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 technologies like CRM and marketing automation systems.

Editor's Note: This blog was originally published in July 2018 and updated in May 2019.

HubSpot CRM is a great tool to help sales leaders gain visibility into their pipeline and to implement measurable change in their organization.

Click here to get the HubSpot CRM. It’s free and it’s awesome, we promise.

Setting up well-defined deal stages is an important first step to gaining insight into your sales funnel and improving sales team performance.

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.

There are over 130 apps that seamlessly connect with HubSpot, plus thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of custom apps and existing API configurations that exist to help companies grow better.

Every organization has its own set of priorities when it comes to infusing HubSpot across its specific tech stack; however, there are a number of high-value, free-version apps every company can connect to HubSpot in order to extract more value from the platform. We've outlined six of these free apps to get you started maximizing your HubSpot investment.

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.

Pop-Up Forms, formerly known as "Lead Flows," are a great and easy tool inside of the HubSpot growth stack that lets any website add a conversion point (form) to any website page, without any coding knowledge at all.

Pop-up forms are simple three-step forms for gathering customer information that can be set to appear on any page on your website. 

Here's how to use them effectively to generate leads.

The HubSpot growth stack includes tons of useful tools for sales and marketing teams. One of its most powerful and intriguing features is known as the Prospects tool. It's a tool that's been around since the very early days of HubSpot, and it's one of the most interesting features to both new and existing HubSpot customers.

Understanding the potential power of the HubSpot Prospects tool and how to leverage it gives marketing and sales teams a huge competitive edge.

The world’s most popular marketing automation platform, HubSpot, is primarily known for its ability to help marketing teams, but there are so many powerful facets of the software that are designed to supercharge sales for your company.

Many sales leaders are cautiously optimistic about marketing automation software like HubSpot, but they're just not sure how the technology applies to them. 

HubSpot includes a full set of sales productivity tools that help streamline and speed up your sales process. These technology tools allow sales teams to spend more time selling, shortening average sales cycles and increasing sales team happiness. Let’s take a look at some of the top tools helping sales teams fuel performance.