Setting up HubSpot Reporting for C-level management

In partnership with Emerce - How do you figure out what's working and what's not in your HubSpot portal? And how do you create the ultimate overview of KPIs, giving you insight into what impact your marketing, sales and service teams are having on the financial results of your customer-facing business processes? A detailed explanation.

Many companies want to workoutside-in orcustomer-centric in their commercial process. Yet they often fail to do so sufficiently. Why? Most companies make outside-inthinkinga means, rather than an end. So personas andcontent are createdandsocial selling is done, but professionals in marketing, sales and service are driveninside-out onleads, revenue and handling time. In this article, I'll take you through some of these common frictions and offer suggestions on how to solve them.

Most companies that use HubSpot in their sales process are not taking full advantage of the powerful reporting feature in HubSpot. The limitations and obstacles they face often have nothing to do with HubSpot itself, but with their own processes, people and data. In this article, I'll tell you all about the pitfalls in HubSpot Reporting and how to get actionable insights from HubSpot the right way.

Ask yourself the following questions to get the right actionable insights in HubSpot:

1. What business processes are we managing in HubSpot?
2. What data do we have to measure the right KPIs for those processes in HubSpot?
3. Do teams capture KPI data in the HubSpot CRM?
4. What does the ultimate overview of KPIs for actionable insights in HubSpot look like?

1. What business processes are we managing in HubSpot?

As the technology landscape in companies expands, it becomes increasingly difficult for management to determine which teams are using which system. How do they get their management information? The market currently has over 8,000 MarTech tools. That's only going to increase. Processes and data are therefore managed anytime, anywhere.

Over time, this leads to a completely cluttered tech stack. Managing it takes so much time and energy that little is left for customers. Unnecessarily complex tech stack. also make it increasingly difficult for customer-facing teams to obtain reliable data. As a result, it is becoming virtually impossible to provide customers with the contextual experience they expect.

This is one of the main obstacles we face as HubSpot consultants when setting up Reporting for customers. Companies like to use HubSpot to gain more insight. To best use the reporting feature, it is crucial to understand the purpose for which your organization has implemented the HubSpot platform.

Why is this an obstacle?

First, let's look at what role HubSpot plays in your business processes, but more importantly, what role it does not play. The platform's CRM data is central to HubSpot. Which customer data is available in HubSpot, and which is not, depends on which systems are used for which business processes.

Depending on the HubSpot components your company uses, these processes may involve the following topics:

• Marketing Hub: How well do we succeed in generating (qualified) leads?
• Sales Hub: To what extent are we succeeding in converting leads into customers and reaching potential buyers?
• Service Hub: How well are we able to solve customer problems and satisfy our customers?

What does this mean?

Data in your other business processes (such as project management, order management and processing, production planning, finance and billing) is not available in HubSpot without data integrations. And that's fine - use technology for its intended purpose, rather than trying to fit a system into your business environment with a lot of pushing and pulling. That only adds friction to your processes.

Misconceptions about reporting across business processes in HubSpot

Here are a few real-life examples of C-level management reporting as HubSpot users expect:

• Measuring customer satisfaction after resolving complaints, processing complaints in a separate complaint or quality management system.
• Creating a summary in HubSpot CRM of invoices that a customer has and has not paid, managing the financial process in a revenue/billing software, such as ISAH or Exact.
• Determine a customer health score for customers in the Software-as-a-Service (SAAS) industry, where the company's core process runs on a personalized platform and not HubSpot.

Conclusion: Make sure you can determine from your company's scorecard or KPI report what data is coming from which system. Where might you need integration of data between systems to measure KPIs and get the right insights?

2. What data do we have to measure the right KPIs for these processes in HubSpot?

Data is effortlessly available across systems today. However, there can be misconceptions about how to leverage this data. There can also be information overload, especially if companies are keen on incorporating all this data into their reports.

Let's take a closer look at these two issues:

Too many metrics

The average HubSpot portal currently has more than 300 metrics with data you can use to create reports. In practice, most teams that have reports set up in HubSpot do not use every single report to manage day-to-day operations. This leads to the aforementioned information overload and makes reporting in HubSpot unnecessarily complicated.

Ask yourself the following two questions:

• What performance metrics in my company have a lot of impact on the organization?
• Can I study these metrics accurately enough to proactively drive the business?

If you look critically at your KPIs and still have too many metrics, consider dividing responsibility for KPIs across different organizational levels (layering your scorecard). That way you keep control of what actually impacts the business. HubSpot offers a lot of flexibility in setting up dashboards with reports specifically tailored to teams, processes or even individual employees/representatives.

Conclusion: Start small, keep it simple. What is an overarching Key performance indicator (focusing on Key) for how your company is performing? You can always look at a more detailed level if needed. The strength of HubSpot Reporting is that you can zoom in on the data that makes up the KPI in the report.

Excluding HubSpot data when setting KPIs

Not every HubSpot user in your company knows exactly what data is available in HubSpot. As a result, there are often wish lists of reporting KPIs that are completely separate from HubSpot data (the data is not available 1-to-1 in HubSpot).

Particularly if your team is just getting started with HubSpot, you can approach KPI reporting in the following order:

• Take a step back from an already defined wish list of KPIs. First, determine what you want to monitor for what purpose.
• See what data/features in HubSpot relate to this part of your business process and are already available for reporting.

Example: ROI of marketing campaigns

A good example of a report that most businesses eventually want to see is the ROI of their marketing campaigns. HubSpot doesn't give you insight into how investments from your marketing budget translate into new customers. However, you can trace paying customers back to their original (marketing) source or determine which campaigns helped generate those customers.

Once you know that, you can fairly easily determine whether it was a good idea to invest your marketing budget in a specific campaign.

Conclusion: There are often standard metrics already available in HubSpot that you can use to gain insight into how your team is performing.

What follows is a list of the most common KPIs that you can measure more or less by default in HubSpot:

• Marketing - Reach, Traffic, Leads, Marketing Qualified Leads (month by month and by source).
• Marketing & Sales : Conversion rate of Marketing Qualified Leads to Sales Qualified Leads
• Sales : MQLs accepted by sales, Sales Qualified Leads, opportunities, customers, closed vs. targeted deals, deal forecast (next month, next quarter), reasons closed deals, activity per salesperson, deals - time spent in half stages, average deal value
• Service: number of tickets closed, Net Promoter Score
  
  

3. Do teams capture KPI data in HubSpot CRM?

The main advantage of HubSpot Reporting is that you can create reports based on all the data in your system. The real challenge is having the right data at all.

The metrics for most reports are available by default. Yet we see in many customers' HubSpot portals that data is not actually being used or captured by the teams working in HubSpot CRM.

Often this is because teams are not aware of the importance of this data for reporting because:

• They have not been involved in determining which KPIs are important to measure the performance of their particular team.
• There is no established process for determining responsibilities of team members who capture data.
• The process is not automated, making the completeness of your data dependent on your team's willingness to capture it.

4. What does the ultimate overview of KPIs for actionable insights in HubSpot look like?

So now we know what the common pitfalls are when reporting in HubSpot. But what exactly does the ultimate overview of KPIs in HubSpot look like?

Of course, the ultimate overview varies greatly from company to company. However, there are some KPIs that are common among companies working with HubSpot.

First, let's see what the basics of HubSpot reporting for your company might look like. You can then flesh those out into your own ultimate KPI summary.

The most common key performance indicators in HubSpot

We first need to determine what in HubSpot are the key areas that C-level looks at when measuring performance:

Sales

• Full visibility into the sales pipeline in real time.
• Based on our sales forecast, how many orders/orders can we expect in the coming period?
• Where in our process are we losing the most deals?

Marketing

• What is the result of our marketing investments?
• How many qualified leads are generated by Marketing for Sales?

Service

• How satisfied are customers with specific phases of our process, from sales to upsell?
• How quickly do we help our customers solve problems?
• How satisfied are our customers in general?

Sales - what does success look like?

I once heard a CEO say, "Meeting our sales targets is more luck than wisdom. We close deals with companies we didn't have on our radar at all and lose the deals we should have closed." With Sales Reporting, this company was finally able to get a handle on their forecast by determining how to do sales business, how to capture the necessary data in HubSpot and how to report on this process.

When used properly, the deal pipeline functionality in HubSpot CRM is enormously powerful. It gives you more than enough information for more reliable forecasting and about how your sales team closes deals.

The 4 reports that sales teams use the most in HubSpot are:

Deal Stage Reporting.

• Measure how sales opportunities move through the different stages of your sales process.
• Where are you missing sales opportunities and why?
• How healthy is your sales pipeline (how long do deals typically linger in the different stages; do salespeople spend too much time on deals?)

Forecasting (forecasting).

• To what extent do you achieve sales goals for next month, next quarter or at the end of the year?
• Based on our sales forecast, how many deals/orders can we expect in the coming period?
• Which deals are very likely to close in the coming days/weeks?

Recurring Revenue Reporting (HubSpot Sales Enterprise)

• Which new deals or upgrades count as new recurring revenue?
• Which deals have been renewed and count toward existing recurring revenue?
• Which deals have been dropped, or which downgraded deals have been dropped or further downgraded, and count toward lost recurring revenue?

Time in half phase/deal speed.

• How quickly do sales opportunities convert into customers?
• Where are deals lingering longer than average in half-phases (and what is causing this)?

How to make these reports actionable:

• Sales pipeline and stages are defined - opportunities and customers are tracked in HubSpot.
• All Sales users in the CRM know the definition of each stage and what their responsibilities are in pushing sales opportunities through the pipeline.
• Manual or automated triggers are set in HubSpot to ensure the process is in place.

Marketing & Sales - What does success look like?

Companies often underestimate what it takes for Marketing and Sales to work well together: setting goals and responsibilities between the teams. Marketing and Sales working together on the same business and sales targets need to report on two crucial KPIs. One is to determine how many leads Marketing forwards to Sales and the quality of those leads.

• Marketing Qualified Leads - Which leads "on paper" would Sales like to follow up on?
• Sales Qualified Leads - Which leads does Sales qualify as leads they will actually follow up on?

You only need to use one report for this in HubSpot, which adds a lot of value:

Lifecycle Stage Funnel Conversion.

• How many leads does Marketing generate and what is their quality?
• How many marketing leads are followed up by Sales?
• What does our marketing forecast look like in terms of lead generation and how do those leads affect our sales?

How to make these reports actionable:

• Responsibility ofMarketing: Marketing passes leads to Sales based on a list of criteria defined by Sales (MQL).
• Responsibility ofMarketing : The context of the lead information is shared with Sales.
• Responsibility ofSales : Sales follows up marketing leads within x hours/days.
• Responsibility ofSales : Sales gives Marketing feedback on the quality of Marketing-generated leads (SQL)
• Responsibility ofSales : Deals are passed into the sales pipeline using manual and automatic triggers.

• Technical: HubSpot is set up so that contacts go through lifecycle stages manually or with automatic triggers.

Marketing - what does success look like?

We have already identified the key KPI often defined in the marketing process: generated MQLs. But there are other KPIs that are part of the marketing process that are important for C-level:

Marketing Performance

• How much traffic do we generate through which marketing channel?
• How many leads are we generating through which marketing channel?
• How do we affect sales by generating customers from a marketing channel?

If you know this, you'll find out soon enough which marketing channels are performing best - better yet, whether it's "paid" or "owned" media. That's how you'll know if your ROI improves over time.

How to make these reports actionable:

• Technical: Install a HubSpot tracking code in your website/online channels to measure all data.
• Technical: Make sure all campaigns use HubSpot forms or that form data is integrated into HubSpot.
• Marketing: Run campaigns from within HubSpot.

Sales - What does success look like?

Keeping a grip on customer satisfaction becomes more difficult as your business scales. After all, it's easier to keep insight into how you're helping customers when fewer people are interacting with the same customers.

You can scale the process in HubSpot with a few KPIs that customer service teams often use for reporting during C-level meetings. They can have a significant impact on customer retention:

Ticket Pipeline Reporting.

• How quickly are we responding to tickets?
• How quickly are we resolving tickets for customers?

Customer Effort Score Reporting (reporting on customer effort score).

• To what extent are customers satisfied with the problem resolution process?

Net Promoter Score Reporting.

• How satisfied are our customers overall (over time) and how likely are they to remain customers?

As we saw earlier in this article, you can always view data in HubSpot in more detail. For example, to see which customer gave you which score in a survey. This way, you can actually identify and solve recurring problems in your business processes.

How to make these reports actionable:

Ticket Pipeline:

• Service/ticket pipeline and phases are defined in HubSpot.
• All Service Hub users in the CRM know their responsibilities when advancing tickets in the pipeline.
• Manual or automated triggers are set in HubSpot to ensure the process is in place.
  

Customer Effort Score:

• Ticket pipelines are set up as described above.
• The survey tool Customer Effort Score in HubSpot automatically sends out customer surveys based on resolved tickets.

Net Promoter Score:

• A process (responsibilities and activities) is set up to send out a Net Promoter Score survey at a specified interval to a list of regular contacts at customer companies.

Summary

Successful marketing, sales and service teams working with HubSpot and creating reports have the following in place:

• There is a scorecard for KPIs that are measurable in HubSpot based on available data in HubSpot.
• Customer-facing teams work in HubSpot and capture required data (manually or automated).
• Sales: Sales pipelines and half-phases are defined and implemented in HubSpot; definitions and responsibilities are known to the sales team.
• Marketing and Sales: Definitions for lead lifecycle stages in the marketing and sales process have been established. Responsibilities for dropping off leads to Sales (Marketing) and providing feedback on marketing leads (Sales) have been established.
• Marketing: HubSpot tracking code is active, form data is integrated into HubSpot, and Marketing runs campaigns in HubSpot.
• Customer Service: Service/ticket pipeline and a framework for customer feedback are defined and implemented in HubSpot. Responsibilities are known to the customer service team.