HubSpot Ideas

rossfruin

Deal Stage Funnel Should Have the Option to Include Stage Skipping in Reporting.

The Deal Stage Funnel becomes completely unvaluable once you have a deal that skips a stage. If we take a prospect from stage 1 to stage 3 because of a quicker than average sales cycle, and don't drag and drop them into stage 2 along the way, it does not account for the stage to stage conversion % which is incredibly valuable data. Most companies that have sales teams will have deals that move from one stages to a further stage down the funnel and for one reason or another will skip stages and the tool does not currently account for that. 

 

Can you include an option to included data from deals that skips stages?

23 Replies
davstock
Member

Totally agree. While I see the importance of having a rigid stage funnel, real life is a bit messier.

I just want to see the stage a deal is in. I don't care how it got there.

Vladimir
Member

Agree. Look what issue do we have too.

 

Deals snapshot and Deal stage funnelDeals snapshot and Deal stage funnel

OleMartinExilva
Contributor

Yup.

You, as in HubSpot, should either:

a) add an option to open up for skipping stages, as suggested, 

or,

b) make it mandatory* to follow each and every stage in the correct order.

 

Unless one of these options are available, your whole funnel approach falls apart. 

I have no idea how my deals move, how many of them that was moved since last report period, and so on. At least not with this tool at the moment. Excel magic might due the trick, but that's not why I bought the Reporting Add-on.

Finnspin
Member

And still no response here?  What's up hubspot?!

fulthy
Participant

@Finnspin @OleMartinExilva @Vladimir @rossfruin

 

I also believe that there is an issue in that to be counted as a 'closed lost' the deal also has to pass through the 'closed won'' stage.  

 

At the moment the way the report is designed the Deal Stage Dashboard and Deal Funnel Dashboard will never reconcile.

erikblues
Top Contributor

We have the same issue, will call some more votes this way. This feels like more than an idea, but a bug that needs to be fixed.

rok
HubSpot Product Team
HubSpot Product Team

We are currently investigating ways to improve funnel reports to provide additional conversion insights including stage skipping.

AlexandraM
Member

Indeed, I am quite surprised to see this is still an open issue since 2017. I wonder if any of the HS clients use the Deal funnel at all. Making it mandatory to follow each stage for a deal (or introduce a workflow that marks the ones skipped as completed by default when you push a deal two-three stages ahead) should be done asap, otherwise, why have a Deal funnel at all? 🙂

shatton
Participant

Oh my goodness! PLEASE fix this! It's disheartening to see only 3 won deals for the year when we have closed more than 3. Just because a customer skipped getting marked a lead, it doesn't mean that they shouldn't be part of the report. This is truly an oversight and needs to be corrected. NO excel spreadsheet, NO piece of paper, NO other sales report would display it the way Hubspot is currently displaying it. The deal flows report in my opinion is utterly useless without this functionality.

 

And we just recently paid for custom reporting to hopefully fix it. Nope. Still doesn't work. 😞

 

Same with customer lifecycle stage. We jerry rigged that one with workflows to automatically move customers through lifecycle stages, but it's far from perfect. I just want the report to show up correctly with correct conversion amounts.

Sean_Wilson
Participant

@rok so this has been in planning for 4 years now - I guess we will never get a sales funnel report that actually works.

Mission critical reporting for sales teams is absolutely DEAD.

ESeligman
Member

Disappointed to see this idea seems to have stalled. As things stand, the funnel reporting isn't useful for us at all since some of our pipelines include optional stages for things like testing, as well as multiple kinds of won or lost stages. While we initially thought to move deals through stages they're skipping as a formality to make it work, this not only creates unnecessary manual work for our users, but also is no longer an option as some of those stages have stage-based workflow automations that shouldn't be triggered unless actually needed.

riteshk
Member
This feature has been in consideration since a while, is there any ETAs? 
 
Here's my two cents: 
 
Next stage conversion & cumulative conversion ratios: 
  • If a deal was created directly in let's say Negotiation or Proposal stages, it does not count in stages earlier to where it was created --- that skews Next step conversion percentages 
  • If a deal has skipped one of the stages in swim lane - that is not getting counted in Cumulative Conversion percentages
To fix the above: need to customize the system to consider a deal to have gone through all stages prior to the current stage it is in, even if it was originally added in a later stage or skipped a few stages while progressing 
 
Hygiene: 
  • How can we disable creation of deals in a stage that is not the very first stage in the funnel? While creating a deal - it should go to the very first stage ONLY 
  • How can we disable stage skipping? -- A deal can be moved to the next stage only, it can't jump any stage except if getting moved to 'Lost' 

 

DWoods
Participant

This is a gap in HubSpot reporting. Deal conversion rates are essential to sales analysis. 

04552
Member

Any updates after more than two years of "investigating", @rok?

LVarvashevich
Participant

still the same issues.  the only thing that made is useful for me was deleting of all the stages before the closed lost and counting of the Loss Rate. and nothing more. 

FLIPPP
Participant

Same issue here. The conversion rates between deal stages are crucial for optimizing our sales process and we miss that information. Seeing that it has been reported in 2017 without a solution yet is frustrating.

Apr 9, 2020 2:06 PM We are currently investigating ways to improve funnel reports to provide additional conversion insights including stage skipping.

If the answer wouldn't be 2 years old, I would say that it sounds promising 😞

ChaosFreak
Contributor

SIX YEARS AND NOTHING!!!

Three years ago this was marked as "in planning" but no action since.

Why does HubSpot continue to do such stupid things as assuming that every single deal will pass through every single deal stage? This is not how sales works. It's as if HubSpot was created by a bunch of engineers and marketing people who have absolutely no idea how sales works.

For what we pay for this product, it is riddled with missing features, bonehead decisions (like this) and inefficient interfaces for entering data.

DenysStukalenko
Participant

UNBELIEVABLE! If I had known about this bug earlier, I would have never chosen Hubspot for my company. I am seriously considering replacing Hubspot with a different CRM. What a DISAPPOINTMENT! 

 

Hubspot, do something! It doesn't seem like a too difficult bug to correct. 

dmastin
HubSpot Product Team

We have begun development for all professional tier HubSpot customers to have the ability to mark middle stages as "optional."

dmastin
HubSpot Product Team

Effective November 28, all Pro portals will be able to request private beta access to the new, rebuilt funnel builder. This will allow you to mark a stage as optional for both Deal funnels and Contact funnels. 

 

This new funnel builder will also allow you to use the Company Lifecycle stage if you would look!

 

If you are a HubSpot admin, be on the lookout in your inbox or the Product updates section of your HubSpot portal.