So, you’ve set up a website, you have a sales team, and your marketing department is cranking out content like crazy. How do you measure your results? Reviewing reports of sales and marketing department performance is crucial for assessing how effective your efforts are and what your opportunities for improvement are.
After all, how can you improve your sales and marketing efforts if you aren’t measuring what is or isn’t working? This is where HubSpot’s reporting tools can prove to be priceless.
Let’s go over what these tools are, how they help businesses, and how you can use them for your organization.
HubSpot touts their reporting tools as “a single source of truth for all your data.” What does this mean? It means that HubSpot reporting tools gather a wide variety of data about a business’ sales and marketing efforts to collate them into a cohesive whole that can be used to make more informed business decisions.
These reports can be organized and displayed in a variety of ways to accommodate different reporting needs. For example, you could create a HubSpot dashboard with line, bar, area, pie chart, or funnel-style graphics to make it easy to visually interpret your data.
So, how does using the reporting tools available in HubSpot help a business? There are countless possible answers to this question. Some of the most important ways that using reporting features in HubSpot can help your organization include:
These are just a few of the potential benefits of HubSpot reporting—which can help to drive long-term success for any organization that seeks to drive continuous improvement and growth.
You might be wondering what the best features of HubSpot’s reporting tools are. Here are a few personal favorites of mine:
So, you want access to the Reports feature? How can you get that access? While dashboards that leverage your HubSpot reports are available to all HubSpot accounts, specific report features are restricted to certain subscription types.
For example, to create a custom report, you need to have one of the following subscription types:
Basically, you need any Professional or Enterprise-level HubSpot subscription to create custom reports. Additionally, you need to have “Create/own” and “edit” report permissions in your HubSpot portal. If you do not see an option to create reports or edit them, contact your HubSpot portal admin to verify your access privileges.
Some other features may be restricted to specific subscription types. For example, to create a custom analytics view, you need to be on Marketing Hub or on CMS Hub at a Professional or Enterprise subscription level.
So, how much does reporting cost? Basic reporting features with default reports is available to all HubSpot subscribers on a Starter account—which can be as low as $23/month for a CMS Starter account subscription (and $45/month for Marketing, Sales, Service, or Operations Hub Starter accounts).
The number of dashboards you can build and reports you can have on each varies by subscription type:
Additionally, the Enterprise and Professional accounts get the ability to build custom reports to help you meet specific reporting needs not met by default reports.
So, how can you create a HubSpot Reports Dashboard view in your HubSpot portal? It’s actually pretty simple.
All you have to do is:
Here’s a quick video showing the process:
From there, you’ll want to either edit the existing reports in the template you chose or add reports that align with the key performance indicators (KPIs) that you want to track. So, how do you create new reports in HubSpot?
Okay, so you want to create your own custom report in HubSpot because you can’t seem to find an existing report that tracks the exact piece of data you want to track. It’s time to start experimenting with the custom report builder in HubSpot.
Before making a report, consider what kind of information you want to track and how you want to track it. This should help inform which data sources you select and how to visualize them.
Here’s a quick overview of the basic process for creating a custom report in HubSpot:
Here’s a quick tutorial video:
This is just a simple outline of the basics of creating a custom report in HubSpot. There are many other features to explore in this process, such as the Chart settings.
Here’s a quick video showing the chart settings menu and how to edit these settings:
[Placeholder for Customizing the visualization for a report]
In the video, for the bar chart, you see that, when I click on the cumulative option, I get an error message. That’s because, for the cumulative option to work, the data field for the y-axis in that case has to be a date or time value.
If you’re on Marketing Hub or CMS Hub at a Professional or Enterprise subscription level, you can create custom analytics views. Before you create a custom analytics view, it’s important to know two things:
Here’s the basic process for how to do it:
Here’s a video showing how easy this can be:
From this settings tab, you can also edit an existing view by clicking on the “edit” button that appears when highlighting that analytics view. You can also click on “delete” to remove an obsolete analytics view.
So, why should you create an analytics view? You might be looking for where you can use the data you collect after creating an analytics view. To do this, you need to go to your traffic reports in your HubSpot portal.
Here’s a quick video tutorial:
An attribution report tracks the interactions that your contacts have made with your brand along their customer journey. This helps you identify which pieces of content and interaction types are the most helpful for guiding your prospects along your sales pipeline—helping you streamline your processes and improve conversion rates.
There are three kinds of attribution reports that can be created—though two of the three are exclusive to Marketing Hub Enterprise subscription accounts.
So, how can you create an attribution report? Here’s how:
Here’s a quick video walkthrough:
To manage an existing report in your HubSpot portal, go to your reports list—you can reach this by clicking on “Reporting” in your top nav in your portal and clicking on “Reports” in the dropdown.
From the reports list, search for the report you want to manage. You can do this by using the search bar. You can also filter reports in the list by dashboard, business unit, or owner.
You can also restore a deleted report by clicking on the “Restore deleted reports” option on the left of the reports list. Note that this must be done within 14 days of the deletion.
Okay, so, how can your internal marketing, sales, or service team use reports? The most important use of these reports is to gather data that you can then use to inform decisions amongst your team.
For example, you could look at attribution reports to see which types of content are creating the most new contacts. Using this information, your marketing team could tweak future content strategies to focus on higher-performing content types.
Alternatively, your sales team could use reporting dashboards to track progress toward process and results goals. For example, you could track conversations tool data to see how many conversations your sales reps are engaging in or track deal data to see how many deals are being closed and how much revenue is being generated.
Exported conversations tool and ticket data could also help you keep track of service department interactions with customers. You could create and track adherence to SLAs with regard to incident response times and ticket close rates to see how effectively the service team is meeting its goals.
What reports should you create for your internal team dashboards? Here are a few suggestions:
This report tracks every marketing action’s impact on revenue. By tracing multiple marketing interactions and their impacts on revenue generation, marketers can define the ROI for their efforts and identify what kinds of marketing efforts have the biggest impact on the company’s bottom line.
You can create a multi-touch marketing report quickly by going to the report builder, selecting the “Attribution” report type, and choosing the “How are my marketing assets impacting revenue over time?” option under the “Revenue” heading. This gives you a premade report that shows different marketing channels and their impacts on deals that you’ve recently closed.
This is a report that shows you where the traffic to your website is coming from (email, organic search, direct, referrals, email, etc.). You can find this data in your traffic analytics report tool. You can find traffic analytics by clicking on the “Reporting” dropdown in your HubSpot portal navigation, and then clicking on the “Analytics Tools” option.
From here, you’ll be able to see a breakdown of sessions, new contacts, customers, or other data by their traffic source. You can export this data to a dashboard by clicking on the “Save report” button in the upper right once you have the data you want to track.
Hopefully, your marketing department has already created some detailed buyer personas that closely align with the identities of your ideal customers. If not, it’s probably a good idea to do so as soon as possible so that your marketing efforts can be aligned with the type of messaging that most resonates with your ideal clientele.
If you have buyer personas and have added them to your HubSpot portal, you can then create a special marketing report for your team that helps divide your contacts by their persona. You can set this up in the report builder by plotting contacts by create date and using personas to break down the report.
This helps you find out what’s driving traffic to your site and what your biggest opportunities for improvement are.
This is a report that can help you discover which deals are likely to close and which ones aren’t so that you can assess the impact to your bottom line. It details how many deals are in each stage of your sales pipeline, their value, and who the owner is for each deal in the pipeline.
You can view this report by going to “Forecast” under the “Sales” dropdown in your main HubSpot portal navigation. Then, you can create pipeline reports by clicking on the “View Report” button in the upper right. You can select from the reports there, then click “Save Report” to export it as a report that can be shown in a dashboard.
Here’s a quick video showing the process:
You can also find these reports under your Sales Analytics under the analytics tools menu of your HubSpot portal.
What percentage of prospects are being converted from prospects into leads and then from leads into opportunities and opportunities into customers—or whichever specific lifecycle stages your business uses in its sales pipeline? Having an accurate assessment of your conversion rate helps you understand the health of your sales pipeline and temper your forecast estimates.
For example, if you know that only 10% of opportunities convert into customers, to meet a goal of 100 new customers, you would need to generate 1,000 opportunities. Having the conversion rates for every step of the process leading up to that point helps you set the goal for lead creation that you would need to meet your new customer targets.
Additionally, you could dive into individual sales rep data to see who is underperforming or who is overperforming. This could be useful for creating a mentorship program to help low-performing reps learn from your top performers.
Here’s a sample image of a conversion rate report:
How long does it take to close a deal with a prospect? Having this information is crucial for creating an accurate projection of your revenue for a given time frame. For example, if you know that it takes 60 days for your deals to close on average because your business has a particularly long sales cycle that requires buy-in from multiple decision-makers, then you’ll know that a deal that your sales reps just started on in June probably won’t close until August at the earliest—so deal started in Q2 wouldn’t hit the books until mid Q3.
If you look at your average sales cycle length and see that it’s too long or that some reps seem to be struggling to stay close to the average, it might be time to refine your sales process to streamline it.
Here’s an example of a report that compares the average time to close for contacts between online and offline sources:
How many tickets is your service team opening and closing in a given time period? Knowing how many tickets are being opened and how many your team is closing helps you identify if you’re consistently meeting the SLAs you need to keep your customers delighted and coming back for more.
Here’s a quick example of a ticket status report you could build in HubSpot using the report builder—just set ticket status as one axis of the chart and count of tickets as the other.
Note: All of the ticket statuses in your HubSpot portal will be reflected. So, it can help to clean up your ticket statuses to avoid having too many ticket statuses shown in the report.
How is your service team handling customer interactions? Are they keeping up with calls, emails, meetings, and other interactions in a timely manner? It’s important to keep track of service activities in your HubSpot portal to ensure that your team is staying on top of these interactions.
Here’s an example of a conversation status report that shows a count of open and closed conversations in HubSpot:
How successful is your service team at retaining clients long-term? How many clients are different teams managing in your HubSpot portal? Creating reports that show you how many customers you currently have assigned to different teams or individuals and how many have stopped being customers can help you rebalance workloads to optimize efficiency and see which teams have a higher churn rate, which customers are leaving, and possibly even why they’re leaving.
Here's an example of a pie chart showing the potential distribution of customers by employee:
Human resources departments are responsible for ensuring that organizations have enough personnel to meet the organization’s overall goals. Being able to attract the right talent and retain it is critical for any business.
To help ensure a healthy pipeline of talent and keep the company well-staffed, it can help to track the number of job openings in the organization, average employee retention, and other statistics about recruitment. Unfortunately, HubSpot does not natively support this function—it is not an HR software solution. However, it is possible to use HubSpot to track new hires as a deal type!
For example, you could create a deal for “New hire/Recruiting” with distinct deal stages for:
This could be paired with a workflow to set up reminder tasks for hiring managers to complete each step of the process and update the deal stage for job applicants that triggers when someone completes a form on the website related to a job opening at the company.