Best practices for restructuring deal pipelines?

[NicoleT]

We have a variety of pipelines that are used by different sales organizations in our company (one for inside sales, one for national accounts etc).

Recently we have started an effort to standardize the pipelines into a single pipeline, to make it easier to understand pipeline value, forecast revenue, and generally understand what's going on in our business.

The problem is we have a fair amount of workflows enabling pipeline automation right now. And 40+ hubspot users active in the platform daily. 

We want to build the new process and retro-actively update the data to match the new stages. But it doesnt seem like Hubspot has a sandbox instance where we can build out the new process and then push live to the rest of the company.

Has anyone else done a major restructure and have best practices to share?

[karstenkoehler]

Hi @NicoleT,

That's correct, it would be an empty portal.

Best regards!

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @NicoleT,

This really come down on the types of workflows that you have set up. The first step would be taking inventory of all records that are currently in place for the target pipeline and checking whether they would immediately enroll new deal records from the soon-to-be old pipeline. Hopefully, a lot of them won't. For those that remain, you need to evaluate the enrollment criteria very carefully.

If there is for example a workflow regarding deal ownership, it might make sense to exclude all moved deal records entirely (if ownership has been taken care of in the old pipeline). This could be done via a custom deal property and "labeling" the deals.

There might be some "backend" workflows which update properties or stamp dates, they can probably be ignored.

And then there will likely be some workflows that trigger internal notifications to sales or external emails to contacts. This is the most tricky part. Here again, you'd have to exclude these deals (by marking them with a value in a custom property). It might also make sense to wait for these deals to be closed won or closed lost in the old pipeline before moving them into the new pipeline. At this point, they can likely be excluded from all workflows.

In any case, if you do migrate deal records from one pipeline to another, start with a small sample of records, ideally test records to see if everything behaves as you want it to. If this small sample triggers notifications or external emails, you can go back to the drawing board.

By the way, there actually is a way to get a sandbox instance. Via this link you can request a developer account (select app developer account).

Best regards!

[NicoleT]

Hi Karsten, 

Thanks for your answer! My understanding from Hubspot support was that Sandbox accounts dont include your data / workflows and there wouldn't be a way to "push" the changes made live across your Husbpot instance?

[MarianaG]

Hi Nicole,

If you have several workflows working on your previous pipelines, I would start by exporting all workflows and doing an audit to decide which ones can be turned off. That way you can have a clearer picture of the new workflows you need to create to update the data for the new single pipeline.

When you turn on a workflow you can choose to deploy the workflow action to records that currently meet the trigger, which would sort of retroactively update your database, or update only new records. You may want to look first at how much data would be affected by this update to decide if you want to use workflows to do that. 

Do you currently have a large number of deals in each of those pipelines? I would also look deeper into how moving all deals to one pipeline would affect reporting and properties related to revenue and evaluate for possible loss of data.