Required deal stages (so deals show in deal stage funnel report)
It would be good to be able to set required deal stages for a pipeline. For example; a pipeline for 'New business' (prosects that are not yet customers), it would be good to force the sales team to add a deal at the first stage then have to progress it through every stage until won/lost. Then every deal will show in the deal stage funnel report and allow us to measure sales performance.
Moving a deal to a specific stage also helps the Sales Rep to fill-in certain information at a certain point of the lifecycle of that deal. By not being able to enforce that certain deals are mandatory, you miss on that help for the Sales Rep.
Moreover, having this feature would all of the sudden make the ton of new Sales Reports quite relevant. Until we can ensure that a deal hits all stages, any deal productivity report is totally inaccurate!
Having the ability to enforce certain Deal Stages would be a great additon.
Not only to get more value from the "Funnel Report" but also to make sure that the "Update stage properties" (required properties) cannot be circumvented. Currently, if a deal gets directly created in Stage 4, the required properties of Stage 4 are not being enforced which leads to data inconsistencies.
+ 1. The lack of this feature makes our sales reporting pretty hard sometimes (not to mention that I have to be the annoying person who reminds salespeople constantly)
This is SO needed. You put all those resources into makeing the amazing Funnel reports, and they are WORTHLESS if sales doesn't put deals in every step of the funnel. There needs to be a system way to "enforce" going through stages. Otherwise, they will get kicked out of every Funnel tracking conversion through stages.
It's frustrating that HS h hasn't addressed this need. It shouldn't take many voices, when the implication is clear, and it clearly ruins the value of other components they've spent time on, like the Funnel reports.
HOWEVER, here's one thing I did to solve a similar "stage skipping" in lifecycle stages. At least until HS gets on the ball about it. I created a workflow for key stages that would alert me to manually fix the skip. Goes like so:
- Trigger: stage changes - If/then was "ever in" previous stage? - If not, then "send 'Skipped Stage'" email to me. - The email comes with a link to the company, I click it, manually walk through through the missed stage, save, put then in the current stage, save. Shouldn't have to, but I threw that up while working on a workflow solution.
The sale funnel report is useless without this feature. Impossible to determine attribution through the stages.
This is a very basic setting that could be set at the deal object level. A simple Y or N for "Must follow linear process," and you have the team set which stages as a "Default" so nobody can enter a deal mid-flow.
In addition, without this, the Attribution funnel and intelligence as to how many deals move from start to close and fall out is not possible. I have tried to export all deal properties and build a pivot table, but it failed because it wasn't stored at the database level in an easy way to use in Excel.
The last part is that as we require certain "data" to be captured by each stage, not having forced linear flow means salespeople can skip critical aspects of entering prospect profile details. Hence, we ended up having all back-loaded into the Close Stage, and it is a PIS to spend time filling in data at close rather than having that BI during the sales cycle. #salesforce and #marketo both have this - it was huge in ensuring we captured the right profile data at the right stage
Why can't they just change it that it will automatically log all deal stages if you jump over some? I had to create a mandatory checkbox in each deal stage to stop our sales guys from jumping 2 or 3.
SonarShane, PLEASE tell me more detail about this checkbox.
It would solve a ton of problems if HS gave us the ability to set a deal stage to required. How hard could that be? But they do not give us that choice. How did you set up a box that forces them to complete the steps? It ends up not just making our Sales Pipeline funnel charts useless, but also mucks up all the Lifecycle stages that are geared on changes in our sales pipeline.
Deal attribution through phases is useless without this. Hubspot should get this in, it would be a simple boolean rule flag at the database level, its not hard. Salesforce has this
+1 Seeing many related ideas to this topic, but none of them have even moved passed "Idea Submitted" or received any comments from Hubspot Team. Would love to see this critical feature prioritzed.
It would be great if Admins could at least lock down which Deal Stages must be required for all Deals to pass through, and to limit which Stages that Deals can be created in to address the issue of Deal Stages and required fields getting bypassed.
+1 - Can't use the pipeline report without this, data is just wrong. Was really surprised how long this thread has been going on for but I guess with only 76 upvotes its not a top priority ..... Make sure you vote for it.
