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

[rossfruin]

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?

[rossfruin]

Hi, @OfferZenBrett --

Yes, this fix is for both the lifecycle stage funnel report and the deal funnel report. 

In terms of not wanting stages to be skipped, that's still supported! When you're setting up the report, just don't mark the stage as optional (see a screenshot below for what I mean) and it means any contact or deal had to go through that stage.

If you're not sure if you've set up a stage as optional or required, you'll see a little piece of copy in the top right that tells you whether it's optional or required. Hover your mouse over the stage to change it one way or the other.

Hope this helps.

[rossfruin]

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.

[rossfruin]

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

[rossfruin]

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

[OfferZenBrett]

@dmastin  

Just want to check if you're referring to the fix being for lifecycle stages that get skipped OR deal stages? 

Both are a problem for us. 
but came here today to find posts referring to deal stages being skipped. We want to have a way to not allow stages to be skipped. OR have implied stage conv versions (for previous stages) when skipping stages like this person suggested https://community.hubspot.com/t5/HubSpot-Ideas/Sales-Funnel-Report-with-Implied-Conversions-for-Skip... 

[dmastin]

Hi, @OfferZenBrett --

Yes, this fix is for both the lifecycle stage funnel report and the deal funnel report. 

In terms of not wanting stages to be skipped, that's still supported! When you're setting up the report, just don't mark the stage as optional (see a screenshot below for what I mean) and it means any contact or deal had to go through that stage.

If you're not sure if you've set up a stage as optional or required, you'll see a little piece of copy in the top right that tells you whether it's optional or required. Hover your mouse over the stage to change it one way or the other.

Hope this helps.

[OfferZenBrett]

Thanks @dmastin 

I'm sure this addresses the issue. From what I can see in the reporting is that if I make the deal stage "required" then all it does it exclude deals where the stage was skipped. Which means I'm missing out of a bunch of deals because they're being excluded. 

I want to prevent stages from being skipped by the AE's. 

[LChausse2]

The new change is helpful but still doesn't work for our reporting. I want to be allow the first stage in the pipeline to not be bound to the dates. If I want to see how many of our contacts or companies moved from unaware to the next stage, aware, last month, I can't see the full group. I can only see those that were first marked as unaware during that month and then moved to aware.