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The Ultimate Guide to HubSpot CRM Reporting for Sales Leaders

Stephanie Lehuger
Stephanie Lehuger
May 12, 2021 · 7 min read
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HubSpot is a dynamic, powerful CRM that offers sales teams a wide variety of use cases. However, the truth of the matter is that making the most of your HubSpot data is easier said than done. The good news is that you have options for creating your dream sales report.

HubSpot is a dynamic, powerful CRM that offers Revenue Operations and Sales Operations teams a wide variety of use cases. Simply put, if you’re a sales leader at an organization that uses HubSpot CRM, understanding your HubSpot data is essential to the growth and success of your business.

However, the truth of the matter is that making the most of your HubSpot data is easier said than done. Default HubSpot dashboards can be somewhat limiting, and many sales leaders end up wanting more control over their sales dashboards than HubSpot offers out-of-the-box.

The good news is that you have options for creating your dream sales report. With a HubSpot reporting alternative like Actiondesk, you can say goodbye to laborious manual sales reports that don’t give you what you really want. Below, we’ll explore two of our favorite HubSpot use cases for Sales leaders, RevOps and SalesOps — and how Actiondesk can take these use cases to the next level.

Here’s what you can expect to learn:


1. Use Case: Monthly deal stages conversion rate

  • What is a monthly deal stage conversion rate report?
  • How does a monthly deal stage conversion rate report help you boost your revenue?
  • Why default HubSpot reports are not enough to track your monthly deal stage conversion rate

2. Use Case: Deal time spent in each stage and sales velocity

  • What is the deal time spent in each stage and what is sales velocity?
  • How does understanding the time spent in each deal stage help you boost your revenue?
  • Why default HubSpot reports are not enough to track your time spent in each deal stage

3. How Actiondesk helps you leverage key sales KPIs


1. Monthly deal stages conversion rate


What is a monthly deal stage conversion rate report?


A deal stage conversion rate report allows RevOps, SalesOps, sales managers, and other sales leaders to follow the evolution of their HubSpot Deals as the Deals progress through HubSpot’s deal stages. It provides sales leaders with tremendous insight into their unique sales funnel processes. 


The report zeroes in on an organization’s monthly deal stage conversion rate, a sales KPI that measures the percentage of deals moving from one stage to another. (HubSpot’s default deal stages are “Appointment scheduled,” “Qualified to buy,” “Presentation scheduled,” “Decision maker bought-in,” “Contract sent,” “Closed won,” and “Closed lost.”)


As an example, imagine you have 200 deals in the “Appointment scheduled” deal stage in a given month. If 100 of them progress to the “Qualified to buy” deal stage, your monthly conversion rate from the first stage to the second stage is 50%.


How does a monthly deal stage conversion rate report help you boost your revenue?


As a sales leader, your ultimate objective is to grow your revenue. There are three avenues you can follow to achieve this:

  1. Grow your pipeline
  2. Increase your average deal size
  3. Increase your deal conversion rate


A monthly deal stage conversion report equips you with the information you need to pursue the third option. Among other things, this type of sales report helps you answer critical sales reporting questions like:

  • How are my deals moving through HubSpot’s deal stages?
  • At which stage do I lose the most deals?
  • Where can my sales processes get better?


Measuring your deal stage conversion rate also enables you to drill down into the details of your sales operations. Want insight into the individual performance of each of your sales reps? A custom report on your deal stage conversion rate can give you what you’re after.


Why default HubSpot reports are not enough to track your monthly deal stage conversion rate


HubSpot CRM is a powerful tool for tracking your sales activity. That said, default HubSpot reports seldom deliver everything you need to build dashboards that are reflective of your real, on-the-ground sales activity.


You could build a deal stage conversion rate report in HubSpot CRM by combining data from your Deals object with your deal stage history data, but it would fall short for a number of reasons. Here’s why:


1. Reports in HubSpot CRM do not give you enough longitudinal insight


A deal stage conversion rate report in HubSpot will cover a set period of time. However, to gain actionable insight into how your sales pipeline is progressing, you need to be able to see the month-over-month evolution of your deal stage conversion rates.

 

For example, say you want to track the impact of the adjustments to your sales strategy you make each month. To do so, you would need insight into the month-over-month evolution of your sales conversion rate. You’re not going to get this with a default HubSpot report. (Conversely, achieving this level of insight would be easy with a HubSpot reporting integration like Actiondesk.)


2. Reports in HubSpot CRM do not reflect your real business activity


HubSpot CRM has seven default deal stages. Of course, the reality is that some prospects will skip one (or more) of these stages — perhaps a prospect signs on the dotted line before even receiving a demo.


In such a scenario, HubSpot CRM will show that no conversion event occurred for the skipped stage(s). That means your deal stage conversion rate report is no longer reflective of how your deals actually progress.


3. Reports in HubSpot CRM do not give you the flexibility you need


You might be tempted to use calculated fields in HubSpot like “Cumulative Conversion Rate” to expand your deal stage conversion rate report. While “Cumulative Conversion Rate” can be a helpful indicator in certain circumstances, it does not reflect the fact that many of your currently open deals may end up as conversions. In short, this indicator does not provide enough longitudinal perspective for it to help you truly understand your conversion rate.


As such, it can be more productive to calculate your conversion rate in a separate field using only your closed-out deals. This is difficult to do with HubSpot’s default reporting features, but takes just a few clicks in a tool like Actiondesk.


2. Deal time spent in each stage and sales velocity


What is the deal time spent in each stage and what is sales velocity?


Reporting on the time spent in each deal stage allows Revenue Ops, Sales Ops, sales managers, and other sales leaders to track the average time that a deal spends in each stage of their sales lifecycle.


The time spent in each HubSpot deal stage enables you to calculate another critical metric: sales velocity. Sales velocity measures how quickly you generate income, and is calculated using the following variables:

  • Number of deals (or opportunities): The number of deals you currently have in your deal pipeline.
  • Average deal size: The revenue generated over a defined period divided by your number of deals in that period.
  • Conversion rate: The number of “Closed won” deals over a defined period divided by your number of deals in that period.
  • Average sales cycle length: The average time needed to convert a Lead into Customer.


To calculate your sales velocity, multiply your number of deals by your average deal size by your conversion rate, then divide the product by your average sales cycle length.


How does understanding the time spent in each deal stage help you boost your revenue?


Knowing how long a deal typically spends in each stage of your sales funnel is critical. This information will enable you to answer key questions like:

  • Which stages take too long for deals to get through?
  • How long does it take for a deal to close?
  • Which steps of my sales funnel can I improve to increase my sales velocity?


Once you answer these questions, you will be able to make strategic changes to your sales processes that will help you close deals faster. And, of course, the faster your deals move through your funnel, the faster you generate revenue!


Why default HubSpot reports are not enough to track your time spent in each deal stage


HubSpot is an incredibly popular CRM for a variety of reasons. It’s powerful, intuitive, and provides an all-in-one solution for efficiently tracking your sales and marketing activity. However, HubSpot leaves something to be desired when it comes to reporting.


In fact, if you want to track your time spent in each deal stage in a HubSpot template, you need to purchase HubSpot’s premium reporting add-on. Even then, you likely won’t have access to all the reporting functionality you need. Here’s why:


1. Reports in HubSpot CRM do not give you enough longitudinal insight


Every business is different. As a result, every sales team needs to be able to customize their HubSpot reporting to make sure they get the insights they need from their data. Default HubSpot reports can determine your time spent in each deal stage over a specific time period, but this is only half the story. You need to be able to explore the month-over-month fluctuation in how long your deals stay in each deal stage.


You might also want to view this data broken down by sales rep to determine whether your sales cycle varies across your sales team. While plotting and comparing this data in HubSpot is a nightmare, doing so requires just a few clicks in Actiondesk.


2. Reports in HubSpot CRM are time-consuming


Anyone who has done it can tell you: building reports in HubSpot takes time. Especially if you are trying to view the evolution of metrics month-over-month or quarter-over-quarter, you should be sure to clear your schedule. Indeed, you will have to manually generate a new report every month or every quarter!


With Actiondesk, once you import your HubSpot data and set up your customized report, everything is automated. Whether you want to check in every quarter, every month, or even every week, your time spent in each deal stage metrics will always be up to date.


3. Reports in HubSpot CRM do not give you the flexibility you need


Tracking your time spent in each deal stage is a good start, but it’s just that: a start. Successful sales leaders get more granular with their analyses. For example, you might want to highlight deals that have stayed in your pipeline for more than five days. This is a critical metric for monitoring the health of your sales pipeline. With Actiondesk, tracking this metric is easy: all you need to do is add a simple calculation to your customized time spent in each deal stage report.


3. How Actiondesk helps you leverage key sales KPIs


Actiondesk is a spreadsheet with superpowers. With just a few clicks, you can import your HubSpot data and organize and analyze it in whatever ways you want. What’s more, as you update your data in HubSpot CRM, it will automatically update in Actiondesk! With Actiondesk, you have total control and visibility of your data.


To save you time, Actiondesk has pre-built reporting templates for you. Want to generate a monthly deal conversion rate report? Simply click the “Report” button in Actiondesk, then select the “Deal conversion rate per month” template. Actiondesk will produce an automated report on your conversion rate with your imported HubSpot data.


How about a time spent in each deal stage report? Again, simply click the “Report” button in Actiondesk, then select the “Deal time spent in each stage” template. Actiondesk will produce an automated report on your time spent in each deal stage with your imported HubSpot data.



Actiondesk also empowers you to perform deeper analyses of the evolution of your deals and get a clear, detailed overview of how your sales pipeline is performing. Want to break down your pipeline by individual sales reps? Want to assess your deal stage conversion rates on a quarterly basis? You can do all this and more in Actiondesk with only your spreadsheet skills! Plus, we’re always here to help you build your perfect customized HubSpot dashboard in Actiondesk if you need a hand.


Ultimately, by boosting your deal stage conversion rate and accelerating your sales cycle, you ensure the long-term robustness of your revenue operations. To achieve these outcomes, you must keep tabs on key sales KPIs like monthly HubSpot deal stage conversion rate and time spent in each HubSpot deal stage. It can be overwhelming — even impossible — to create custom reports in HubSpot CRM, but with Actiondesk, it’s a breeze.


Learn more about everything Actiondesk has to offer by signing up for a free 14-day trial!

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