# Deals with no value in Pipedrive: how $0 hides in your forecast https://salesbond.app/blog/deals-without-value-pipedrive/ Published: 2026-10-07 · Updated: 2026-10-07 A Pipedrive deal with no value adds nothing to your pipeline total or your weighted forecast, but it still shows up in every count-based report: deals created, deals won, deals per rep, and a win rate counted by deals. So it hides in two directions at once. The forecast is quietly short, and the counts are quietly inflated. The fix is a weekly filter for open deals with an empty or zero value, a decision on each one (a real zero such as a pilot or a free trial, or missing data), and an estimate on the missing ones before they reach a proposal stage. ## The deal that was never worth anything Mira took an inbound call in March. A regional logistics firm wanted to replace a spreadsheet, the caller was not sure how many people would use the tool, and the conversation ended with a demo booked. She created the deal, attached the organization and the contact, set the expected close date and moved it to Qualified. The Value field stayed at zero because nobody had said a number yet, and the demo was the place to find out. The demo went well. The deal moved to Proposal. In the pipeline view the stage total read exactly what it had read before she dragged it over, which nobody noticed, because nobody watches a stage total for a change that does not happen. Sven runs the weekly review from two places: the stage totals at the top of the pipeline and the forecast view. The deal appeared in neither. It appeared in the count. Proposal looked healthy at fourteen open deals, so he spent the meeting on the stage below it. Three months later Mira won the deal. Deals won went up by one. Revenue won went up by nothing. The quarter’s average deal size dropped, and Sven spent twenty minutes trying to work out which discount had done it. Nobody had done anything wrong. As far as the CRM knew, the deal had simply never been worth anything. ## What a blank value does to the numbers Pipedrive’s forecast arithmetic is short. Weighted value is total value multiplied by the deal probability divided by 100; if only a stage probability is set, the stage probability is used instead, and if neither is set, the weighted value is simply the deal value ( [Pipedrive: probability in Pipedrive](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/probability-in-pipedrive)). Every branch of that formula starts with the value. Zero in, zero out. A rep can set the deal probability to 90 percent on a deal with no value and the forecast will not move by a cent. That is the direction most managers already see: the pipeline is worth more than it says. The other direction is the one that costs you decisions. Do the arithmetic yourself. If your win rate counts deals rather than value, a zero-value deal that closes won is one more win and one that closes lost is one more loss, with no money attached either way (how to pick the denominator is in [sales win rate in Pipedrive](https://salesbond.app/blog/sales-win-rate-pipedrive/)). Pipedrive’s conversion reports can measure by number of deals, deal value or weighted value ( [Pipedrive: Insights deal conversion](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/insights-reports-deal-conversion)), and measured by deal value these deals contribute nothing at all. Average deal size is money divided by a count, so on paper every zero-value win pulls the average down without pulling revenue down. That is how a team can “win more” and “close smaller” in the same quarter while selling exactly as before. If you split the average into mean and median the way we suggest in [average deal size versus the median](https://salesbond.app/blog/average-deal-size-median-pipedrive/), the zeros sit at the bottom of the sorted list, dragging the mean and leaving the median alone, which is one quick way to spot them. Pipeline coverage goes the other way. The deals are in the pipeline, the value is not, so the coverage ratio reads lower than the pipeline actually is, and a manager who trusts it pushes for more prospecting when what the team needs is better data entry. We think the count distortion is the bigger problem, because the forecast gap gets found. Someone eventually asks why the won revenue is higher than the weighted pipeline ever was. A win rate that is a little too high (say, two points) gets quoted at the board meeting for a year. One more thing the formula tells you. Probability is a multiplier, not a substitute. Teams that run a careful [deal probability versus stage probability](https://salesbond.app/blog/pipedrive-deal-probability-vs-stage-probability/) setup and build a [weighted pipeline forecast](https://salesbond.app/blog/weighted-pipeline-forecast/) on it have done the hard half. The easy half, a number in the Value field, is where it breaks. ## Three kinds of zero Not every zero is a mistake. Before you tell the team to fill the field in sort the zeros you have into the kinds they are, because each kind wants a different response. - The honest zero. A pilot, a free trial, a proof of concept, a deal where the money is tracked on a separate paid deal. The value really is nothing, and typing a number in would be the lie. These deals stay at zero, but they carry a mark that says so: a label such as “Pilot”, or a custom field “Deal type”, so a filter can set them aside. How to run them is covered in [proof-of-concept and pilot deals](https://salesbond.app/blog/proof-of-concept-pilot-deals-pipedrive/) and [free trial sign-ups](https://salesbond.app/blog/free-trial-signups-pipedrive/). - Not estimated yet. The deal is a week old, the buyer has not said how many seats or sites or trucks, and the rep genuinely cannot price it. Fine in the first stage. Not fine once the deal has had a discovery call, because after discovery the rep usually knows enough for a rough guess, and a rough guess beats zero. - Forgotten. The number exists. It is in the quote PDF, in the email thread, in the rep’s head. It never made it into the field because the field does not insist. In our experience this is the most common kind and the cheapest to fix, and it is the only one where “just fill it in” is the complete answer. There is a fourth kind, and it is worse than any zero: the placeholder. A value of 1, or 100, or 1000, typed in to make a required field stop complaining. It looks like data. It slips past any filter for empty or zero values. It survives until someone sorts won deals by value and asks why six of them closed for a hundred dollars. If you see the same small round number on more than two deals, treat it as a blank and go back to the rep. ![Deal cards with zero value sorted into honest zero, not estimated yet, forgotten, and a dashed placeholder lane](https://salesbond.app/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/deals-without-value-pipedrive-2.png) ## Finding deals with no value in Pipedrive Pipedrive gives you two filter tools, quick filters on the list and pipeline views and advanced filters with ALL and ANY groups, and the “+ Add new filter” button sits in the filter drop-down of the deals list, pipeline, forecast and archive views ( [Pipedrive: filtering](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/filtering)). The weekly check is one saved advanced filter. 1. Open the deals list view, click the filter drop-down and choose “+ Add new filter”. 2. Under ALL, add the condition Deal status is open. 3. Under ANY, add a condition on Value equal to 0, and an empty-value condition if your account offers one. Check the operators your account actually shows for the Value field: the help page above describes the ALL and ANY groups but does not list them. 4. If you use a “Pilot” label or a “Deal type” field for honest zeros, add a third ALL condition that excludes it. Otherwise the pilots will fill the list and the team will learn to ignore it. 5. Name it “Open, no value”, set it to shared, save. 6. In the list view, show the columns Stage, Owner, Expected close date and Last activity, and sort by Stage so the deals furthest along come first. Those are the ones about to become a zero-value win. Fixing the deals on the list is per deal, not bulk. Each one needs its own number, and a bulk edit that sets one value on forty deals is the placeholder problem at scale; the limits of bulk edit are in [bulk edit safety in Pipedrive](https://salesbond.app/blog/pipedrive-bulk-edit-safety/). Two Pipedrive settings make the list shorter over time. Important fields, on Advanced and higher plans, show a flag in the deal detail view when a field marked important for that stage is empty, and Pipedrive’s own example for the feature is marking the Value field as important for every stage except the first ( [Pipedrive: important fields](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/important-fields)). Required fields, on Professional and higher plans and set by a global admin, go further and stop a deal from being moved to a stage until the field is filled; they do not stop deals that arrive by import, bulk edit, API, automation or a third-party integration ( [Pipedrive: required fields](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/required-fields)). The setup is in [required fields in Pipedrive](https://salesbond.app/blog/required-fields-pipedrive/). We would start with the important-field flag and switch to required only once the team has stopped producing placeholders. A required field on a team that is not ready produces exactly the fourth kind of zero. ## A rule the team can keep The rule we give teams is one sentence: an estimate with a note beats a blank. By the time a deal leaves the first stage it carries a number, even a rough one, and the deal note says where the number came from. “Est. 20 users at list” is enough. “Buyer said budget is under 15k” is enough. When the real quote goes out, the estimate gets replaced and the note gets a second line. Honest zeros carry their label and nothing else. (If the team argues about what belongs in the field at all, settle that first: [ACV versus deal value](https://salesbond.app/blog/acv-vs-deal-value-pipedrive/).) Say it on Monday the way Sven eventually did: if you do not know what a deal is worth, your guess beats ours, and ours is zero. Reps accept that quickly, because it is true and because it puts the estimate under thier control instead of under the manager’s. What they resist is being asked for a precise number too early, so do not ask for one. Ask for a bracket and a reason. The manager’s side of the rule is the Friday filter. Open “Open, no value”. The target is a list that fits on one screen where every row is a labelled pilot, and the first week it will not be. Walk through it with each rep for two minutes, not to assign blame but to ask the question the field never asked: what is this one worth, roughly, and how do you know? After three or four Fridays the list stops growing, because reps start filling the the field at the moment they have the number rather than at the moment someone asks. A disclosure, since this is the kind of check that gets automated: we build SalesBond, a sales management layer on top of the CRM a team already uses; we started with Pipedrive. [Deal Health](https://salesbond.app/blog/deal-health-score/) checks every deal against more than 20 rules in six categories, with a Data category among them, and explains which deals need attention and why. It does not decide what a deal is worth. That is still the rep, with a note. [Check your CRM with SalesBond](https://salesbond.app/) if you want to see which deals it would flag today. The deal that was never worth anything will be back. Someone will create one next week from a phone call, and they will be right to leave it at zero for a few days. The difference is that now it has a few days, not a quarter.