Tracking Growth Deals/Ramped Revenue

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1

Hi there,

I am working on a process to more accurately track ramping deals in HubSpot and would love some input from anyone who has tackled something similar.

Context: We have clients who sign deals but don’t bill at full value right away — they ramp up over 12-18 months and the revenue doesn’t come in on a consistent cadence or in consistent amounts. For example we might sign a client for a $10,000 deal, receive $50 in month 1, then $4,000 in month 5, and the remaining amount trickles in over the following months. Currently we record the full expected deal value upfront which inflates our pipeline and makes forecasting inaccurate. We want to fix this by properly tracking revenue as it is actually realized over time.

I have been working in the sandbox and have built out a set of custom properties to support this:
- Total Deal Value — full expected opportunity
- Revenue Realized — cumulative revenue billed to date
- Ramp Progress — calculated percentage of Total Deal Value realized
- Revenue Remaining — what is still left to be realized
- Months to Ramp — expected ramp duration
- Ramp End Date — calculated from First Bill Date + Months to Ramp

The question we are trying to resolve is around pipeline structure and this is where I would love the community’s input:

Option 1 — Separate Growth pipeline
Create a dedicated Growth pipeline where closed ramping deals live and progress through percentage-based stages (0-25%, 26-50%, 51-75%, 76-99%, Revenue Realized). Clean separation of new business vs growth revenue, easy to include or exclude in reporting.
Option 2 — Growth stage in existing pipeline
Add a Growth stage and a Revenue Realized stage to existing pipelines. Simpler for the sales team, one less pipeline to manage, but new business and growth revenue live together.

There is pushback on a separate pipeline. My concern is that from a reporting standpoint, mixing active new business deals with ramping growth deals in the same pipeline makes it harder to get clean data.
For those who have dealt with post-close revenue tracking in HubSpot:

  1. Did you use a separate pipeline or deal stages and what drove that decision?
  2. If you went with stages, how do you cleanly separate new business from growth revenue in reporting?
  3. How are you handling the Revenue Realized update process — manual, workflow, or integration?

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!

2

Hi @lynzie

You are actually approaching this really thoughtfully already. This is a pretty common problem once companies move beyond simple “Closed Won = full revenue” reporting.

Honestly, I think your concern about mixing new business deals and ramping revenue in the same pipeline is valid. It usually starts out manageable, but over time, reporting can get messy because you’re trying to track two very different things in one place:

  • new revenue being sold,
  • and revenue being realized over time.

Because of that, I’d personally lean toward the separate growth pipeline approach too. It keeps forecasting and reporting much cleaner, especially for leadership and finance teams.

Your custom properties also sound very well thought out already. The only thing I’d be careful about is updating “Revenue Realized” manually long-term. Once volume grows, manual updates tend to become difficult to maintain consistently. A lot of teams eventually connect that data to invoices, billing systems, or integrations, so the numbers stay accurate automatically.

I’ve also seen some companies keep the original deal as the “Closed Won” event, and then track the ramping revenue separately afterward so the sales pipeline itself stays clean.

So overall, I do think separating growth tracking from active sales pipeline management is probably the cleaner long-term setup, especially if accurate forecasting is important to your business.

And honestly, this is one of those HubSpot structure decisions that is much easier to get right early than rebuild later. The team at WebGuruz Technologies works with HubSpot reporting and workflow setups like this quite a bit and can help simplify things before the process becomes harder to scale.

Hope this helps!