Monday pipeline review. The rep scrolls to a deal in “Proposal sent” and says the champion is out this week, so it should move next week. The manager nods. The same deal was in “Proposal sent” at the last three reviews, and nobody in the room remembers that, because the board only shows where a deal is, not how long it has been there.
That is how a pipeline fills up with deals that stopped moving weeks ago. They still count toward coverage, they still sit in the forecast, and they still get discussed every Monday. This paper shows what HubSpot already records about time in stage, how to build a stalled-deal view and report, what a long stay means at each stage, and how to clean up the backlog without losing the history you need.
What counts as a stalled deal?
A deal is stalled when three things are true at once: it has sat in its current stage well past the time your won deals usually spend there, the buyer has stopped engaging, and its close date still sits in the current period. Any one of those alone can be normal. All three together mean the forecast is counting a deal the buyer has stopped working on.
The comparison point matters more than the cutoff. A week in discovery and a week in legal review mean different things, and a team selling six-figure contracts moves at a different pace from one selling small subscriptions. So the yardstick is your own history: how long the deals you won spent in each stage. Pull that from your closed-won deals before you set any filter, and set a separate cutoff per stage.
Buyer-side activity is the second test. A rep logging calls and emails to a prospect who never replies is still a stalled deal. What you want to see is a meeting the buyer accepted, a reply, or a document the buyer sent back.
HubSpot already tracks time in stage
HubSpot keeps a set of stage calculated properties on every deal: Date entered current stage, Time in current stage, and per-stage properties such as Cumulative time in a stage and Latest time in a stage, per its stage calculated properties documentation. You do not need a custom property or a workflow to know how long a deal has been sitting.
Two details from that documentation decide how you build the view. First, Time in current stage and Date entered current stage describe the stage the deal is in now, which is what a stalled-deal list needs. Second, HubSpot does not enroll records in workflows on the Cumulative time or Latest time properties while the record is still in that stage. If you want an alert, trigger it on Date entered current stage or Time in current stage instead.
Activity has its own default properties. Last activity date and Next activity date sit on the deal record, alongside the rest of HubSpot’s default deal properties. A deal with an old last activity and no next activity scheduled is the clearest sign that nobody, rep or buyer, has a plan for it.
I often came across the same picture: not one stuck deal but a long list of them, each with no next step and a last logged activity from months ago. A rep will say they called Jeff last week. Maybe they did, but if the last logged activity was 48 days ago, the CRM can’t show the deal stalling, and nobody can forecast it.
How do you build a stalled-deal view in HubSpot?
Build one saved deal view and one report. The view lists open deals that have stayed in their current stage longer than your won-deal norm for that stage, with no recent activity and nothing scheduled. The report shows the same thing as an average by stage and by owner. Plan on an hour, most of it spent working out your own norms per stage.
For the view:
- Start a saved view of deals in the pipeline you forecast from, with closed won and closed lost stages filtered out.
- Add a filter for one stage at a time, and a filter on Time in current stage greater than the norm for that stage, taken from your won deals. Repeat the filter group for each stage, since each one gets its own cutoff.
- Add a filter on Last activity date before a date you choose, and Next activity date is unknown.
- Show the columns that matter in review: deal owner, amount, close date, Date entered current stage, Last activity date.
- Sort by amount, so the largest stalled deals come first.
For the report, build a deal report on open deals that averages Time in current stage, grouped by deal stage, then a second version grouped by deal owner. The first shows where deals stall. The second shows whose deals stall, which is a coaching question, not a performance verdict.
If you want the list to come to you, a deal workflow triggered on Time in current stage can create a task for the owner when a deal crosses its stage norm. Keep the task wording neutral: “confirm the buyer’s next step” gets better answers than “why is this stuck?”
What a long stay means at each stage
Time in stage is a symptom, and the stage it happens in points at the cause. A long stay early in the pipeline usually means the deal should not be there. A long stay in the middle usually means the buying group grew. A long stay at the end usually means the team met legal or procurement too late.
| Where the deal sits | What a long stay often means | The first question to ask |
|---|---|---|
| Discovery or qualification | The deal never had a real problem, budget or buyer behind it | What did the buyer agree to do after the first meeting? |
| Demo or evaluation | More people joined the decision and the rep is still talking to one | Who else has to say yes, and have we met them? |
| Proposal | The proposal reached someone who cannot approve it | Who is reading the proposal, and when do they decide? |
| Legal, security or procurement | Requirements surfaced late | Which requirements could we have raised in discovery? |
The last row is the one teams underrate. A deal stuck in procurement is not dead, but its close date is often optimistic, and the forecast should say so.
What should you do with a stalled deal?
Give every stalled deal one of three outcomes in the next pipeline review: a buyer-confirmed next step with a date, a move to a lower forecast category, or closed lost with a reason. Ebsta and Pavilion’s 2024 B2B Sales Benchmarks, an analysis of 4.2 million opportunities across 530 companies, found deal slippage rose to 44% in 2023, and that deals with close dates moved more than three times saw win rates drop 77%.
A deal that has stalled and been pushed deserves a harder look, whatever its stage says. If stalled deals are piling up across the pipeline, the free CRM Diagnostic shows where it starts.
The hard part is the conversation. Salesloft’s 2026 report, fielded by Censuswide among 500 U.S. sales and revenue decision-makers, found only about 32% of leaders can instantly diagnose why a deal has stalled. The stalled list often exposes the same gap: the rep knows the deal is quiet, and nobody has asked the buyer why. Ask about the buyer’s actions, not the rep’s. “What has the buyer done since the last review?” separates a slow deal from a dead one faster than any field.
If your forecast categories need a clearer line between commit and best case for deals like these, our forecasting glossary defines each one. If the weekly review itself rewards reps for keeping dead deals open, your pipeline review is teaching your reps to lie covers why.
How do you clean up stale deals in bulk?
Run one cleanup, then keep the view. Export the stalled list, give each owner a week to confirm a buyer-side next step on the deals worth keeping, then close the rest as lost with a reason such as “No decision” or “Stalled.” Close them rather than delete them: the deals you lost are half of every win rate your forecast relies on.
Deleting old deals feels tidy and costs you later. A win rate needs the losses as much as the wins, and a stage-by-stage conversion rate needs every deal that entered each stage. We showed how those rates feed HubSpot’s forecast in why is my HubSpot forecast always wrong?, and what drives accuracy in sales forecast accuracy.
Expect the pipeline to shrink the week you do it. That is the forecast getting more honest, and it is a better conversation to have with the CFO in week two of a quarter than in week twelve.
After the cleanup, make the stalled view part of the weekly review, sorted by amount. Ten minutes on the top of that list each week keeps the backlog from coming back.
Keep the view, or keep the padding
You can keep running pipeline reviews on what each deal’s stage says this week, with a coverage number that includes deals nobody is working. Or you can build one view, run one cleanup and accept a smaller, truer pipeline. The first option feels safer until the quarter closes. The second gives you the bad news while there is still time to replace it.
If you want to see how much of your own pipeline has stopped moving, along with the rest of your CRM’s health, book your free diagnostic.