How do you currently keep track of deals that go cold in HubSpot?
I’ve noticed that once pipelines grow, it’s easy for deals to just sit there without activity.
Curious how people here handle:
Do you rely on reports, workflows, or something else?
Hi @As021,
One way to look at deals and their staleness is the default deal score: Predict likelihood to close with deal scores - you could create a filtered view of deals in later stages dropping below a certain threshold and take action accordingly.
Another option would be a simple deal-based workflow that notifies the deal owner and a manager when a close date moves into the past (Close date is more than 0 days ago + is not closed won/lost).
Yet another option would be using deal tags to flag stale deals: Create color-coded object tags (based on activity dates, for example)
On top of that, you can also create reports to check regularly - I’ve explained in a previous post how to do that: https://community.hubspot.com/t5/Dashboards-Reporting/How-to-create-deal-report-for-inactive-deals/m-p/687348
Let me know if you have any follow-up questions!
Thanks, this is really helpful.
Out of curiosity, do teams you work with actually rely on these consistently (especially reports/workflows), or do deals still slip through? Also, which of these approaches tends to work best in practice?
@As021 whether deals slip through depends on your definition of what is stale and on your sales team culture and way of working overall. If you leverage all of the above, you’re definitely lower the probability of that happening.
What works best in practice again depends on your way of working. Try the ones that seem to make most sense in your environment and then see how it goes. I personally think that a combination of visual cues (tags) and reminders (workflow notifications) works best.
The deal score and close date workflow above are a solid base. One gap worth adding, a workflow that only notifies the deal owner often just recycles the problem, since the owner is usually the person who let it go stale in the first place. Adding a second tier that escalates to a manager or RevOps if the deal is still open a few days after that first notification catches the ones that would otherwise just sit ignored in someone’s inbox.
Also worth tracking separately from close date, deals with zero activity in the last couple weeks, even if the close date technically hasn’t passed yet. A deal with a close date next month but no touch in three weeks is just as stale, and close date alone won’t catch that one.
This is actually the exact problem that got my team building something internal for it. We started with a few scripts to catch it automatically, and it grew into a small tool that watches for stale deals, missing close dates and a few similar patterns, then flags them in Slack in plain English the moment they cross the line instead of waiting for someone to run a report.
How is everyone else handling the escalation part specifically? Notify only, or does anyone loop in a manager after some grace period?