Looking for Examples of Best Practice - Legacy Deals on Legacy Pipelines

[JReynolds9]

Hi There!

I've received great support previously for HubSpot queries, and now have a more unusual request as I am looking for examples of best practice for the topic mentioned in the subject header rather than a clear-cut solution. 

One of our company goals is to tidy up our legacy pipelines and the deals associated with them. What's great is that with recent HubSpot developments allow legacy deals from legacy pipelines to be mapped over to another pipeline, alongside being just able to delete deals itself if needed. 

Thus my enquiry is what tends to be the most common option, and/or, best practice for legacy pipeline hygiene?

I have a few ideas but interested to see how others have tackled/could tackle this:

1) Create a new pipeline called 'archive deal dump'; this would effectively be a 'graveyard' pipeline of old, archived deals. Once these deals have been moved, the legacy pipelines they were once part of can be deleted. 

2) Map the old deals and their associated legacy deal stages over to the current pipeline we use. Though this to me is complex, as the deal stages between legacy pipelines and our current one aren't in sync. I don't also want to mess up previous year reporting by doing this. 

3) Simply delete the deals and then delete the legacy pipelines. 

Looking forward to hearing accounts of this and how to tackle. 

[sales]

Interesting problem. More details on why the legacy pipelines were created will help the community offer more and deeper answers - here's how I'd approach your situation and hopefully this can help guide your decision:

1. How useful is the data in the old pipelines? If the answer is "not used or useful", your number 3 is the obvious answer.
2. If it is used or useful, will the value be preserved if they're merged into one "archive"? This is going to be very subjective depending on how different the actual sales process is between the pipelines and whether you can implement a way to separate them out after the merge - possibly additional deal types, product types, or a new field ("former pipeline"). 
3. If having them merged above is worth considering, then it might be even more valuable to have them in your current main pipeline. As you've pointed out, only do it if there's a point in time (end of fiscal year) or some very clean way to be able to structure your reporting.