# A HubSpot saved view that nags reps about deals with no next step

https://salesbond.app/blog/hubspot-deals-without-next-activity-saved-view/
Published: 2026-10-08 · Updated: 2026-10-26

To stay on top of deals in HubSpot without reading every record, build one shared saved view on the deals index page: open deals where **Next activity date** is unknown, or is before today. Share it with the team and agree on a rule: the view is empty by Friday. Whatever is still in it on Friday is the agenda for the 1:1. HubSpot sets Next activity date automatically from the next upcoming call, sales email or meeting on the deal ( [HubSpot: default deal properties](https://knowledge.hubspot.com/properties/hubspots-default-deal-properties)), so the view answers a question stale-deal reports leave open: which deals has nobody planned to touch?

## The deal nobody planned to touch

A composite scene, but we have watched it more than once. A Thursday pipeline review on HubSpot. Jonas, the manager, has the board open, grouped by stage. The team added its own Proposal sent stage to the pipeline, and everything in it looks fine. Amounts filled in, close dates this quarter, last activity within the week on every card.

He asks Nadia about the “Nordvik, 40 seats” deal. She says the proposal went out Monday, they liked it, she is waiting to hear back. When was the next call? There isn’t one. Procurement said they would “come back to us”. No meeting booked, no follow-up email scheduled. The deal is healthy by every column on the screen and nobody has a plan for it.

That is the gap. Most of the reports a manager builds look backwards: last activity, days in stage, last contacted. They tell you a deal has been touched. They cannot tell you whether anyone intends to touch it again. A deal with a note from yesterday and no next step is a deal that will quietly become a stale deal in three weeks, and by then the the buyer has moved on.

We think the forward-looking question is the one worth automating. The backwards one you can see on the board already.

## Two properties that matter: next activity date and last activity date

HubSpot keeps both on every deal, and both are set by HubSpot, not typed by the rep ( [HubSpot: default deal properties](https://knowledge.hubspot.com/properties/hubspots-default-deal-properties)).

**Next activity date** is the date of the next upcoming activity on the deal. The help page lists what counts: logging a future call, sales email or meeting, or scheduling a future meeting. If the next thing on the calendar for that deal passed yesterday and nobody marked it done, the property either points at the past or goes empty, depending on what was scheduled. If nothing is scheduled at all, it is empty. Either way, the deal has no planned next step, and that is the exact condition we want the view to catch.

**Last activity date** is the most recent past date and time a note, call, tracked and logged sales email, meeting, LinkedIn, SMS or WhatsApp message, or chat was logged on the deal. The same page says it also includes completed tasks. It is a record of effort, and effort is easy to produce. We come back to that in a minute.

One honest caveat on Next activity date. The help page names calls, sales emails and meetings; it does not mention tasks. Before you trust the view, create a task with a due date next week on a test deal and see whether Next activity date fills in. If it does not, your team needs a rule about whether a task counts as a next step. Ours: a task is a promise to yourself, a meeting or a scheduled email is a promise involving the customer. The view should catch deals with neither, and if tasks don’t register, reps learn to book the call instead of writing “follow up” on a to-do.

## Building the saved view in HubSpot

The steps below come from HubSpot’s pages on saved views and filtering ( [HubSpot: create and manage saved views](https://knowledge.hubspot.com/records/create-and-manage-saved-views), [HubSpot: view and filter records](https://knowledge.hubspot.com/records/view-and-filter-records), [HubSpot: determine filter criteria](https://knowledge.hubspot.com/lists/determine-filter-criteria)). Menu labels differ a little between accounts, so where the help page gives two routes we give both.

1. Open the deals index page. In your HubSpot account click **More**, then **CRM > Deals**. If **More** doesn’t appear in your account, go to **CRM > Deals** directly.
2. Click the **\+ add view** icon and choose a view type. Table is the one we use for this, because the point is a list you can empty, not a board you can admire. Name it something a rep reads as an instruction, for example “No next step (empty by Friday)”, and confirm.
3. Click **Advanced filters**, then **Add filter**. Pick **Deal stage**, operator **is none of**, and select your closed won and closed lost stages. This keeps the group to open deals.
4. In the same group, **Add filter** again. Pick **Next activity date**, operator **is unknown**. HubSpot’s definition of that operator is the one you want: all records that do not have a value for the property are included.
5. Now the second condition. Click the **clone** icon above the group. The help page says a cloned group follows OR logic, which is exactly what you need: a deal should show up if it has no next activity *or* if the next activity is already in the past. In the cloned group, change the Next activity date filter to **is before** and pick the relative date **Today**. Leave the Deal stage filter as it is.
6. Close the panel and click **Save** in the bottom right so the filters survive a page refresh.
7. Edit the table columns (hover over the right edge of the table, click the edit columns icon) so the view shows Deal name, Deal owner, Deal stage, Amount, Close date, Next activity date and Last activity date. Seven columns is enough. Click **Apply**, then **Publish**.
8. Share it. Click the view name, click the configure view icon, then **Manage sharing**. Views are private to you and Super Admins by default. Choose **Team** and pick the sales team, or **Everyone** if the whole account should see it.

Two filter groups, four filters, one sort. Sort by Close date ascending so the deal closing soonest with no next step sits at the top. For deals that have a next step but still sit too long, see which [HubSpot time in deal stage](https://salesbond.app/blog/hubspot-time-in-deal-stage-stalled-deals-report/) timer to trust.

![Saved view logic: two filter groups joined by OR, Next activity date unknown or before Today](https://salesbond.app/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/hubspot-deals-without-next-activity-saved-view-2.png)

If your pipeline has more than one closed stage, or more than one pipeline, add a **Pipeline** filter to each group as well. The deal properties page describes Pipeline as the property that determines which stages a deal moves through, so one view per pipeline is the cleanest setup.

One thing the view does not do: it does not tell you why. A deal with no next step after a sent proposal is a very different conversation from a deal with no next step in Appointment scheduled. The columns give the manager the context; the conversation is still theirs to have. That is on purpose. Once the view is clean, divide what is left by the gap to goal, which is how [HubSpot pipeline coverage](https://salesbond.app/blog/pipeline-coverage-ratio-hubspot/) works in the Forecast tool.

## Why last activity date is too easy to satisfy

The obvious alternative is a view on Last activity date: anything not touched in seven days. Most teams build that one first. We think it measures the wrong thing, and the reason is in HubSpot’s own definition.

Last activity date moves whenever a note is logged. It moves when a task is completed. It moves on a logged call, even a call that went to voicemail. None of those require the customer to have agreed to anything. A rep who knows the manager checks the seven-day view can clear it in a few minutes on Thursday afternoon by writing “checked in, waiting on procurement” on each deal. Every card is fresh. The pipeline looks worked. Nothing has moved, and nothing is scheduled to move.

That is not dishonesty, most of the time. It is a reasonable response to a metric that rewards touching deals. When the metric is “is there a next step on the calendar”, the cheapest way to satisfy it is to book the next step, and booking a next step means asking the customer for one. That is the behaviour you actually wanted, so the metric should point at it.

There is a second, quieter problem with last activity. It gives a deal credit for the past. A deal with a great call on Monday and no plan after it looks better on a last-activity view than a deal with a dull call two weeks ago and a demo booked for Tuesday. By the standard that matters, which deal is more alive, the second one wins every time. A high deal score does not mean anyone has booked the next call either; here is [what the deal score misses](https://salesbond.app/blog/hubspot-deal-score-likelihood-to-close/).

Keep the last activity column in the view. Its useful context when you look at a deal that has no next step: no next step and no activity for a month is a different situation from no next step and a proposal sent yesterday. Just don’t make it the filter. Logged calls have the same weakness, because [a logged call is not a recorded outcome](https://salesbond.app/blog/hubspot-calls-log-outcome-next-step/).

## Making the empty view a Friday habit

The view on its own changes nothing. We have seen plenty of HubSpot accounts with a sensible saved view that nobody opens. What makes it work is one agreement, said out loud at a team meeting and then kept: this view is empty by end of day Friday.

Empty does not mean every deal has a meeting. It means every open deal has a decision. For most deals that is a scheduled call or email. For some it is honest closure: the buyer went quiet after the third nudge and the deal moves to closed lost, which takes it out of the view as cleanly as a booked meeting would. The rule forces that decision weekly instead of letting the deal drift for a quarter.

What the manager does on Friday is short. Open the view. Whatever is in it is the list for the following week’s 1:1s, deal by deal, and the question for each is the same: what is the next step, and when? Not “why haven’t you touched this”. The rep who has nothing scheduled on a deal usually knows it and has a reason and the reason is often useful: the buyer is waiting on budget, the champion changed jobs, the proposal was priced wrong. Those are the things a manager should hear in week two of a stall, not in week eight.

The first Friday the view will be long. How long depends on how the team has been working, and in our experience it is always longer than the manager expected. Resist teh urge to book twenty fake follow-ups to clear it. A deal that cannot honestly get a next step this week is a deal to question, and that is the view doing its job. If the team already runs a [15-minute weekly pipeline review](https://salesbond.app/blog/weekly-pipeline-review-15-minutes/), this view is the first thing to put on screen; it replaces the “what’s happening with” scroll through the whole board.

A few things we have learned running this. Give the view to reps as well as managers; the point is that a rep opens it Thursday and fixes it themselves, so Friday is a check, not a confrontation. Pair it with [required properties on late stages](https://salesbond.app/blog/hubspot-stage-required-properties/) if you want Next step filled at Contract sent, but keep that separate; Next step is a text field a rep types, Next activity date is a fact HubSpot sets. And be clear who owns the rule. A shared view that everyone can edit will drift, and in a month someone has added a “Deal owner is me” filter and the team version is gone. The piece on [who owns CRM data in a small sales team](https://salesbond.app/blog/crm-data-ownership-small-sales-team/) covers how to settle that.

Since we are on tooling: we build SalesBond, a sales management layer on top of the CRM a team already uses. Its Deal Health checks every open deal against more than 20 rules, activity among them, and flags the deals that need attention, without anyone maintaining a view. For a five-person team on HubSpot, the saved view above may be all you need, and it costs nothing. If you would rather not keep it by hand, [check your CRM with SalesBond](https://salesbond.app/).

The view is a small thing. The habit is the point. A pipeline where every open deal has a next step on the calendar is a pipeline a manager can actually [forecast from](https://salesbond.app/blog/hubspot-deal-stage-probability-forecast/), because stage and probability mean something when there is a plan behind each deal. Build it this week, and open it Friday.