How to clean a stale deal pipeline in HubSpot

A pipeline is a forecast. Every open deal says "this might close, for this amount, around this date". When half of those deals haven't moved in months, have no close date or no amount, the forecast is fiction, and so is every report built on it. Cleaning the pipeline is the fastest way to make HubSpot reporting trustworthy again.

The properties that make or break a deal

Four default deal properties carry most of the forecast (HubSpot: default deal properties):

• Amount: the total value of the deal. Without it, the deal weighs nothing in revenue reports.
• Close date: the day the deal is expected to close, or did. HubSpot sets it automatically when a deal moves into a closed won or closed lost stage, but for open deals, someone has to fill it in.
• Next activity date: the date of the next scheduled activity, set by HubSpot when a future call, email or meeting is logged. An open deal without one has no plan.
• Last activity date: the most recent past activity on the deal. It tells you how long the deal has been sitting.

Add the associations: a deal with no contact can't be followed up, and a deal with no company is missing from account views.

Find the deals that need attention

Run these checks on your open deals, from the most to the least urgent:

1. No close date. The deal can't appear in any forecast by month.
2. No amount, and closed won deals with no amount, which make revenue reports wrong.
3. No associated contact. Nobody to call.
4. No next activity. Nothing is planned, so nothing will happen.
5. No activity for 90 days or more. These are usually lost deals nobody has closed.
6. No activity for 30 to 89 days, then 15 to 29 days: the deals slipping away.
7. No associated company.

Lost deals with no follow-up planned and deals with no original source are worth a look too, but they don't distort the forecast.

Clean in three passes

Close what is dead. For deals with no activity in 90 days or more, ask the owner one question: is there a real next step? If not, move the deal to closed lost, with a reason. A smaller, honest pipeline beats a big, imaginary one.

Complete what is alive. For every deal that stays open, fill the close date, the amount and the next activity, and associate the contact and the company.

Review what is slipping. Deals with no activity for 15 to 89 days are the ones you can still save. A short review with each owner, every week, keeps them from drifting into the 90-day pile.

Keep the pipeline clean

• Make key properties required per stage. In HubSpot, a pipeline stage can require a property, so a deal can't be created or updated into that stage without it (HubSpot: set up and customize pipelines). Requiring the amount and the close date from the first qualified stage means every qualified deal has both.
• Never leave a deal without a next step. Every call ends with the next one scheduled.
• Review stale deals weekly, before they become a quarter-end surprise.

How Forgeo checks the pipeline

12 of the 40 checks in Forgeo's audit are about deals, including every check above. Open deals with no activity are counted in exclusive bands, 15 to 29 days, 30 to 89 days and 90 days or more, based on the last activity or the create date when there is none. Each check opens the matching deals in a spreadsheet view you can search, sort and filter. The full list is in the HubSpot data audit checklist.