Showing pipeline progress

[RGroom]

Hey,

I'm trying to create a report showing pipeline difference today vs previous months, however, the default is to sort by 'create date'. Since some opportunities take longer to come to fruition, this isn't an appropriate way to segregate them. I want to show the count of all deals on the y-axis with each deal stage inside it and have a monthly period or rolling period on the x-axis.what I have currently

[Chris_Hamoen]

The historical snapshots is super cool, but what it does miss is "what changed". You can get this by exporting to excel then running some macros/lookups. 

There are some 3rd party tools that can help to run compares - of course i'm one of them at www.dataparrot.ai 🙂

[jolle]

Hey @RGroom, thanks for reaching out!

I'll be honest — this can be a difficult report to capture since HubSpot reports are built off of date properties. You have a couple options here:

Set up a funnel report

You should be able to find a default deal pipeline funnel report from HubSpot, but here is the HubSpot Knowledge Base article on creating custom funnel reports as well. This report won't necessarily show you the progression of individual deals over specific time segments, but it will give you a sense for the percentage of your deals that are moving forward within a set timeframe.

Set up the average time in deal stage report

There is another default HubSpot report called "Deal average time spent in each stage" that will tell you the average amount of time deals spent in each stage for the given time period. It tends to be the most helpful when you're looking at it over the course of years vs months, but it can give you a sense for the deal stages that seem to take the most amount of time to get through.

Set up "Date entered stage: [stage name]" reports

For every deal stage in your pipeline, HubSpot has a default "Date entered stage: [stage name]" date stamp property. Instead of the create date/close date, you can use a stage-specific date property to track the deals that entered a certain stage within a given timeframe. If you set up a report for each stage, you can potentially track individual deals in each report if they've moved to different stages within the examined timeframe. For example, you could build a report that shows you all of the deals that entered a specific stage within the last year. You can then format that report to display data on a monthly basis. That should give you a view of how many deals entered that specific stage each month. 

Other thoughts

I'm not sure exactly how you'll be using this data, but think about what's truly important and actionable to you. You can track deal progression, but how much does that really tell you? I think it may be more helpful to report on:

1. Closed/won deals for a given timeframe
2. Closed/lost deals their reasons for a given timeframe
3. Stuck deals (deals that have been in the same stage for 30+ days)
4. Key logged activities (i.e., meetings, calls, emails, notes, tasks)

Reports like those will give you a solid since for what actually moved in the pipeline, what's not moving, and what tracked actions are being taken (or not taken) to move deals though the pipeline.

Hope this helps!!

[RGroom]

Thanks Jolle,

The historical reports suggested by karsten was just what I needed. I appreciate your reply.

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @RGroom,

If you want to create this report yourself, it has one dimension too many. You could create a report for each stage, looking at the 'Entered ... stage date'. That would allow you to include the previous months data as a comparison. With the breakdown by stage in one report, the time period comparison becomes unavailable:

So it's either one custom report per stage or nothing, unfortunately.

Alternatively, there is a default report under Menu > Reports > Analytics Tools > Sales Analytics > Forecasts & Pipelines > Historical snapshots. While it might not be exactly what you're looking for, you might find that it's equally useful and informative.

Best regards!

[Phil6]

Hello Karsten, the solution you propose sounds interesting. However none of the labels correspond to things I see in my version of Hubspot. So I am a bit confused where to find this. This is what I see: 

[RGroom]

Hey Karsten, Historical snapshots are exactly what I was looking for, thanks.