topic Re: Forecasting on a per customer basis instead of per sales rep in Sales Hub Tools

Forecasting on a per customer basis instead of per sales rep

katherineladue — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 19:38:54 GMT

I have had multiple clients recently that do all their sales forecasting on a per customer basis for their top targeted accounts, instead of per sales rep. It seems that for these folks the forecasting tool is essentially useless because it only allows you to submit a forecast per sales rep.

We could create custom company properties to store the sales forecast numbers but it's not a very scalable solution for long term because they would need a custom property for each month of each year.

Has anyone come up with a good workaround for this?

Re: Forecasting on a per customer basis instead of per sales rep

BérangèreL — Fri, 20 Dec 2024 10:01:13 GMT

Hi @katherineladue, I hope that you are well!

Thank you for asking the Community!

I'd love to put you in touch with some of our Top Experts who can share their experiences in this field: Hi @danmoyle, @KhushbooP11 and @johnelmer can you think of a workaround or do you have suggestions to help @katherineladue, please?

Thanks so much and Happy Holidays ❄️

Best,
Bérangère

Re: Forecasting on a per customer basis instead of per sales rep

danmoyle — Fri, 20 Dec 2024 17:29:32 GMT

Hey there @katherineladue - interesting use case here on the forecasting tool. I haven't personally run into this, but a couple of thoughts come to mind.

You could maybe create a custom deal pipeline for customer-based forecasting. This pipeline would include stages representing different forecast categories likePipeline, Best Case, Commit, etc. Sales reps would create deals for each customer account in this pipeline, then use deal amounts to represent forecasted values. Then they could use deal stages to indicate the confidence level of the forecast. It might help them use the existing forecasting since it's not customizable how I think theyd need it, but adapt it to the customer (or account) based forecasting.

Custom properties could also maybe work, even though creating custom properties for each month and year isn't ideal. What is you did something like this?

Create a custom company property for "Forecast Amount."
Use a date property for "Forecast Period."
Implement workflows to update these properties regularly.

This might help reduce the number of custom properties needed but requires more manual management.

I think however someone might help you create a sustainable and scalable workaround, I'd probably still drop this in Ideas to basically submit a feature request to HubSpot for the functionality your clients need.

Hope that helps inspire some ideas to help!

Re: Forecasting on a per customer basis instead of per sales rep

katherineladue — Fri, 20 Dec 2024 18:07:26 GMT

Thanks Dan, I like the idea of the deal pipeline! The only thing with that is I'm wondering how we'd be able to compare actual revenue amounts for each company to the forecasted deal amounts.. I guess it would have to just be a custom report and all the forecast deals would be associated to the customer Company account along with the regular deals?

I was also wondering if there was an integration that would work well for this, and I found a couple sales forecasting apps, but it seems that they all operate outside of HubSpot and just pull data from HubSpot. If you have any knowledge on any integrations that might work well for our use case we're open to that as well!

Re: Forecasting on a per customer basis instead of per sales rep

danmoyle — Fri, 20 Dec 2024 18:37:49 GMT

I think that's right on your first thought, @katherineladue. You're definitely into custom report territory.

As for the integration question, if I find anything I'll definitely pass it along. It's not something I've heard abiout, but you never know!