Just wanted to know how other SaaS products in the market fix the deal stages of their sales pipeline which has demo, sign-up & on-boarding to free or subscription type product use. Can you help in the stages they include in hubspot’s deal stage to manage sale pipeline effectively.
Hi @mariselvi,
For SaaS companies, deal stages should reflect how leads progress from initial contact to active use or subscription. Below are two suggested pipelines that reflect common SaaS sales motions:
Pipeline A: Sales-led SaaS with demos and onboarding
- Discovery or Initial Contact
- Qualification or Needs Assessment
- Demo Scheduled
- Demo Completed
- Technical Evaluation or Trial
- Proposal or Pricing Sent
- Decision Maker Buy-in
- Contract Sent
- Closed Won or Closed Lost
Pipeline B: Product-led SaaS with freemium or self-service entry
- New Lead or Sign-up
- Product Activated
- PQL Identified
- Outreach Initiated
- Qualified for Sales
- Demo Completed or Sales Call
- Upgrade Discussion
- Contract or Payment Decision
- Closed Won or Closed Lost
These can be adapted based on your internal processes, sales motion, and whether you’re combining PLG and SLG models. It’s helpful to keep deal stages aligned with buyer intent and internal actions to ensure forecasting is clean and reps know how to move deals forward.
If the above don’t match your requirements, please share a bit more context about your situation and requirements.
Hope this helps!
Hi @mariselvi
SaaS industry is a very particular one, and not all companies operate the same way.
Some of our clients have:
- 1 pipeline for self-serve trials and account (specially if its individual or small companies)
- Another pipeline for SMB that requires the assitance of a Sales Rep.
- And a 3r pipeline for additional module trial /add-ons (that is different from the first product/account purchase)
- Then you can handle onboarding by the Customer success team in a tickets pipeline.
Of course all of this comes with an optimized data model with you app objects and information replicated in HubSpot and synced by an integration to keep up to date.
If you are looking for help optimizing HubSpot for your company, you can get in touch with me here.
Hope this helps
These are two fantastic and comprehensive answers from @karstenkoehler and @Lucila-Andimol that cover the pipeline structures perfectly.
To build on their points, the key to making these SaaS pipelines truly effective isn’t just the definition of the stages, but the automated triggers that move deals between them based on real-time data from your product.
For example, in the Product-Led Pipeline model, you can’t rely on a sales rep to manually move a deal to “PQL Identified.” Instead, your pipeline should be automated based on actual user behavior:
- When a user invites X+ teammates in your app, a sync from your production database should automatically update a property in HubSpot, moving the deal to the “PQL Identified” stage and creating a task for a rep.
- When a workspace completes the onboarding checklist, that event can trigger the deal stage to move to “Ready for Expansion,” alerting the Customer Success team.
This approach makes your pipeline truly data-driven, not reliant on manual updates.
Full disclosure, I’m the founder of Stacksync. We’re a real-time sync platform, and our bread and butter is providing that deep connection between a company’s production database (Postgres, MySQL, MongoDB, you name it) and HubSpot to enable exactly these kinds of automated, data-driven pipeline triggers