Post-sale deal stages and churn

[JohnnyTargaryen]

We use deals to manage our opportunity pipeline. When a new deal closes, we mark it closed won. If it churns, we don't know what to do. If you move the deal to closed lost, you can no longer look back retrospectively and get an accurate picture of how many deals were won in previous months, because now all churned deals would no longer be there. 

Does anyone have a process they use to handle this?

[roisinkirby]

Hey @JohnnyTargaryen have you explored the option of creating a new/custom Deal Stage? See here.

[Josh · Accepted solution]

Hi @JohnnyTargaryen,

We've run into a similar situation. As @roisinkirby mentioned, a new deal stage is a possibility. We have added one for "Future Possibility", something that hasn't been a win or a loss yet, but something we want to keep track of. 

Another option is to create a new pipeline which you could even call "Churn". This is something you could focus on and keep track of secondarily to your main pipeline. Because churn deals might also have their different stages, this would be beneficial and would likely keep your main pipeline view a bit cleaner. If I am understanding your issues correctly, this is probably the route I would go.

Hope that helps!

[JohnnyTargaryen]

Thanks, y'all. Good ideas, my concern is that moving deals out of closed won or lost once they should be there throws off the reporting. As does creating additional deals (or associated deals) on a given company. We're going to have to weigh what's more important, the workflow or the data.

Thanks.

[bgrinning]

We need this as well! 

I'm really surprised that you are the only person who has written about this in the community and I'm the only one to give it Kudos.

Ideally, you could have a customer churn date and churn reason. The churn date could be used to calculate each customer's lifetime and the valuable reports that rely on that metric. For example, average customer lifetime by acquisition source or deal size, etc.

Thanks for posting! Winter is coming...

[Seyed · Accepted solution]

Hi @JohnnyTargaryen,

I am also very sensitive about my data, and understanding new sales versus repeat sales and churn. I have found you don't need to sacrifice data or workflow to acheive your goal here.

The best way we have managed to handle this issue is the following:

1. I set up a Primary Sales Pipeline for all new sales to leads, and set the deal stages accordingly for example (appointment made, showed up, 
2. I set up a second pipeline for revenue from customers which can be called a Customer Sales Pipeline. The stages here are almost surely different than the stages in the first one since your sales process is for sure different for leads vs old customers. Some semantics: we don't set up a pipeline for "churn". We set up one for sales deals...

Now this is where the fun starts. Some pointers below:

• Once you close a deal, you never touch that deal again. At least the stage that is. If it is a closed won, that's it. If it is lost, that's it. Ditto.
• Once a deal in the Primary Sales Pipeline is closed (and you have a new client/customer), right then and there you close won that deal, and you go into the other pipeline and create a new deal in that. You set the new deal's close date to whatever the contract end is for the first one (or whenever you plan to sign the renewal contract say in a year's time).
• A deal is not an active contract that you change once the contract or client becomes inactive. A deal is a possible sales transaction/contract/agreement you make with a contact and/or a company. You can have 5 deals under a client. You might even have simultaneous deals because you're offering them a full one year package and a short 3 month contract at the same time to see which they want. There is no problem with having several deals. At the end of the day it is the definitions you have to understand and set across your team.
• When you look back at a contact's timeline (read client/customer) in the contact details page, you will see the several closed won and closed lost deals from all pipelines over time related to them. You will know exactly what has happened.
• The reporting systems and dashboards in Hubspot will easily allow you to filter between the pipelines when looking at your data making it easy to see new revenue vs customer revenue (some call this old revenue, or renewal revenue atc). You can even see lost potential new revenue or lost potential renewal revenue.
• This is where churn calculations come into the picture. Since you created a new deal in the Customer Pipeline every time you got a new customer, you can just look at the deal stages pipeline report to see how many were lost vs won vs created. The number of lost over created is your churn. But remember to filter for deals in the Customer pipeline that have a close date of before today and have their stage as closed lost or closed won. 

I am using this model to expand on other sales as well. For example we are using 5 pipelines in one of our installations altogether. One being a Payment Plan pipeline. 

I can't say this is the definite answer but it has worked for us very well and the model solves a lot of things that might come up otherwise.

@roisinkirby @Josh I hope I have elaborated correctly on your answers, while presenting my solution. I would love to learn if there is a better way to tackle this problem and would value your feedback.

[PedroMarzagao]

Hi @Seyed is there any chance you can share an overview of your Pipelines structure in the Customer lifecycle stage? I most insterested in which stages you are creating for each.

[kbjornaas]

Is there a reason why using the deal type field for New and Existing business won't work with one pipeline? We are starting to look into the best way to calculate these and I assumed that field could be used easily. 

When we close-win a new customer, we will auto-create a renewal opportunity with the Deal Type "Renewal".  Will that not work?

[JonDFreeman]

This is exactly what we are doing. New and Renewal deal types. But, we also are going to set up a separate funnel for renewals since the stages of a sales process for renewals is certainly different than for new logo customers.

Some have commented in this conversation that this can affect reporting and forecasting. Certainly true but the net effect to me is that you can now track everything and in the past might not have been tracking future opportunities tied to renewals because you don't have future deals representing renewals. Not tracking this critical part of the business means you can't forecast future contracts easily or accurately or just do it through some non-hubspot method. In my thinking, everything representing possible future business should be recorded and tracked - assume the same people working things today might not be around tomorrow. A record represents the organization's memory for anyone new that comes along.

[David_HubSnacks]

This is what we do as we have a subscription model.

We have a separate Pipeline called "Bring Back Customer" which get created when a customer churns via a workflow.