The new approval stage is great! It would be awesome to be able to create more than one approval stage in a pipeline.
Whilst I love the new approval functionality, we need more flexibility to improve the experience for customers (especially medium-sized and corporate clients on Enterprise):
- We need to be able to ‘pause’ Approvals being required (for example, to import legacy data that’s already been approved) without having to recreate the Approval requirements from scratch when you switch it back on. Errors can be made when re-adding the criteria.
- We need the capablity for approvers to set a ‘delegated Approval’ for specific periods e.g. when they are on holiday or long-term sick. Ideally we should be able to enter dates from when/until when should the delegated Approver be able to cover their outstanding/new approval items.
- We need to be able to include more Approval Steps, for different levels of approval, as well as the abliity to have conditions for approval - without having to create multiple Pipelines with similar Stages. For example, if a Deal is value X or more, then it needs to be approved by Approver 1 only. If the value is Y or more, it needs to be approved first by Approver 1 and then by Approver 2. And if it is a specific type of Deal (contains product A), then it must also be approved by Approver 3. Essentially we need to be able to include more sophisticated approval layers.
Currently I’m achieving the above for key clients using a combination of Workflows and a single Approval Stage for the highest level of approval (typically the CEO), which works. However the user experience is different for different types of approver. I really like the ‘user experience’ for approvers and how they can reject and add notes, so would prefer to have that approach for ALL approvers.
Would love to speak to a Product Manager about use cases, since I have a lot of experience with Salesforce Enterprise clients using SF approval processes, and we need to be able to offer the same with HubSpot to accommodate those type of needs for HubSpot corporate clients too (and even smaller ones, selling sophisticated solutions).
Completely agree with @vanessahunt!
Also, if deal gets denied approval it should have more options than only moving it to Closed Lost. Or at least there should be settings that we can decide what we want to have happen.
It’s very clunky without increased options and abilities to add more stages of approval.
It would also be great if you didn’t have to hard code in an approver e.g if you could use a HubSpot user property like ‘Manager’ or ‘Delegate Approver’.
To get around only having three hard coded approvers we are having to create multiple pipelines.
YES PLEASE!
We need to be able to include more Approval Steps, for different levels of approval, as well as the abliity to have conditions for approval - without having to create multiple Pipelines with similar Stages.
Adding my +1.
My use case is to have approval requirements for closed lost. I need to require approval to move to closed lost for deals with a certain value that are lacking key property values. Right now the approval don’t run at all when moving to Closed Lost.
Hi everyone,
I’m Zita, the product manager for Pipelines.
Thank you for taking the time to share this idea — we genuinely read and consider everything submitted here.
After review, we don’t have plans to build this right now. This is actually something we find interesting, but we have higher-priority work in flight that we need to see through first. It’s on our radar for future consideration.
That said, we revisit our roadmap regularly, and customer ideas like this one do influence what we prioritize. Thanks!
For anyone landing here after the PM’s update: some of the asks in this thread can be covered outside the native approvals today.
Native first: the built-in approvals give you one approval stage per pipeline, so the usual workarounds are the one @TGibs02 describes (extra pipelines per approval level), or a custom Approval status property with workflows that create a task for each approver, plus a required property on the next stage.
Full disclosure, I built an app for this: Deal Approvals & Stage Gate. It runs its own approval steps on top of your pipeline: up to 5 steps in a row on its Pro plan, each with its own conditions (amount, discount, deal type, owner’s team or any deal property), approvers as named users, teams or the deal owner’s team lead instead of hard-coded people, and a rejection goes back to the owner with the reason instead of to Closed Lost. A deal moved past the gate without approval is moved back within seconds with a note on the deal.
Two honest limits: apps can’t block a stage change before HubSpot saves it, so the app moves the deal back right after, and it doesn’t gate Closed Lost, so @K_Brown’s case isn’t covered.
It’s not on the Marketplace yet, so search for “Deal Approvals & Stage Gate Kayabyte” or use the website on my profile for the setup guide and install link.
If you want to try it on a real pipeline, send me your approval rules and I’ll set it up with you by email, free.