I’m setting up forecasting and trying to work out how the probability should be tackled and trying to get my head around what best practice looks like. Need to provide weighted pipeline reporting to management.
I see on the deals setup page you can set probability for each stage - looks nice and simple
There is also a custom default field ‘probability’. It seems to be used when a workflow is invoked.
How do the two interact?
Or do they?
Why would you have two models for probability - one set on the property and one set on the deal stage automatically.
Appreciate forecast category and you can either set to automate setting it based on lifecycle stage or manually select. There are pros and cons here and I am veerinf to manual becuase then, for example, you can set a deal to be best case at start of a Quarter even if it is still early on in the Discovery lifecycle.
I have seen that some new features are layered over older features and would like a sense of what the ‘gotchas’ are before I paint myself in a corner.
I want to share these two helpful resources with more information:
Set up the forecast tool
This knowledge base article explains how to edit the forecast categories in HubSpot, including adding, editing, and organizing the categories, and selecting which columns and forecast categories are displayed in the forecast tool.
Use the forecast tool
This knowledge base article explains how to review a forecast on your desktop in your HubSpot account, including how to filter and analyze the forecast by different criteria, drill down into specific users’ forecasts, edit columns, and enter notes for deals.
If you are still running into this behavior, I would recommend connecting with HubSpot Technical Support, as Support is included in your subscription and they will be able to provide real-time assistance for this matter, where you are able to share your screen and further information about this. They will be able to further investigate, open your account, and provide you with insights, solutions, etc.
In our business, we can have a very long sales cycle, and we also utilize hubspot to manage our pipeline of sold work (‘WIP’) as we actually deliver our services - these have an element of contingent fees. It means the rules for discounting sales and delivery fee values need to be a bit more sophisticated than the out-of-the-box functionality, particularly as some fee components are variable and some are fixed (and these have different levels of contingency)
We took the decision early to replace the native method with our own, and so effectively we set each discount percentage for each deal ‘manually’ - although in reality it is done via a workflow which implements our business rules.
We have a single workflow which re-enrols a deal whenever its deal stage changes. The deal then passes through branches of logic which end up with an action that sets the probabality property on the deal.
So for example, if a new qualified sales opportunity is created, it defaults to our stage ‘identify opportunity’ and we set the probability to 10% (full stop) - this is equivalent to setting the parameter in HubSpot directly. But if if the deal moves to our next stage, the probability is set differently dependent on the deal type and whether it is a competitive bid or not. And so on - we just built out the logic precisely how our management team wanted it, and then we compare to observed behaviour.
As I say, this is appropriate in our business because we have relatively few, large deals, on a long cycle - and so it is worth having more precision / control over them. But it does have two key advantages - (i) we are absolutely certain we know how it works! and (ii) we have a single workflow I can point any of our management team to which shows precisely the basis of the discounting calculation.
Word of warning though, I believe as soon as you start setting deal probabilities ‘manually’, the system’s native discounting is disapplied on those deals -- so if people go this route, they need to be committed to it!
Thanks for taking the time to share this Phil - really helpful.
We too have long sales cycles and the ambition is there to use Hubspot as the system to manage the project work that we deliver as part of our initial deployments - which can be several months - so interesting to learn how you do it.
But one step at a time…
Any other views and experiences welcome - this is great to see as I go through the training.