What to do with cold deals in HubSpot?

A common issue that businesses face when using HubSpot’s sales hub is what to do when a deal goes cold?

Do you create a new pipeline stage? Delete the deal? Keep it in the same stage?

In this deep-dive, I’ll go through the step-by-step process I use to manage cold deals.

What is a cold deal?

The definition of a cold deal varies between businesses, but as a general rule of thumb I would say if the deal is not showing signs of moving to the next stage and there is no clear next step, the deal is cold.

Where to move it?

Businesses make the mistake of creating a separate pipeline stage for ‘nurture’ which ruins their forecasting. I recommend that you move the deal to closed lost as it’s technically a lost deal.

It’s important that you setup a drop down ‘closed lost reason’ property to categorise these deals. I would have a drop-down option that is ‘gone cold’ so you can mark these deals.

How to set this up?

Go into HubSpot settings, properties, deal properties, create a new property called ‘closed lost reason drop-down’ and create a down down field with all the main reasons that you lose deals.

This will allow you to set-up some automation on the backend to reopen these deals, set tasks and emails, and notifications if there is the possibility of these deals becoming live again.

What is the follow-up?

You have two options for when a deal goes cold. You can either allow your sales team to manually set the follow-up schedule or you can define it as an organisation.

I prefer to set it organisation wide, with my process like the following:

Deal is moved into closed lost and the reason is ‘gone cold’:

• Delay for 2 weeks

  • Set task to deal owner to follow-up

• Delay for 2 weeks

  • Set task to deal owner to follow-up

• Delay for 1 month

  • Set task to deal owner to follow-up

• Delay for 3 months

  • Set task to deal owner to follow-up

• Delay for 6 months

  • Set task to deal owner to follow-up

The goal of the workflow should be that the associated deal is no longer in closed lost.

I would also ensure that the contacts are included in all marketing comms and newsletters.