Forecasting is one of the "holy grails" in the sales and marketing world. Perfect forecasting affords perfectly timed budget decisions, investments, new hires ... you get the idea.

Sales leaders and executives examine specific data points to drive their business decisions. This type of analysis covers everything from hiring new team members to prioritizing product innovation. Accurately forecasting sales shines light on important data that lets you make effective decisions about hiring, marketing, and growth.

In this post, we'll focus on the four elements you'll need to create an automated forecasting system in HubSpot:

1. Custom properties to track and measure forecast data
2. Workflows to automate data capture and capture time stamps
3. Reports to measure performance and accuracy
4. Team documentation/training to ensure consistent process and data integrity

Marketing and sales teams are swimming in data, and in available tools to collect, analyze, and visualize their data.

But what's most important for marketing and sales teams is often data that's right in front of us, and right within our HubSpot portals. In order to drive growth, it's important to hone in on the most critical data that impacts your bottom line. All that's required is knowing where and how to look for this information.

Here are six key reports you can create in HubSpot to measure the impact of your marketing and sales efforts, along with step-by-step directions on how to create them. 

Warning: Don't Confuse Salesforce Campaigns with HubSpot Campaigns

It's important to know that HubSpot also has a campaigns tool, and it is specifically not the same as Salesforce campaigns. You can skip to the bottom of this article for more about HubSpot campaigns and some ideas on how to leverage them.

The word "campaign" is thrown around a lot in marketing. Despite its prevalence, there is a marked lack of clarity around the term "campaign," which has several different meanings and functions within marketing and sales.

This has the potential to cause significant headaches for marketing teams, especially when you layer on powerful technologies like HubSpot and Salesforce, with their own CRM and automation systems that must be configured together. 

Smart marketers know that basic marketing metrics (traffic and engagement) on their own provide a narrow view, and only small piece of the puzzle. While useful for optimizing campaigns, they are not necessarily tied to larger business goals and objectives.

Analytics that matter to organization leaders and boards go beyond the basic number of leads generated per quarter or increases in lead conversions. Leads, opportunities, and customers are easy and obvious numbers to focus on, but more important are the metrics that allow companies to track, project and predict growth. This is particularly true when it comes to SaaS (and IaaS, PaaS, FaaS) companies and others with a subscription-based pricing model.

Chances are, you're already familiar with Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR). This is a number that investors care about, which means it is a number that companies care about, which means it is a number that marketers care about. MRR, however, is just scratching the surface of revenue metrics that matter and must be measured.

Lead scoring is an essential part of growing revenue for marketing and sales teams.

A sophisticated lead scoring model can be the difference between a sales team buried under piles of new leads, unable to distinguish a good lead from a bad one, and a team that is effectively and efficiently prioritizing their efforts - and closing more deals as a result.

Technology in the marketing and sales space is evolving rapidly, with more capabilities and innovations emerging every day.

The disruption potential of these major technologies is tremendous. In a space that has already been massively revolutionized in the era of digital, marketing and sales leaders must prepare to adapt their technologies, business models, and personnel in order to keep up with the future.

Here are four of our favorite emerging technologies on a path sure to intersect with marketing and sales very soon.

When it comes to segmentation, many companies lean on the basics, splitting up their email database by industry, persona, and/or stage of the funnel. But why stop there?

Marketing automation tools like HubSpot, Marketo, and Pardot make it easy to create lists based on actions and engagements taken by your website visitors. When you augment this data with offline touch points logged in your CRM, there are an endless number of trigger combinations you can use to segment your audience and deliver highly-customized marketing and sales campaigns.

One of the major components of conversion optimization is measuring visitor engagement with your website content, capturing actions like page views, email opens, CTA clicks and form submissions to score and analyze.

While these basic pageview analytics tell us how long a visitor is on a page, they don't tell us what they were doing on a particular page and which specific content they found engaging.

In other words, analyzing page views, CTA clicks, and form submissions only tells part of the story of your visitor's experience, but omits most of the details. Fortunately, there is a tool we can use to measure on-page engagements and visitor actions that lead to conversion - events.

Serious HubSpotters know how to get the most out of HubSpot reporting tools, but they also know that combining other technologies and analytics creates a more comprehensive and actionable landscape.

Knowing which content is sticky enough to engage your audience beyond the landing page produces more conversion opportunities. After deep diving into the data that gives us this insight, we are going to take the time to understand why these campaigns are delivering better results, then look at how to replicate the effective components.

By the end of this post, you'll be able to measure which HubSpot email campaigns produce the most page views and longest time on site on your website.