Sales · Start here
Sales 101
Your first read. This page is the map and the dictionary: how a sale moves from a name on a list to a customer with locks on doors, and what every word in that sentence means here. Each step links to a deeper playbook when you need one.
The shape of a sale
We sell NFC door locks and the software that runs them to self-storage operators. A sale moves through five things, in this order, and each one is a different record in HubSpot.
- Lead. One attempt to start a conversation with one person. It ends when a meeting is booked, or when you write down why it did not. Working with Leads →
- Deal. Created the moment a meeting is booked. This is the opportunity: a real number, a real conversation, and the thing that shows up in the forecast.
- Quote. Built from the deal and sent to the customer to sign. You set a few fields on the deal and the system builds, sends, and tracks it. Working with Quotes →
- Order. What exists once they sign. Hardware gets picked, shipped, and invoiced against it.
- Onboarding. Kickoff call, install, go-live. This is tracked on the onboarding ticket, not on the deal. The deal's job ends when the customer has paid in full.
The words we use
Most confusion in the first month is vocabulary, not process. These are the terms that come up daily.
People and accounts
| Contact | A person. We have thousands. Being a contact means nothing on its own. |
| Company | The storage operator. This is the account, and it is where the facts about their business live: how many facilities, what software they run, what locks they have now. |
| Lead | One attempt to start a conversation with one contact. A work item, not a person. |
| Deal | A real opportunity with a value attached. Created when a meeting is booked. One deal ends in one signed quote, which is one order. You can send several quotes while you negotiate, but only one gets signed. |
| New vs existing business | Decided for you when the deal is created: if the company is already a Customer, it is existing business; otherwise (including a Former Customer) it is new business. You do not pick it. If it looks wrong at signing, ops flags it for a conversation between the rep and the AM. |
| Owner | The one person responsible for a record. Everything has exactly one, always. |
| Signer | A label you put on a contact to say "this is who signs". It decides who the quote gets emailed to. |
| Tenant | The storage customer's customer. The person renting the unit, who opens the lock with their phone. |
| Guest | Someone a tenant shares access with. Not a tenant, not a customer. |
Money and paperwork
| Quote | The signable offer. Built from a deal, sent as a link, and tracked until it is signed, edited, or voided. |
| Order | What exists after signing. The quote is the offer; the order is the commitment. One quote can produce more than one order. |
| Tranche | When one quote splits into several orders that ship and get billed at different times. Set up at quote time, so think about it before you send. |
| Deposit | Part of the money now, the rest later. Turned on by setting Deposit percent on the deal. Leave it blank and the whole amount is due on signing. |
| Invoice | Raised against an order, not against a quote, and generally at fulfillment rather than at signing. |
Product
| Hardware | The physical locks. SKUs starting 1xx. Paid once, invoiced through QuickBooks. |
| Premium Features | The paid software add-ons. SKUs starting 2xx. Recurring, billed through Stripe. The base platform is free, so a quote with no 2xx lines is perfectly normal. |
| Demo lock | A real lock shipped to a prospect so they can hold it. Comes in Disc, Cylinder, and Latch. |
| PMS | Property management software: the system a storage operator already runs their facility on. We integrate with theirs, so which one they use is an early qualifying question. |
| Facility | One physical storage site. Operators often have several, and they buy site by site. |
| Unit | One storage space inside a facility. Roughly one lock per unit, which is how deals get sized. |
| Go-live | The date a facility starts actually using the locks. Onboarding works backwards from it. |
The deal stages
Every deal lives in the Deal Pipeline. Each stage is entered when something you can point to has happened, not when a deal feels further along. If you cannot name the event, the deal has not moved.
| Evaluation | A meeting is booked or held with someone who could buy, and the deal was created from the lead. No quote has gone out yet. No meeting means it is still a lead, not a deal. |
| Proposal Sent | A quote has been sent to the customer. The deal stays here while the customer has not replied. |
| Negotiation | The customer has come back on the quote: a change, a revision, pricing, or terms. A quote nobody has answered is still Proposal Sent. |
| Signed - Unpaid | The quote is signed. This counts as won. The system moves the deal here when the quote is signed. It stays on your board until the money lands, so you can help us collect it, and you are not paid commission on a deal until it is paid in full. |
| Closed Won | Paid in full. The system moves the deal here when the last payment lands. Never move a deal here yourself. |
| Closed Lost | The customer said no, or went quiet and stopped responding. Always record the reason. |
Four things that trip people up
1. There are two won stages.
Signed - Unpaid means they signed but the money has not landed. Closed Won means it has. A deal sitting in Signed - Unpaid is not stuck and nothing is broken, it is just waiting on collection. Both count as won, and you move neither by hand: signing and payment move them.
2. The old Sales Pipeline is being retired.
Deals still in the old Sales Pipeline move to the Deal Pipeline when you next talk to the customer: change the pipeline, pick the matching stage, and make yourself the owner. Discovery and New Opportunity deals with no meeting go back to being leads instead. Its onboarding stages (Kickoff Call Scheduled, Onboarding in Process, Onboarding Complete) are history only; onboarding is tracked on the ticket.
3. A quote is not an order.
The quote is what you send; the order is what exists once it is signed. They are separate records, and one quote can produce several orders. If you are looking for shipping or invoicing, you are looking for the order.
4. One deal, one signed quote. A reorder is a new deal.
Send as many quotes on a deal as the negotiation needs, but once one is signed that deal is finished. If the customer comes back for more locks, create a new deal and quote from there. Never edit the line items on a signed deal to build the next quote: those lines are the record of what they bought.
Buying for several facilities at once? Keep it on one deal if everything ships to one address and one person pays. Make one deal per facility when they want different shipping addresses or different payment methods, because a signed quote carries exactly one of each.
The playbooks
Each step of the funnel has its own guide. Read them in this order, and come back to this page whenever a word stops making sense. Every one carries a companion file built for an LLM, so you can hand an assistant the full picture in one paste.
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Working with Leads
What counts as a lead, the five stages one moves through, the exact moment it becomes a deal, and how to close one out so the effort teaches us something.
📄 LLM file -
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Working with Quotes
How to generate, edit, and void a quote in HubSpot, the setup rules that shape it, what the customer sees, and what happens after they sign.
📄 LLM file
This set grows. Orders and onboarding do not have their own guides yet. As each one gets written it appears here, and its terms get a line in the dictionary above. If you hit a word on this page that is not defined, that is a gap worth reporting rather than guessing at.