HubSpot Deal Stages: What to Fix, What's New, What to Stop Ignoring
HubSpot's default deal stages are a starting point, not a strategy. Here's how to set yours up properly, and what's changed in 2026.
Multiple Pipelines: When to Use Them
One pipeline works for most businesses. Multiple pipelines make sense when you have genuinely different sales motions that shouldn't share the same stages or probabilities.
Common cases: a product sales pipeline and a consulting or services pipeline, an inbound pipeline and an outbound pipeline, or an enterprise pipeline with more qualification stages and a low-touch pipeline with fewer. If the buyer journey is different enough, different stages, different timelines, different close rates, they probably deserve a separate pipeline.
The risk is proliferation. More pipelines mean more places for deals to live, more dashboards to build, and more configuration to maintain. Start with one, get it right, and only create a second when the first genuinely cannot accommodate the use case cleanly.
The Audit Every HubSpot User Should Do Right Now
If you're not sure whether your current pipeline setup is working, here's a quick audit worth running. It covers the same ground, faster, as auditing your HubSpot data before you trust the forecast it produces.
Check your stage probabilities against reality. Pull a closed-won report by deal stage and see what percentage of deals at each stage actually closed. Compare to your configured probabilities. If they are a long way apart, update them.
Put a dollar figure on it while you're in there, because that is what changes the conversation with a sales leader. Take a $220,000 AUD services contract sitting at Decision Maker Bought In. HubSpot's default probability for that stage is 80%, so it's contributing $176,000 to your weighted forecast on the strength of a rep ticking a stage. If nobody can name the evidence that moved it there, that number is opinion with a currency symbol in front of it.
While you have the deal open, check whether the amount includes GST. A $220,000 contract that's GST inclusive is $200,000 of revenue. If half your pipeline is entered one way and half the other, your forecast is out by up to 10% before anyone touches a stage.
Look for stages with deals that never move. Filter your pipeline by stage and sort by time in stage. If a stage has deals sitting there for months, either the stage is poorly defined, reps don't understand it, or it needs required properties to enforce forward movement.
Check whether stages describe buyer milestones or rep activities. Read each stage name and ask: "Can the rep move a deal here without the buyer doing anything?" If yes, consider rewriting it as a milestone the buyer has crossed. There's a full walkthrough on tracking real buyer milestones instead of rep-reported stages.
Review your Closed Lost reasons. If Closed Lost has no reason attached, you're missing one of the most valuable data points in your CRM. Set a required Closed Lost Reason property and enforce it. Twelve months of that data will tell you why you actually lose, which is usually not the reason your team says out loud.
It's also the thing to hand marketing when they ask what happened to the pipeline they generated. Same job as giving marketing a view of which campaigns actually create pipeline: the reporting only works if the stages underneath it are honest.
How many of your stages does anyone actually update?
Teams tend to use three of them and drag past the rest.
Conclusion
Deal stages are not a one-time setup task. They're a living part of your CRM that should evolve as your sales process evolves, your team's average deal cycles change, and HubSpot adds new capabilities.
The businesses getting the most out of HubSpot in 2026 are the ones treating their pipeline configuration as something worth auditing quarterly, instead of setting it and forgetting it. The features are there. The AI Deal Score is there. The stage-gating tools are there. They just only work if the underlying stage structure is honest about how your team actually sells.
That last point is worth sitting with, because the AI features are arriving faster than most teams are ready for them. The ABS put business use of AI at 12% in 2024-25. It's a loose measure of a broad thing, but the direction is clear enough: plenty of Australian sales teams are being offered AI scoring on a pipeline whose stages nobody has looked at since the portal was set up. The score will be confident. It will also be reading your rep's optimism back to you.
If you want help auditing and rebuilding your HubSpot pipeline properly, book a session with us. Pipeline configuration is a standing part of our RevOps and HubSpot work.
When were your stage probabilities last changed?
Whoever set them up has probably left the business.
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