Streamline Your Sales Process with Sales Forecast Automation

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do you want to be able to easily predict future revenues from right inside your HubSpot portal well the forecasting tool is exactly what you need in this video we're going to walk you through everything it can do and exactly how to use it welcome to HubSpot hacks where we help you get more out of HubSpot [Music] the forecasting tool is going to be available to anybody that has a sales Hub professional or Enterprise license and I will warn you it does have a little bit more of a learning curve than a lot of the other HubSpot tools but don't worry we're going to walk you through it all today so let's dive in so if you're new to HubSpot the first thing to understand about forecasting is that it is going to be based on your deals also known as opportunities that are going to be stored inside of HubSpot so whenever you have an open sales opportunity you're going to create a deal and Associate it to the contact and Company records that are relevant and so in this case we're looking at just the deals that we are going to close next month or have a close date of next month so we've got two deals in here we're recording this in January of 2023 so you can see we've got two deals that have a close day of February in 2023 so these are the two deals that are forecasting is going to be based on when we look at the forecasting tool so this is going to be our deals view if we want to go to forecasting it's going to be under this sales drop down and forecast and the first thing that you're going to notice here is we've got two tabs across the top so there's two ways to do forecasting inside of HubSpot the first one is going to be based on Deal stage so when we looked at that deals pipeline we noticed we've got more than one stage here this is all the deals I had it filtered for just next month earlier we've got different stages for each of our for each of our pipelines they represent milestones in our sales process so the first way we can forecast is based on those deal stages the second way is going to be forecast category which I'll talk about here in a second but it allows you to forecast across pipelines more easily and have a little bit more control over your forecasting so deal stage is kind of an entry level forecasting great place to start out if you want something more sophisticated or if you want to be able to forecast across pipelines then you're going to want forecast category so we'll start with going over the deal stage forecasting and they have this little help icon in the top right that helps you understand which users of your HubSpot system will actually show up in forecasting so make sure you understand this everybody that you want to be able to forecast around so the people that are assigned as owners to your Deals they need to have a paid sale seat they need to be a part of a team and they have to have forecast permissions turned on so this little help icon will teach you how to do each of those things if you're not familiar with that then when you scroll down depending on kind of last time you visited the tool you're probably going to see something that looks like this so across the top here we have some analytics some high level analytics across all of our users and teams and then we've got our teams here with the deal stage forecasting you do have to select your pipeline you can only do your forecasting around one pipeline at a time so today we're going to focus on this demo sales pipeline if you want to be able to combine forecasts across pipelines again that's for the forecast category comes in and we've got our close date so we're focused on next month go down to our teams in this case we really only care about our sales team so if we click on sales team it's going to allow us to drill down to the two users that are on our sales team so will and myself so in this view the first thing you're going to notice is the goal attainment so we've got a goal set for will for two thousand dollars for next month we don't have a goal set for me I'll show you how to set a goal in just a second the next next one you're going to see is your total so this is the total of all of the deals that are assigned to that user for that uh within they have a close date within the time period that you have selected here so in this case will has a has deals that total up to about 2300 and I have a deal that totals up to 800 that are going to be closing next month we currently have our forecasting set up based on the weighted amount so if we go back to our deals we'll notice that at the bottom of these each of these stages we've set a weight or a likelihood of closing so when a deal reaches presentation scheduled the likelihood of closing is 60 so you can set your forecasting up to show the weighted amount or the total amount so we've got our weighted amount so in this case I've actually got a one deal that's valued at a thousand dollars but it's sitting in a stage that's weighted at 80 percent so it's showing me eight hundred dollars for my total the next one here is going to be our coverage ratio so this is going to be the this total divided by the goal so we've got and it is looking at the weighted total here you'll notice the pipeline coverage number up here is higher because this is looking at the unweighted total so that's going to be why you might see a discrepancy here if you do have this set up to show the weighted total and I'll show you how to change that here in a second if you would prefer to just show the total without having any of the weights then as we scroll over here what we're going to see is we're going to see the amounts in our case the weighted amounts by each stage in that pipeline so in this case will has one deal and the presentation scheduled stage and I have one deal in the decision maker bought in stage so you'll see all of the stages in your sales process here and then you'll also see this forecast submission so these numbers are all based on your deals this forecast submission is based on a number that you put in here so let's say Will has 2300 worth of deals in here for next month but he knows he's going to an event next month with a lot of low hanging fruit and so he's actually going to commit to his manager that he's going to have 5 000 clothes so he's going to submit that forecast that's what he thinks he's gonna make and so you can compare um your kind of automated totals based on deals compared to what you have submitted as your forecast if you want to do that and again that'll roll up here so if I would also let's say I don't think I'm as good of a salesperson as will I'm only going to get 2500 I think this month I'll submit that and it'll total up for me across the top so I mentioned I'd show you how to set goals so we've got a goal for will but not for myself so there's a couple ways to set goals one of them is if there is no goal set you can just hover over this and click on setting a revenue goal the other way is to come up here to your settings you'll go to tracking and analytics and goals so they are doing some work on goals right now so this may look a little bit different depending on when you're watching this video but it should be a pretty similar process so we've already got a goal for will so we'll set a goal for myself we're just going to hit create goal at the top you can create lots of different goals inside of HubSpot if you have this beta turned on you can create all kinds of goals but for forecasting we're going to want to set a specific type of goal called a revenue goal and that's going to be from this template so we're going to create from template and hit next we'll just call this test goal for now it's going to be a sales goal and it's going to be a revenue goal so this is the category and type that you're going to want to set goals if you're going to use for the forecasting tool we'll hit next we do intend to forecast for that goal we're going to select the user select the users that that goal applies to so in this case it's me it's going to be for 2023 and your goals Revenue goals do have to be for a specific pipeline so if you've got multiple pipelines you do have to break your Revenue goals across pipelines that is true even if you're using forecast categories rather than deal stages so you always have to select a pipeline in this case we're working with this demo sales pipeline we'll hit next this pipeline is set up to be forecasted monthly I'll show you how to change that here in a second so it is going to ask for a goal for each month if your goal stays the same throughout the year and you don't want to type in that goal for every month there is a neat little trick you can just hit this check box to the left here and hit apply targets and let's say we want my goal to be a thousand a month so I'm going to apply that and you'll see we've got a thousand a month for each of these let's say you've got some seasonality and we know that in December we expect a little more so we'll bump that up to 2 000. hit next you can set up notifications around your goal if you'd like to we'll just leave those off and hit done now if we go back to our forecasting tool refresh it here and you'll notice that we've got my goal of a thousand for next month put in here and so I can now see a coverage ratio number as well to see how I'm performing to that goal as we close deals this status bar will fill up so if I were to close this deal if that deal remember is worth a thousand dollars is 800 is just the weighted amount once it's closed one it'll reflect the total and so it would show me that I have attained that goal of a thousand dollars so this is the deal stage forecasting for forecast category it looks similar but slightly different so with forecast category what we have is we have a property on every deal record that allows us to select a category you can identify what those categories are but if you're just getting started I really recommend using the defaults from HubSpot which are going to be pipeline best case and commit and again you can do this for one pipeline or the nice thing about using forecast categories is you can have it forecast across category acrossed pipelines for you it'll total up your goals for each of your pipeline and all of the deals in each pipeline based on the category that's selected on those deals so again the screen's gonna look very similar we've got our goal attainment we've got our total our coverage ratio and then rather than having deal stages we have those categories and we can still submit forecasts here on the side this is also a great tool to use in your coaching conversations if you're a sales manager when you're doing your coaching with your sales reps because you can easily view the deals so if I want to see all of Will's deals I can hit view deals here or I can go to any of these categories and hit this number of deals at the bottom and that'll expand so I'm going to see all of Will's deals here so it's going to show me that Will's got one deal for February it's going to show me the forecast category so our category in this case is best case the name of the deal the total value so this isn't the weight of the amount this is the total value of the deal and what stage it's in it's also going to show you whether the next step property is being used and if it is what's in that property so next step is a default property on all of your deals good idea to coach your sales reps to always have a next step on the deal this is a great way to have coaching conversations so we're going to come in here and say you know hey Will I noticed that your goal is 2 000 it looks like you're probably going to hit it we've got 2300 in here but you've submitted the goal of 5000 so let's take a look and see what deals we have and see if we can move them forward let's view your deals okay I see you've got a one you've got one deal here your next step is to give a presentation on the the 13th let's talk about what that presentation is going to look like and any needs that you have for me so that's a way that you can have your coaching conversations I'll pop open you can also click on the deal to pop open that deal and you can see here on the deal record we have the properties on the left here and some of one of those properties is the forecast category so we can change this between all of these categories so let's say I'm pretty sure this deal is going to close I'm going to move that category to commit and then this next step property is that one that shows on that deals view in the forecasting so I'm going to save that within the forecasting tool there is also quite a bit of setup right we've got those categories we can change and we can change whether we want it to be whether we want those goals around a pipeline to be monthly or quarterly or annually and we also have some automation around the forecast categories that we can do as well as setting whether or not we want to see the weighted amounts or the total amounts here so all of those settings are going to live in our settings icon here and under objects and forecasts so there's two tabs here we've got the setup and the pipelines this first tab is going to allow you to do a few things so we can manage our forecast properties so this is where I would change those categories if I don't like that best case commit and pipeline categories I can change those to custom categories of my choosing I can edit the columns that show up in my reporting tools let's say I've got a lot of categories but I only want a few of them to show up in the forecasting tool I can customize that here this is where I change whether or not I'm seeing the weighted amount based on those deal stage weights or the total amount of the deals just a simple drop down here and if you want to have an indicator around somebody um so basically give somebody an alert when they haven't submitted a new manual forecast in a while you can select that as well this next tab here for our pipelines is going to be primarily for the deal categories so the deal categories are nice because we can automate them or override what the automation says so most of them are going to kind of start off automated so what this is going to allow us to do is for deals in our demo sales Pipeline and we can do this for each pipeline here we're going to say if we move a deal to our appointment scheduled or qualified to buy stage automatically set that forecast category to pipeline if we move it to the presentation scheduled stage we're going to update it the best case if we move it to decision maker bought in or contract sent commit and close one is closed one but as I just showed you earlier when I opened up that deal record a salesperson can also override that so let's say that's got a they've got a deal in the decision maker bought in stage but they don't really think it's going to close this month we're going and they want to then manually override that forecast category to pipeline or maybe they've got a deal an appointment scheduled but they're pretty sure it's going to close they can update that deal category or that forecast category to commit to show the sales manager and reflect in the forecast that is actually pretty likely that that deal is going to close in that time period so the automation gives you a nice starting point but unlike when you're using just the deal stage 4 forecasting they can kind of manually adjust that forecast to make sure that it's an accurate representation of what we saw there the last thing that you can set up here is whether that forecast period is going to be monthly quarterly or annually so I showed you in the goals tool when we went to the goal and was selected that pipeline it asked us for a goal each month that was because we have this set to monthly if we updated it to quarterly it would change how those goals are made and how that's represented in the forecast tool so like I said a little bit more of a learning curve lots of settings with the forecast tool but hopefully you can see that this is going to be a sales manager's best friend especially if you have multiple sales people high volume of dual of deals great way to see kind of what's coming in in future months or quarters for more HubSpot tips tricks and how to's make sure you hit that subscribe button and check out the description below for a link to our HubSpot hacks newsletter see you next time foreign [Music]