Seven deal tags, and what it means that you need them

This started with a list Will DePeri posted — seven must-have deal tags for a HubSpot sales team — and the comment thread under it, where Joshua Oakes, Camille Balhorn, Kristeen Romero and Caleb King added most of what makes the set complete. Worth reading in full: Will DePeri's original post on LinkedIn.

I'd implement most of that list tomorrow, and the version below is the one I'd actually build, with the additions from the comments folded in and a note on what each one costs to stand up. But something occurred to me while I was reading it, and it's worth saying before the list rather than after.

Every tag on it flags a rule the business already believes. Every open deal has a next step. Close dates are real dates, not placeholders. A deal that hasn't moved in two weeks is not fine. Nobody in the room would argue with any of those. They're not aspirations, they're how the team already thinks the pipeline works. And each tag exists because nothing in the system makes them true — so instead you build an instrument that shows you, deal by deal, where the rule is being broken.

That instrument is genuinely worth having, and I'd rather a team have it than not. I just think it's worth being clear which of two things you're buying: visibility into a rule being broken, or the rule holding. They're different purchases, and the first one is much cheaper, which is exactly why almost everybody buys it and stops.

What a deal tag actually is

A pipeline-scoped, rule-based label on the deal's board card. You write a filter; every deal matching it wears the tag. Nothing gets applied by hand, which is the whole point — a tag someone has to remember to set is just another field that decays. It also means a tag is only ever as good as the property its filter reads, which is where most of the build cost hides.

The six you can build this afternoon

These read properties HubSpot already maintains for you. No workflow, no helper property, nothing to maintain afterward.

Missing next step

Next activity date is unknown. The highest-signal hygiene tag on the list — a deal with nothing scheduled isn't a deal, it's a hope. If you build one tag, build this one.

Past close date

Close date is before today and the deal is still open. Forecast rot, made visible. Everything downstream of the forecast is wrong for as long as these sit there.

Closing soon

Close date within the next fourteen days, deal open. This is the one the team plans capacity against, so it's worth a two-stage version: amber at fourteen days, red at seven.

No activity in seven days

Last activity date more than seven days ago, deal open. Silence on both sides. Cheapest tag on the list to build and the fastest to act on.

Stalled

Hasn't changed stage in roughly half your average time-to-close — fourteen days is a reasonable default, not a constant to inherit. Build note below.

No contact or company

Zero associated contacts, or zero associated companies. Camille Balhorn's addition in the comments, and in my experience the one most likely to be quietly true across an existing pipeline. An unassociated deal is invisible to every relationship report you run, and nobody finds out until a report is wrong.

The build note on stalled: HubSpot gives you a date-entered property per stage, so a single stalled filter across a pipeline means OR-ing every stage's date property together. That works, but it has to be re-edited every time somebody adds a stage, and nobody remembers. A one-line workflow that stamps a last-stage-change date on any stage change turns the filter into a single clause that survives pipeline changes. Do that if your stages move more than about once a year.

The three that need a property before they can exist

Deal tag filters read deal properties. That sentence is the whole constraint, and it's why these three are a different kind of work — not harder, but not configuration either. Once the property exists the tag takes a minute.

Contact in sequence

The truth lives on the contact, where 'currently in sequence' is maintained. To tag the deal you need that rolled onto the deal first — a workflow-set checkbox is the usual answer.

Close-the-loop sent

A checkbox or date on the deal, set by the thing that sends the breakup email rather than by the rep afterward. Set by hand it decays within a quarter, and then the tag is worse than nothing because people still believe it.

No champion in quoting

Joshua Oakes's buying-committee tag, and the sharpest one on the whole list: a deal that reached quoting without an identified champion is a problem the board should be shouting about. It needs whatever names your committee — an association-label rollup, or a champion field if you already run one.

Two more worth having, once something upstream earns them

Oakes also suggested fit tags — red, amber, green against qualitative fit rather than firmographics. Do their stated challenges match what you can actually solve? That's the most valuable tag anyone proposed and the easiest to fake. It's only honest if something is already capturing stated challenges on the deal, whether that's a notetaker, a scored field, or a person who fills it in. Without that, the tag manufactures a judgment nobody made and the board starts lying to you in colour.

And strategy-alignment tags: mark the deals that belong to a named push — a launch, a region, a quarterly focus. Real value, but each one expires. Treat them as temporary tags with a removal date attached, or in a year your board is wearing three initiatives nobody is running any more.

Name them before you build the first one

Kristeen Romero's convention in the thread is the one I'd adopt: an emoji plus one to three words on the tag itself, with the full explanation in the tag description, which surfaces as a hover tooltip. The card stays scannable and nothing is lost. Caleb King raised the symbol-only version — maximum information in minimum space — and Will's own answer was the right one: a symbol-only set is a private language every new rep has to learn before the board means anything to them.

Don't turn them all on at once

Six hygiene tags switched on simultaneously against an existing pipeline will light up nearly every deal on the board. The team's first experience of the instrument is a wall of red, and what they learn from it is that the tags are noise. Turn on two, let the board come clean, then add the next two. The tags are for changing behaviour, and behaviour doesn't change against a signal that's always on.

What you'd do if you were fixing the rule instead

Every hygiene tag on this list has an enforcement version. Missing next step is a stage-exit requirement — you don't move a deal forward without scheduling the next thing. Past close date is a validation, or a prompt at the moment the date goes stale rather than a flag three weeks later. Stalled is a stage-exit criterion that was never written down. In-sequence is an enrollment that triggers off the deal itself instead of being someone's manual step.

I'm not going to pretend you should enforce all of them. Enforcement that fights how people actually work gets routed around, and a rule everyone routes around is worse than a rule nobody wrote, because now the data says it's being followed. Which is the real argument for building the tags first: they're the cheap instrument that tells you which rules are worth enforcing and which ones the team is quietly right to ignore.

So build them. Then look at the board a month later. If one tag is lit on eighty percent of your deals, that isn't a tagging problem, and no amount of visibility is going to fix it — you've found a rule your operating model states and nothing in it enforces. That's the part I'd want to work on.