbit → Near Ready.
These will not move across. HubSpot holds Leads and Deals as two separate record types, and there is no way to convert one into the other.
So it is a re-create rather than a move: the people currently sitting in Contacted through to Qualified get created as leads on the Offsite board, with their stage, owner and tags set, and the deals they came from are then deleted.
Alyssa will walk through the approach and what it takes on Thursday.
Everything from here down is Emma’s agreed process, written for the home consultants. So “you” means Rachel or Amy, the consultant who owns the enquiry. Where something is a build job for Gather ’n’ Grow or a content job for Emma, it is on the build checklist rather than here.
Steps 1 to 4 happen on their own, within minutes of the form being submitted. The consultant picks it up at step 5.
Enquiry form submitted on the website
Any of the residential enquiry forms: a specific home model, the main Contact Us form, a site accessibility check, a site works package request, or the chatbot.
Allocated to Rachel or Amy
HubSpot splits enquiries (lead records) evenly between the two home consultants. From this moment the enquiry has a name against it, and everything that follows is personalised to that consultant.
Information email sent, from their consultant
Sent after the allocation, so it comes from the right person with the right booking link.
The price. Pricing stays published on the website, but no figure is emailed to somebody we have not spoken to yet. The pricing conversation now happens on the phone, where transport, site works, foundations and consent can be explained properly rather than landing as a number with no context.
- The flyer for the home model they enquired about
- The floor plan
- A line promising the phone call, so the expectation is set and the call is expected rather than cold
No booking link in this email. The original plan was a link to book directly with the allocated consultant, and the team has decided against it, so it does not go into the workflow. The email now does one job, which is to set up the call.
You can still send your own booking link once you are talking to somebody, and the calendar lists are being built for exactly that.
A card appears on the Leads board
This is the change. Enquiries used to be created as deals, mixed in with real jobs already underway. Now they arrive as leads, on their own board, so the sales pipeline only ever contains genuine opportunities you are actively working.
Call them, then move the card
The card moves along the board as the conversation progresses, so at any moment you can see exactly where every person sits without hunting through tasks or your inbox.
- New Enquiry has arrived and nobody has tried yet.
- Attempting means calls and emails have been logged and are showing on the card, but you have not got hold of them. At two months in this stage you get a reminder to make one final attempt by phone or email, and then it is your call whether to close it.
- In Orbit is for people who are simmering: warm, real, generally nine months or more out, or with something like a house to sell first. They are not parked and forgotten. Somebody twelve months from moving in may only need two or three months to sort finance, find a section or sell their place, and then they are ready to sign. So they stay visible and get worked on a longer rhythm.
- Near Ready is where your effort should concentrate. Good timeframe, hot, and only one or two things left to sort such as finance or a site check.
- Qualified means they are close to signing the Home Starter Pack. HubSpot asks you which pipeline the deal belongs on, Offsite or Onsite, then creates the deal and drops it into Qualify on the one you picked.
- Not a Fit is closed with a reason recorded: outside budget, went with a competitor, unsuitable site, the plan or home is unsuitable, or Unable to Contact where nobody could reach them. If the site is unsuitable for Offsite but sits in Waikato or Auckland, it goes to Transbuild Onsite rather than being lost.
When a lead closes, the contact stays in the CRM but comes off marketing. So they stop receiving campaigns, which means we are only ever emailing people who are genuinely interested, while we keep the record of why they did not proceed and recognise them if they ever come back.
Two reasons keep the person on marketing. The suppression follows the reason rather than the stage, so it is worth picking the right one when you close a lead.
Unable to Contact. Closing for silence is not the same as closing for a reason. People go quiet because life gets busy, not because they have lost interest, so they stay a marketing contact and keep receiving the newsletter.
Moved to Onsite. They are still an active customer on the Onsite side, so they stay marketable too.
Everything else, such as budget or going with a competitor, comes off marketing as agreed.
HubSpot shows three different things on a card, so they are worth separating out.
- The bold header carries the client name, region and house plan, following the same naming pattern the deal board already uses.
- Detail lines underneath show Timeframe and the owner, in the same way the deal board already shows desired timeframe next to the deal owner.
- Coloured tags then carry what needs to be seen at a glance.
Client Priority is a dropdown, so it holds one value at a time. Its job is to show the next step for that client, so one value on the card is enough and you change it as things move. On Hold has been added as an eleventh option.
The third tag in your document is Response, with Hot, Warm and Cold. We have left it out of the build for now, and it is worth a moment before we add it.
Your own wording defines In Orbit as people who are warm and Near Ready as hot, and in your board mockup Warm sits on both In Orbit cards and Hot on both Near Ready cards. So the tag is saying what the column already says, which is the one thing the tags are there to avoid. Cold is the only value doing separate work, and it appears on no card.
Nothing depends on it, so it costs nothing to leave out and five minutes to add later if the consultants find they want it. Happy to build it if you would rather keep it.
Between them these carry the detail so the columns never have to, which is what stops a lead belonging in two places at once.
There is no attempt count and no call tally. The card already shows the last activity and every logged call carries its own outcome, so the history is there without turning it into labels. Counting attempts would also invite giving up on people who are worth staying with.
The recent activity line. Emma can see something like “call 2 hours ago” on the card and has asked whether it is switched on for everyone, and whether it can carry more than one line so calls, emails, notes and tasks all show.
Alyssa is checking what HubSpot allows on a lead card and will confirm either way. It is a display setting rather than a build, so if more than one line is possible it can be turned on without changing anything else.
Qualified means ready to sign
Qualified is not a feeling about someone, it is a point in the process: they are ready to sign the Home Starter Pack and about to pay the deposit. Marking a lead Qualified creates the deal and drops it into Qualify, skipping the old Lead In and Contacted stages.
You are asked which pipeline: Offsite or Onsite. An enquiry that arrives through the Offsite world may turn out to be an Onsite build, and you would rather keep working it on your own board than hand it over early. So you get one place to work a lead from start to finish, and you choose the deal board at the point it is genuinely qualified.
That sits alongside the existing route rather than replacing it. Where an enquiry is clearly Onsite early on, it still closes as Not a Fit with the reason set to Moved to Onsite and the Onsite deal gets raised by hand.
From there the deal runs as it does today: Qualify while the pack is being signed, Deposit Imminent or Paid when the $5,000 lands, Pre-Lim Management for the site and concept plans, Contract Preparation for final specs and the 10% deposit, then Closed Won.
The consultant records it from the actual quote, replacing the old regional estimate. It should be the build value, not the $5,000 Starter Pack fee.
Spoken to but still working on them, so pick a ready made follow up
Rather than writing the same email again, choose from a set of pre written follow ups and enrol them with one click. Nothing sends without you choosing it, and everything stops the moment they reply.
- Finance. What a lender will want to see
- Seeking Site. What to look for in a section
- Need to Sell Property. Staying in touch, no pressure
- Site Check. Offering to assess the site for transport access
- Resource Consent or Geotech. What is needed, and that we manage most of it
- Site Works Estimate. Offering to quote the site works
- Decision Making. An open day invitation, or completed builds in their region
These are help rather than chasing. Emma will draft them, but the wording needs to come from the two of you, because they go out under your name.
In Orbit, so we keep working them on a longer horizon
Real but further out: still looking for land, finance a way off, selling their current place first. Today they get a few automated emails and then go quiet, which is backwards.
So they stay on the board and get worked on a slower rhythm, with keep in touch content that gives a genuine reason to make contact: new home models, price changes, open days, finance news, completed builds in their region. On top of that, a check in at 6 or 12 months.
And if somebody in orbit shows real interest, the card lifts to the top of your board so you can ring them while they are warm.