Chances are, your sales dashboard prominently features the well-known sales metrics: your forecast, pipeline, win/loss rate, sales velocity and leaderboard. But what about your deal push rate? If you're not tracking this metric now, you may be missing out on key insights that could impact your revenue potential.
In this post, we'll provide a quick explanation of deal push rate, make the case for why sales and revenue leaders should bother tracking it, and cover how you can report on it in HubSpot.
What is a Deal Push Rate?
The deal push rate is defined as the percentage of sales deals postponed to a later date than originally planned or forecasted. It measures how many deals within a specific period, such as a month or quarter, do not progress as expected and are "pushed" to the next period.
HubSpot and other CRMs will calculate this for you, but if you're a fan of manual calculations, here's your formula:
Deal Push Rate = (Total Number of Pushed Deals/Number of Forecasted Deals) × 100
So, if a sales team forecasts closing 100 deals in a quarter, but 20 of these deals are delayed to a future close date, the push rate for that quarter would be 20%.
Impact on Sales and Revenue
This metric, if used correctly, provides insightful feedback on the sales process, forecasting accuracy and potential challenges within the sales pipeline.
A high deal push rate often signals issues such as overly optimistic forecasting, obstacles in the sales cycle or misalignment with customer needs. On the other hand, a low or moderate rate suggests a healthy, progressing sales pipeline where forecasts align closely with actual outcomes.
Understanding the deal push rate and its implications enables sales and revenue leaders to:
- Refine Sales Forecasting: Adjust forecasts based on historical push rates to enhance accuracy.
- Identify Bottlenecks: Pinpoint stages in the sales cycle where deals frequently stall or get delayed.
- Tailor Sales Strategies: Develop targeted strategies to address common hurdles, whether they pertain to customer decision-making processes, competitive landscapes, or internal sales tactics.
- Improve Sales Management: Pinpoint specific areas where sales reps need training or support. For instance, if deals consistently get pushed at negotiation stages, this might indicate a need for improved negotiation skills training or a reevaluation of pricing tactics.
Healthy vs. Unhealthy Push Rates
It's important to recognize that sometimes deals get pushed. Delays happen – it's not always negative (or preventable) and the goal here isn't to achieve a 0% deal push rate.
In some cases, delays might result from strategic decisions, such as aligning with a customer's budget cycle or waiting for a product feature release that better meets the customer's needs.
However, a consistently high deal push rate, especially if accompanied by missed revenue targets or a growing number of stalled deals, is a red flag. It suggests systemic issues within the sales process or external challenges that need to be addressed.
In contrast, a low to moderate deal push rate, particularly when coupled with high accuracy of sales forecasts and consistent achievement of revenue goals, indicates a healthy sales pipeline and effective sales management practices.
In short, if you're doing regular checkups on your sales and revenue operations, think of this number as one of the vitals you should monitor as part of your overall health assessment.
How to Track and Leverage Your Deal Push Rate in HubSpot
Reporting on deal push rate in HubSpot is easy. The bigger lift is a) ensuring the deal data is accurate and current, and b) actually acting on the deal push rate insights to improve sales and revenue operations.
For this to be an accurate and meaningful metric, the sales team needs to do two things that really every sales team should already be doing:
- Create a deal in HubSpot for every opportunity, complete with a realistic anticipated close date.
- Update deals in as close to real-time as possible – especially when they progress through stages or when the anticipated close date changes.
Most standard pipeline and forecast reports will highlight when data is missing or inaccurate, but if additional structure is needed, consider triggering a task when a deal surpasses its close date for the owner to update the close date.
Pro tip: create a custom radio select deal property for deal push reason with the most common reasons a given deal might be delayed. When you trigger the task for the deal owner to update deals past their close date, drop this property in the task for them to include a reason so that you're not only tracking when deals get pushed – but WHY.
Creating the Deal Push Rate Report in HubSpot
Once you've confirmed you have the data requirements, it's time to create the report.
To add this report, you can go to Sales > Forecast > View Report (top right) > select deal push rate from the left column under forecasts & pipelines reports.
Once saved, you can configure your report based on teams, pipeline(s), date ranges or other properties needed.
Beyond the default report, you can create custom reports using deal push rate to slice and dice the data in virtually any way you see fit – including tracking the most common deal push reasons if you're using that custom property.
In a sales dashboard, make a point to review every quarter. These reports are great companions to deal velocity and deal change history reports and help provide a more complete picture of what's behind these metrics.
Putting Your Deal Push Rate to Work
Now that we've walked through what deal push rate is, why it's worth measuring and how to set it up in HubSpot, hopefully, you're ready to start incorporating this metric into your sales and revenue reporting.
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