Best practice for contract termination

[maikle]

Hello! We are looking for some community advice on what your thoughts are on the best practice for forecasting contract terminations in our pipeline.

We are a telecom company and most of our contracts with customers are 12+ months that auto renew on a monthly basis. We need to be able to include in our pipeline contracts we know will be terminated in the future or even significant future credit notes.

The main issue we have is that a Closed Won stage for a Termination or Credit is confusing to many users. Does anyone have a better way to set up a pipeline to account for these type of forecast items?

[Jnix284 · Accepted solution]

Hi @maikle, happy to offer a little insight @PamCotton 

Rather than adding additional stages, I would add custom deal properties related to renewals that you can report on, and allow those deals to remain Closed Won, since they were a customer at one point.

I bet @jolle would have a few good ideas for how to manage this scenario.

[jolle · Accepted solution]

Hey @maikle, thanks for reaching out!

And thanks for the mention, @Jnix284!!

Have you looked into HubSpot's recurring revenue tool at all? This feature lets you report on and forecast revenue relative to start and end dates. There's also some built in functionality for renewals vs straight terminations, in case that's relevant. I think that this would probably be the best representative of active won revenue, and it wouldn't require the creation of an additional deal:

1. Rep moves the deal to closed/won
2. Rep configures the respective recurring revenue settings
3. Those deals are pulled into active deal reporting until they pass the termination date

Hope this helps!!

[maikle]

Hi @Joelle , I took a deeper look and realized that this won't work for our specific case. We're using data from our accounting team for recurring billed revenue but for forecast data it will come straight from the pipeline.

Typically, when a contract expires with us it will roll into a month to month contract and very few will actually terminate the service after expiration. We won't have a card for every single active service but the sales person will want to forecast a termination so I believe a card does need to be created in the pipeline. Is the only solution for us to use the Track recurring revenue function and create cards for all active services?

[maikle]

Thank you Jolle! This looks like what I need to prepare for. I'll take a deeper look into this and test out a few different scenarios. Thanks again!

[jolle]

You got it!!

[Jnix284 · Accepted solution]

Hi @maikle, happy to offer a little insight @PamCotton 

Rather than adding additional stages, I would add custom deal properties related to renewals that you can report on, and allow those deals to remain Closed Won, since they were a customer at one point.

I bet @jolle would have a few good ideas for how to manage this scenario.

[maikle]

Thank you for the suggestion! In my case there isn't an existing card that's in Closed Won. Only a small portion of our sales people HubSpot but we are hoping to change that soon so there will be a lot of new data going into it. In my scenario it would be a new "Deal" that the BDM wants to forecast as a termination to offset the new contract deals they have in their pipeline.

[PamCotton]

Hello @maikle, Happy Tuesday!

I want to invite to this conversation our top experts to share their thoughts @ChrisoKlepke, @Jnix284, @Phil_Vallender any recommendations to @maikle matter?

Thank you,

Pam