Deal Management

MSGA — Wed, 29 Dec 2021 23:18:34 GMT

Is a deal really lost if a proposal was never submitted? In other words, a potential client said to me that he did not want to pursue additional discussions because he preferred to talk with a competitor. This was before we even got to the Proposal Review stage in my Deal Pipeline. I have already counted it as a lost deal and assigned a ballpark revenues number to it, but the more I think about it, the more I wonder if it is truly a lost deal or more of an SQL that should not have been advanced.

Re: Deal Management

karstenkoehler — Thu, 30 Dec 2021 06:28:19 GMT

Hi @MSGA,

This decision is up to you and depends on what exactly you'd like to see in reporting. Eventually, I would say, you'll want to answer the question how good your sales team is at closing deals and, if that doesn't work out, what the reasons and patterns are.

If you want to keep a contact as a SQL you could update the Lead status accordingly and would be able to report on that. For deals, you would update the Closed lost reason. In my opinions both approaches are valid.

HubSpot itself suggests the following: "Create a deal when a contact takes an action that could lead to revenue, such as booking a meeting with you to discuss your product or service." I would echo that. It makes most sense to me that deals are created when a sales rep sees potential in a SQL that could lead to revenue. The deal doesn't have to make it to the proposal stage to be a "real" deal.

If you see that deals are usually lost at that stage because of competitors, that is a huge learning – not a mistake on your end in correctly designing your pipeline stages. Using a deal funnel report from the report library, you can keep track of this and work on finding solutions for improving the conversion rate.

Hope this helps!

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Deal Management

Re: Deal Management