Best Practice for managing "On Hold" deals?
We're a B2B SaaS business, currently our process is as follows:
- Lost deals - a deal where the customer explicitly says no (or chooses another product)
- On Hold deals - in all other cases, they are put on hold after a set period of time, by being moved to a separate "On Hold" pipeline, where they go through a reactivation funnel.
Our product can be defined as a "want" rather than a "need", so there are many more deals that meet the "on hold" criteria than the "lost" criteria, meaning we under report lost deals and that our funnel / sales cycle metrics are incorrect.
What is best practice to manage these "on hold" deals in Pipedrive to ensure focused sales teams and accurate reporting?
Thanks for your input!
Answers
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Hi @HDGM -
There are a few different ways to handle a situation like this in Pipedrive, but one option is to use an Automation to create a new Deal in your On Hold pipeline when a Deal in your Sales pipeline is marked as Lost for a specific reason. Take a look at this 1:15-min overview.
The key benefits to this solution are:
- Since you’re not moving the deal across pipelines, you don’t lose data about the original sales deal
- Your Sales pipeline isn’t cluttered by low-priority “held” deals
Please feel free to reach out if you would like additional support.
- Liz
Schedule a Working Session | Pipedrive for Beginners | Pipedrive Integrations
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Pipedrive's core philosophy used to be activity-based sales (until they added the ability to sort deal cards in the pipeline view). I wouldn't treat on-hold deals any differently if I am adding the appropriate next activity for a tentative date in the future. As far as messing up with the stats is concerned, you can add a custom field that indicates that a particular deal was 'on hold'. You can then use this field to exclude any deal that was 'on hold'.
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Based on your description I'd think management should want to put a time limit on it and then mark it as lost. At the maximum it should sit on hold for a calendar or fiscal year. More likely calendar. If it isn't sold in 2023 then it's lost. A new deal is created for the 2024 "season". An exception would be that a deal is opened in 2023 with the understanding that it will likely not close until 2024. If thats known, it should be understood from the beginning. Deals should be sitting perpetually on hold.
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My approach is to lose deals if they stall in one stage for too long and the prospect has stopped communicating. That works for me, because my use case is finding book authors for specific topics. If one prospect goes unresponsive, my time is better spent in recruiting someone else who is more interested and engaged.
Sometimes an author will say to me something along the lines of "come back to me in six months". In those cases, I will lose the deal and add an activity to the lost deal scheduled for whatever future date fits the scenario.
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Yeah, I have a lost reason called "Ghost" that I use for those that stop communicating.
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Ghost! @Pipedrive User 164 , I love that. It's colorful. I also have a lost reason for that instance, but mine is much more mundane sounding.
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