Here's an example of a common sales pipeline management project that we do with our clients. ⤵️
We saw that this company had several deals in their pipeline in their HubSpot portal that were aging. Every deal in HubSpot has (or should have) a close date on it. So we built a report to show which deals were still marked as open (ie. not yet closed won or closed lost) but whose estimated deal close date was before today. So they're deals that were previously estimated to close by now but are still open. We displayed them in a bar graph grouped by month to see patterns.
The "Dashboard of Zero"
Since we don't want any old deals hanging out unresolved, this report should ideally show zero. Todd Sprinkel at Sponge.io likes to call this concept the "dashboard of zero." Basically build reports that will display any errors and/or anything else you don't want to see in your CRM data. If anything shows up in this "dashboard of zero," you resolve it in the CRM so that it no longer shows up. You do this for every issue that shows up in the dashboard until there are none remaining.
This report shows that in most months this company's pipeline is pretty clean and only 1-2 deals out of 30-40 total slipped through the cracks. But we can see they got backlogged a few times last year in June and September and November and a few more deals slipped by in those months.
The Next Step
We've tasked this client to to review all the deals on this report, starting with the most recent. If the deal is still active, they will update the estimated deal close date and make sure they have a next step task assigned. If the deal turns out to be lost, then they will update its deal stage to Closed Lost.
My guess is that they'll be able to get things going again with several deals from recent months, but most of the still-open deals from last year will probably be marked as closed lost. But you never know until you try!
The Goal
Hopefully after 1-2 weeks this report will once again be a "dashboard of zero," which will indicate that their deal pipeline is once again up-to-date and there are no longer any forgotten deals that slipped through the cracks.
How do you watch for slipped or forgotten deals in your sales pipeline? Do you use a similar "dashboard of zero" or do you track it in a different way?
