HubSpot’s deal pipelines allows your team to track deal records as they progress through the stages of your sales cycle. This is especially effective in managing your sales pipeline - mapping revenue opportunities (deal records) into a clear and visual journey as they progress through the significant milestones (deal stages) of your sales process.
The intuitive drag-and-drop interface makes updating deal stages seamless, ensuring your data stays current.
Simply pairing a structured pipeline with diligent record-keeping provides an immediate boost to team visibility and accountability.
To get even more out of your pipeline setup, here are seven additional ways to boost your pipeline’s effectiveness.
Customise Your Deal Stages
By default, new sales pipelines created in HubSpot come with these seven stages - Appointment Scheduled, Qualified To Buy, Presentation Scheduled, Decision Maker Bought-In, Contract Sent, Closed Won, Closed Lost.
While these default stages are a common starting point, they should evolve to match your specific sales process. Tailor your pipeline and customise your deal stages —by renaming, adding, or removing stages—to mirror the actual milestones of your unique sales conversations.
Update Deal Stage Probabilities
When customizing your stages, assign realistic closing probabilities to each one.
This ensures your weighted amount (deal amount multiplied by deal probability) is dependable, giving you a reliable insight of expected revenue at the bottom of your pipeline view:
Deal Card Properties
You can feature up to four properties on your deal cards-,Properties,-%3A%20displays%20property%20values). Prioritize the information your team needs most at a glance, and order them strategically to streamline their pipeline view.
Deal Tags
Use Deal Tags to help your team scan and identify deals in the deal pipeline board based on different criteria, such as deals that are high value (e.g the green tag) or require attention (e.g the red tag).
You can follow the steps here to create such tags, and popular tags include those that help to identify deals which are:
- Stagnant (deal in current stage for more than X days)
- Stale (deal created more than X days ago)
- High Value (deal amount greater than X)
- No Recent Activity in the last X days
- Urgent (expected close date less than X days from now)
Conditional Properties
Oftentimes, sales reports are inaccurate due to missing data in deal records. For example, when closed won (or lost) reasons are not diligently updated when deals are closed, it compromises your insights and analysis into why your team is winning (or losing) deals.
To maintain high data integrity, you can set mandatory properties for specific stages. When a deal moves into one of these stages, a prompt will appear from the right, ensuring your team provides the necessary details before they can move forward.
Automation
Are repetitive manual tasks slowing your team down, or are vital to-dos slipping through the cracks? By adding automation to your pipelines, you can save your team time and prevent human error. These workflows trigger automatically when a deal fulfils a specific criteria, and examples of automated actions include deal routing, sending internal notifications and creating tasks. High-impact pipeline automations include:
- Assigning deals to specific team members based on a deal property (such as industry or geography)
- Sending an internal notification when a deal is closed won
- Creating a task for deal owners when an opportunity stagnates in a specific stage
Saved Views
Finding yourself filtering for the same data regularly in your deal pipeline? You can create Saved Views with their own pre-set filters, which makes it easy to toggle between different segments of deals at a click. Examples include segmenting deals by:
- Geography
- Industry
- Deal Owner
- Source
- Create Date
Improving your pipeline’s efficiency doesn’t require a total rebuild. By implementing some (or all) of the above recommendations, you can remove friction from your sales process and turn your pipeline into a high-velocity engine that delivers data you can trust. These incremental refinements collectively streamline your team’s deal management, empowering them to work smarter and injecting additional efficiency into their day-to-day.
If you need any guidance in setting these up, do reach out to our Support Team!