Managing Your Domain Capacity

Reducing Capacity & Lead Auditing Guide

The purpose of this page is to help you understand the future of shared selling as well as assist you in de-registering existing domains in your partner portal due to the upcoming capacity reductions in February 2022.

The Future of Shared Selling

Why HubSpot is Reducing Capacities [And more importantly, when]

We know that historically there have been many rejections, a lot of conflict, and a lack of alignment between partners and HubSpot reps when it comes to sales collaboration. Part of this has been a system issue and having a capacity system causes conflict. The current system governs how you sell with us and with high capacities comes low acceptance rates. By beginning to reduce capacities, we've been able to reverse the trend of low acceptance rates, however, while trending in the right direction, we need to make more progress. Reducing capacities is a short term fix to alleviate conflict while we continue to solve for the long term goal - a new deal registration model.

Additionally, capacities no longer align with what we value. While domain registration incentivized partners to refer new leads, the new deal registration model incentivizes partners to source leads, expand customers onto new hubs, and close customers. This new model aligns with HubSpot’s vision of scaling with our partners.

Key Capacity Reduction Deadlines

February 1: New capacity changes go into effect | April 1: Deadline to avoid commissions withheld

The new shared selling tools launched in September 2021, and after capacity reductions in 2022, we'll start piloting an approach to sunset domain registration entirely. It's critical to start de-registering domains and adopt the shared selling tool as soon as possible.

With a mutual understanding for a vision of a frictionless future, the rest of this page will provide both high level best practices and tactical tips to help you and your team get under capacity and avoid any commissions being withheld.

Best Practices for reducing domains:

• Consider companies that don’t fall in your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
• Remove any companies you no longer intend to sell HubSpot to
• De-register existing customers
• Implement an ABM Strategy to only focus on your Target Accounts
• Use Lead Scoring to determine your best companies to target
• Schedule time with your CAM to review and discuss the above
• De-register companies in regions you don’t do business in

Tactical tips for reducing domains:

Review your Default Partner Lists to determine registered leads with invalid data and remove them. Work with your CAM on this if you have questions.

Use SEO Minion Chrome plug-in to find companies with broken URLs and remove those from your list. 

1. Install the plug-in 
2. Navigate to your Capacity Manager and click on the plug-in 
3. Review domains that are redirects or 404 errors 
4. Remove any domains with 404 errors. Double check the redirect links and update the domain(s) accordingly with the correct URL or de-register it.

Check out this Knowledge Base article on how to manually deregister your leads (including screenshots).

Who You Should Keep Registered

• Companies in your Target Accounts or ICP
• Companies that are actively communicating with you. Consider things like:
• Have you had a discovery call? Have you opened a Deal? Are there any warm MQLs or SQLs associated with the domain?
• If you answered ‘yes’ to any of the above, then you should keep those domains registered.

Ready to dial in and target your ideal customer? Keep reading for tips on how to start defining your Ideal Customer Profile and how to implement an Account-Based Marketing strategy!

It's important to note that your Ideal Customer Profile is defined at the company level, not the individual level. This description should be the company that is the perfect fit for your solutions.

Not sure where to start? Determine who you're already successful with.

In your HubSpot account, create a few reports of Deals Won and break them down by different company characteristics. Here are a few example reports to get you started so you can see where you are having the most success. These reports will allow you to see the number of deals or amount of revenue won and will easily allow you to see if there are certain areas where you are winning more.

A few other important metrics to look at include shortest sales cycle, lowest customer acquisition cost, highest customer satisfaction rating, largest number of renewals, most up-sells and most referrals.

Learn more:

How to Create an ICP | ICP and Buyer Personas: How are they different? | 8 Easy Steps to Creating a Customer Profile

Now that you've defined your ICP, you can take that a step further by defining your Target Accounts by implementing an ABM strategy. ABM is a focused growth strategy in which Marketing and Sales collaborate to acquire and delight high-value accounts.

How do you identify and pick your ideal set of target accounts?

Use the data that you gathered when defining your ICP, plus:

• Create a workflow that filters incoming qualified leads based on specific criteria (e.g. company size, industry, etc.) and tags them as an ideal customer type in your CRM. 
• Ask, “If we could replicate one deal from last year, what would it be?” Then, use the characteristics of that deal (e.g. industry, company size, value) to help you identify other good-fit customers. 
• Review major companies and leads who are using and engaging with your inbound content but don’t have a deal attached (yet!). 
• Identify the lighthouse accounts you could use for reference. Stick to no more than 10 accounts per sales rep.

Get started with the resources below:

Getting Started with Account-Based Marketing (ABM) | Guide to Account-Based Marketing (ABM)