How can growing sales organizations truly understand pipeline performance? Teams need visibility into metrics like lead behavior and closed-won deal analytics — without queuing up at the analyst’s support desk. On the leadership side, managers have to accurately forecast performance and coach teams to hit their revenue targets accordingly. All of this is quite an endeavor with traditional reporting, but the analytics within Sales Hub deliver the deep insights sales teams need for a strong pipeline.
To help your teams leverage the best of Sales Hub, here’s a roadmap to getting your teams the reports they need to answer strategic questions now and build a stronger pipeline for the future.
The Actionable vs. The Arbitrary
What makes a successful report? One that delivers actionable insights in real time. It points your team in the right direction: what reps must change or continue to do to reach individual and company-wide goals. Simply put, the best sales reports answer important questions about performance by uniting your data into a digestible, actionable format.
Unfortunately, many teams miss out on comprehensive reporting. Sales leaders often generate reports without coaching their on-the-ground teams on leveraging performance metrics to meet their goals. As a result, teams miss the opportunity to identify what stands between them and faster growth.
That’s why getting reporting right is key to future planning and optimizing the buyer’s journey.
4 Essential Reports for Your Sales Team
Now that you know what makes a good sales report, it’s time to build comprehensive reports that empower your team. As you generate reports in Sales Hub, use the below list as a reference to increase reporting adoption and deepen team-wide knowledge of HubSpot and its capabilities.
#1 Closed revenue amount by interaction with traffic source
Not all traffic sources yield the same revenue results. That’s why sales teams must work in lockstep with marketing, including knowledge sharing on the most successful traffic sources. With these insights in hand, marketers can invest time and energy into traffic sources that drive bottom-line results while sales can engage with high-value prospects from ‘unsung’ channels that may not feel as lucrative.
Sales Hub helps sales and marketing teams to identify prospect patterns through the funnel to determine gaps in content or engagement stages where deals aren’t progressing. These reports also display traffic sources that lead to more bookings, but may create fewer new contacts on average, which is something that both teams can work to improve.
#2 Sequence enrollment totals and engagement rates
Say, for example, a lead in your system just became an SQL. What happens next? A number of actions need to take place before a rep can get a meeting on the books.
Depending on your qualification criteria and deal stages, once a contact becomes an MQL, they must undergo multiple touchpoints before they’re ready for a discovery call. The best way to automate the process is with Sequences. This report displays the performance of these workflows, including if contacts are opening and engaging with sequences. Most importantly, this report shows if contacts are replying and if these Sequences are leading to meetings booked.
By showing sequence enrollment and engagement to sales leaders and operations experts, this report can help your team understand what touchpoints and information are the most important when it comes to getting an SQL to book a meeting and keep the process rolling.
#3 Deals in sales pipeline by rep
Understanding deal stages is vital to any successful sales process. Perhaps more important than understanding the stages is a sales leader’s ability to slice deal stage reporting into specific views, like ‘by rep’. This report provides an at-a-glance view of deal progress in each rep’s pipeline. As a sales leader, it will give you coaching opportunities, highlight team members’ strengths and identify strategic gaps in your sales process. This can help inform your business on common dropoff points and training opportunities, possible friction in your pricing model, or gaps in sales enablement materials.
#4 Contacts created and worked totals with deals created and won totals
A detailed look into the complete buyer’s journey can help your team better understand the marketing contact-to-SQL flow. This report also provides insights on key metrics, including contacts assigned, contacts worked, new deals created, and deals closed-won.
For marketing, this report delivers the most value through a high-level overview of contact types being qualified by sales. In addition, marketers benefit from visibility into how efficiently recently-created contacts from marketing initiatives are moving through the funnel.
A sales leader would want to review this report to understand the proportion of new contacts created versus contacts worked to make sure no lead is being left behind. Additionally, sales teams benefit from reviewing deals created versus deals won to better learn how many opportunities they need to reach revenue goals. Because the report tracks metrics around engagement, it can encourage teams to set higher goals and increase engagement with their contacts.
The Takeaway
These four essential reports from Sales Hub are just the beginning of reporting that you need to support your growth. Ultimately, the vision for any growing sales organization is a comprehensive reporting infrastructure that tracks the entire journey — from new contact, to customer, to long-term expansion and renewal.
Whether it’s simple but actionable reports like those above or complex, multi-object dashboards, HubSpot Sales Hub delivers the tools and insights revenue leaders need for effective, efficient growth — all right alongside the rest of HubSpot’s CRM and growth suite.
