Best practices for new deal stages

[Melissaalvarez]

Hello. I'm trying to update our pipeline's deal stages by 1) deleting unecessary ones and 2) renaming existing ones.

We haven't been using reporting before I joined - so things like average time in each stage, avg. sales cycle, etc are not super clean. Reps are moving deals around, closing and re-opening, or just never closing deals. 

Would it be recommended that I delete stages we won't be using (and migrate existing deals into other stages), and re-name some stages? 

Or should I just create an entirely new pipeline. My worry with a new pipeline is confusing reps by having too many pipelines, and then having to decide what to migrate over. 

[karstenkoehler]

Hi @Melissaalvarez,

If the new pipeline stages somewhat correspond to existing ones, I would rename these. This will minimise how many deals you would have to move around, if you created new stages and deleted old ones.

For steps that are net new, these of course should be added. I would not recommend renaming an existing stage to a new one with a different meaning just because it's in the right place.

When I make these changes in portals, it's typically a mix. You can follow your intuition here. If you're not sure and when in doubt, create a new stage.

I would not create a new pipeline as that will increase complexity. The existing pipeline likely already has settings like tags, required properties, automation, which you would have to set up anew.

Hope this helps!

[Melissaalvarez]

Thanks this is helpful! They are pretty similar in definition, we're just re-naming and getting rid of superfluous "pre-funnel" stages. 

Should I be concerned about breaking old reporting for time in stage and sales cycle? I don't believe it'll hurt sales cycle time since that won't be affected by stages, and I downloaded all deal data so I could have that information offline if needed. I'm thinking since no one has used the "cumulative time in X stage" properties to do any analysis before, we can use some filter like "create date is after june 2024"  when doing this reporting in the future. 

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

@Melissaalvarez HubSpot auto adapts all reports, properties etc to pipeline stage changes. Nothing will break (except for lists, reports, workflows that reference specific stages you are deleting). Everything will reflect your changes, such as the time in stage properties. If you're renaming, they'll retain their data. If you're creating new stages, they'll only collect data from that point on.