HubSpot Pipeline Management: Proven Tactics for Sales

Success in sales is just a matter of dialing numbers, firing off text messages, and sending emails, right?

If only. You might get far by doing the above on repeat 24/7. But trust me, after a week or so of DMing, emailing, instant messaging, and everything else, you will A) burn out and B) lose track of your leads and where they sit in the sales process. 

The answer is pipeline management.

It’s not the headliner topic at INBOUND, but believe me, good pipeline management is key to effectively executing your sales strategy. In this article, I’ll give you a play-by-play breakdown of how to set up and manage a sales pipeline in HubSpot that keeps your calendar and CRM full.

What is pipeline management?

HubSpot’s tools for pipeline management give you a bird’s-eye view of your sales funnel and process. That means knowing how many active opportunities you have and where they are in the sales process.

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Why bother with pipeline management?

As I said, pipeline management is not the most exciting topic in sales, but nailing pipeline management is essential. Without a good handle on your pipeline, everything comes down to guesswork, and sooner or later, your luck will run out. 

I’ll walk you through the essential steps of pipeline setup, practical automation tips, and the analytical insights necessary to keep your sales engine running smoothly.

HubSpot default deal stages

Before you start worrying that I’m about to give you homework, don’t. HubSpot makes pipeline management incredibly simple to get started, thanks to a ton of baked-in functionality and default stages.

When logging into HubSpot’s deal view, you’ll have a default pipeline set up with the following stages:

• Appointment Scheduled
• Qualified to Buy
• Presentation Scheduled
• Decision Maker Bought-in
• Contract Sent
• Closed Won
• Closed Lost

HubSpot gives you a ton of other valuable properties, like:

• Deal scores
• Deal types
• Closed won/lost reasons
• Forecast probability
• Next activity date

Seriously, it’s that easy. The fun part begins when you start customizing this to YOUR sales process, though. I’ll show you how to do that next.

How to customize your HubSpot sales pipeline

You could get pretty far with the default HubSpot pipeline setup, but it’s a one-size-fits-all solution that you’ll need to tailor to your sales process and customers.

Fortunately, HubSpot makes this super easy. All you need to do is:

• Define custom stages
• Set probabilities and milestones
• Configure your reports to track progress

Define custom deal stages

The first way to level up your sales funnel in HubSpot is to create custom deal stages. 

These should map to your exact sales process, so take a step back to examine the flow you take each prospect through from discovery to contract signing, and make sure that is reflected in HubSpot. To customize your deal stages, just head to deal settings and select pipelines from the menu:

A good start for a B2B SaaS company might be:

• Connect Call: 10%
• Discovery Completed: 20%
• Demo Scheduled: 40%
• Demo Completed: 60%
• Proposal Sent: 80%
• Verbal Commit: 90%
• Closed Won / Lost: 100%

But feel free to tweak it to your exact flow. Check out my guide to sales funnel stages here.

Set probabilities and milestones

You probably noticed another setting in addition to the deal stages themselves: probabilities at each stage.

This isn’t a matter of guesswork as much as it is looking back at your deal history to judge the likelihood of closing based on where a prospect sits in your funnel. Ideally, the further along a prospect is, the more likely they are to close. 

Report on deal movement and velocity

In sales, it’s all numbers.

Calls made, LinkedIn invitations sent, deals created, and deal duration. HubSpot is a sales reporting powerhouse that lets you pull data from different sources to provide a visual breakdown of your sales pipeline and its health. 

Personally, I like to keep an eye on deals and the following metrics:

• How many deals are in progress
• Forecasted revenue
• Deal progression by stage
• Win/loss ratio

How to automate communication and pipeline management in HubSpot

Manual pipeline management is fine if you only have a few irons in the fire, but what if you’re making 50 calls a day or sending 100 LinkedIn requests every week?

Automation is going to be your best friend. Fortunately, HubSpot has a ton of great sales automation tools, like:

• Automated tasks
• Sequences
• Workflows

Automated reminders and tasks

Tasks are a HubSpot feature for creating and scheduling to-dos in your CRM. Tasks can be associated with a contact, company, or deal record, making them a great way to schedule and plan out work to hold yourself accountable.

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There are three main types of tasks you can create in HubSpot:

• Call
• Email
• To-Do (which technically can be anything)

And if you have the Sales Navigator integration:

• Send an InMail
• Connection request

I like to use tasks to stay organized and ensure that I have a defined next step for every prospect. Task queues, calendar syncing, and other advanced features can help you keep all your ducks in a row and each prospect moving forward.

Check out my guide to using HubSpot Tasks for a complete walkthrough.

Personalized outreach with Sequences

Personalization doesn’t need to mean painstakingly crafting every email. By using HubSpot Sequences, you can set up pre-defined messages to go out to cold prospects, warm opportunities, and deals you’re trying to get across the finish line!

Sequences allow you to drip a series of personalized emails to sales-qualified leads or cold prospects over time, automating your outreach at scale.

I like to use HubSpot Sequences for the following:

• Automate emails
• Create tasks
• Send LinkedIn InMails

Check out my top 10 favorite HubSpot Sequences here.

Automation at scale with Workflows

Automated emails, task creation… isn’t that what HubSpot Workflows already do?

Yes, sequences are similar to Workflows, but these are distinct tools. While Sequences and Workflows both can send an automated series of emails to contacts in your CRM, Workflows are much more powerful; they support more actions, more complicated branching logic, and a few other special features.

Sequences are great for a simple series of messages or tasks, but Workflows can be used a bit more dynamically. For example, Workflows could be used to:

• Send a series of messages based on a prospect’s activity on your website
• Trigger messages based on LinkedIn activity
• Drip content over a long period of time, with branching logic based on prospect behavior

Together, Workflows and Sequences can help you send the right message at the right time, increasing your chances of being heard and listened to.

How to report on your sales pipeline in HubSpot

You’ve put in the work to create, customize, and automate your sales pipeline. Now let’s talk about reporting.

Whether you’re managing a team of reps or want to track your individual performance, HubSpot has reporting tools and dashboards to help you pinpoint what’s working and what’s not. And that means a smarter and more efficient sales process for your team to follow. 

The sky’s the limit for what you can report on in HubSpot, but at a minimum, I recommend setting up the following dashboards:

• Sales activities by rep
• Deal performance
• A target accounts overview

That’ll get you pretty far in reporting on your sales pipeline; check out my favorite sales dashboards for a walkthrough of my top reports.

Pipeline management best practices

Before we close out, I’ll leave you with a few best practices to guide you as you build and manage your pipeline in HubSpot.

Remember: HubSpot is a great tool, but it’s only as good as you are. HubSpot alone won’t transform you as a sales rep or manager, but it can empower you to work smarter. To stay on track, I recommend the following:

• Run regular audits
• Focus on high-value opportunities
• Automate as much as possible, within reason
• Stay agile

Run regular audits

Your work begins after you set up your pipeline. The pipeline is just your process for prospecting and deal movement, and that process should evolve over time. 

Take time to audit your processes at least a couple of times each year, or once per quarter if you are doing enough volume to collect meaningful data. The best sales teams I’ve ever met were never satisfied with the status quo, and regular audits ensure you won’t be either.

Prioritize target accounts

If you have 25 opportunities at this very moment, would you rather dedicate an equal amount of time to each one or focus on the biggest and most likely to close?

Obviously, it’s the second option.

We call this account-based selling; it’s the practice of ranking and prioritizing opportunities as strategically as possible. By targeting efforts on prospects that best resemble your most successful opportunities, you increase your odds of meeting quotas and closing deals.

Automate with reason

With workflows, tasks, and sequences, there is no reason for doing everything manually in HubSpot.

By combining HubSpot’s built-in automation features with data enrichment tools and LinkedIn automation tools, nothing is stopping you from ramping up your sales process to run outbound at scale. Don’t jump to automating everything right off the bat, though. I recommend refining and automating your process piece by piece.

Check out my guide to sales automation in HubSpot for a complete walkthrough.

Stay agile

This goes hand-in-hand with running regular audits, but it’s worth calling out.

Just because your process has been your process for a few months or years doesn’t mean it always has to be. The best sales reps are rarely caught flat-footed. They stay on the balls of their feet to adapt to what comes their way. 

Whether it’s a new channel, a new feature, or a limitation from LinkedIn or changes in AI, the world around you is going to change. Rather than ask “how do I keep doing what I’m doing,” ask, “how can I adapt or do things differently?”

Success in sales starts with standing out and being noticed, and the reps who remain agile have the best chance of succeeding.

Master pipeline management with the HubSpot Outbound Handbook for 

Pipeline management is just the starting point. Now you need to fill your pipeline with qualified leads and hot opportunities.

To do that, you need an outbound strategy.

If you really want to level up your sales process in HubSpot, download the free HubSpot Outbound Handbook, our guide to building a scalable and effective outbound process in HubSpot. In this guide, we cover:

• The channels to use
• How to get the attention of your prospects
• The tools you should use to speed up sales

And more! Click the button below to get it for free and start scaling your outbound process in HubSpot.