Unlocking Data Insights From Closed Deals

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As a Customer Success Manager at HubSpot, I often see customers overlook the importance of capturing their opportunities’ closed-won or closed-lost reasons. While hitting sales targets is often paramount, you may be leaving parts of your go-to-market strategy to guesswork if your team isn’t systematically and habitually capturing why your deals are won or lost. 

The reason(s) behind your opportunities’ outcomes can provide insights and clarity cross-functionally. For example:

• For marketing teams: Won reasons could allow your marketing team to know exactly what to highlight in their marketing campaigns and assets to attract quality leads.
• For product teams: Trends in lost reasons could provide insights into areas of the product that are falling short compared to competitors, and also allow the product team to make more data-backed decisions that inform their product roadmap (such as understanding the potential revenue lost due to missing features).

In just 3 steps and with just 15 minutes, you can turn simple data collection into a feedback loop of business intelligence.

Step 1

Create 2 custom deal properties - one for closed-won reason(s), and one for closed-lost reason(s). 

Although there are default properties in your account that can capture these as well, they come as multi-line texts, which means that your users can type in anything. This leaves room for data discrepancy, which will affect your reporting accuracy in Step 3. For example, “price,” “pricing,” and “too expensive” all indicate the same category, but would be presented as three different reasons in your reporting.

It is strongly recommended that you create a dropdown select (if only allowing for one selection) or a multiple checkbox (if allowing for multiple selections) to standardise the options available.

 

If you’d like to input more details and context after selecting from the available options (especially if “Other” was selected), you can use the default properties to type in free text.

Step 2

Make your custom deal won/lost property a compulsory datapoint to add when deals are moved to the won and lost stages in your deal pipeline. You can follow the steps here to do so.

With this, your team members will be prompted and reminded to update the deal won/lost reason, and will not be allowed to move the deal into the respective stage without doing so.

Step 3

Create a custom deal report to present real-time data from your deals and pipelines. You can further augment this report to cater for parameters such as close date, sales rep, deal value, etc.

With this simple addition to your sales process, you can gain deeper understanding behind your sales outcomes. The result - a feedback loop of actionable data that provides value and insight not only to the sales team, but cross-functionally across your business as well.

If you need any guidance in setting these up, do reach out to our Support Team!