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. 

Customer reviews are a vital part of an effective digital marketing strategy today. That's because today's consumers simply don't trust brands. Instead, they rely on the opinions of their peers to help guide their purchasing decisions. It's becoming more and more important to pay attention to and get proactive about monitoring your online reputation if you want to compete with others digitally.

If you're interested in crushing your 2020 growth goals, a killer inbound marketing plan is a no-brainer. Inbound marketing is an impressively powerful lead generation strategy, and as marketing technology advances, the opportunities for impressive results with inbound continue to grow rapidly.

The most challenging aspect of creating an effective inbound marketing plan is usually just knowing where to begin. So we've created this easy-to-follow 10-step guide on how to create a powerful inbound marketing strategy that will rock your organization's sales and marketing world in 2020 and beyond.

No matter your organization or industry, your website is the digital epicenter of marketing and sales activity.

How do you ensure that your website not only speaks clearly and directly to your target audience, but that it also actually influences their behavior, getting them to convert on a form or complete another desired action established by your marketing team?

These five steps will outline a blueprint to develop an inbound website - one that will be irresistible to your target customers.

When it comes to boosting your website's conversion rate, you can focus your efforts on several areas to see results almost immediately. Every website is unique, but some tried-and-true best practices within conversion rate optimization prove to increase website lead generation for pretty much everyone.

Try these seven proven ways to boost your website conversion rate and start getting more leads from your existing website traffic. These tips will generate improvement for almost any website, particularly when implemented all together.

Managing a blog for your brand is an awesome way to generate traffic and leads. But very few teams know exactly what to focus on in their blog to get the impressive results they're really looking for. 

You can use these high-impact, low-effort tips to improve conversion performance on almost any blog.

Setting yourself up for success within HubSpot is a critical process. HubSpot contains a powerful set of tools to help increase lead generation and customer acquisition, but it's not a magic button that is ready to go from the gate. You need to properly configure your system to make it work well for your organization, and that starts with properly mapping your sales process using lifecycle stages, lead statuses, and deal stages.

One key trait that identifies all high achievers is that they take action. They don't just talk about ideas; they do. Winning teams practice the art of implementation relentlessly. 

It's not particularly surprising, then, that successful implementation of a strategic marketing plan is one of the biggest challenges consistently facing marketing teams. 

Failed implementation is a stressful situation for any member of your marketing team, but it's marketing leaders that end up taking the brunt of the blame when a marketing plan fails to launch. Organizations regularly cite failure to execute a strategic plan as their primary reason for firing a CMO.