How to Best Report on Number of Demos Booked

toricook · ‎Feb 3, 2020

Hi colleagues,

I am in need of some creative ideas! We are a SaaS company struggling to accurately report on the success of our sales opportunities: primarily prospects who book a demo and prospects who sign up for a free trial.

Our pipeline stages currently include both "Demo" and "Trial" stages, respectively. Prospects can enter either stage first. Some book a demo first, some sign up for a free trial first. Some have both a free trial and a demo (in which case, if someone signs up for a free trial first and then a demo later, they do not move backwards into the demo stage).

I want to answer these questions:

What is the conversion rate of those that only book demos to Closed-Won?
What is the conversion rate of only those that sign up for free trials to Closed-Won?
What is the conversion rate of those that sign up for both a free trial and a demo to Closed-Won?
How many demos did we have each quarter/annually (per contact and company)?
How many free trials signed up this quarter/annually (per contact and company)?
How many signed up for both a free trial and completed a demo quarterly/annually (per contact and company)?

At first, many of these questions seem easy to answer. But as we dig into the tools available and the data more, things become more complex.

For example, answering the simple question of "how many demos did we have each quarter?" and "what is the conversion rate to closed-won?" is tricker than one might think. At first, I was utilizing HubSpot's deal conversion reports. I could see, at any given timeframe, how many deals entered the demo stage. And I could also see how many of those converted to closed-won in the same timeframe. However, because some prospects sign up for a free trial first (which is a later stage than demos in our pipeline), those deals never enter the "demo" stage at all (we do not move deals backwards in the pipeline) even if they do, in fact, book a demo with a salesperson.

So, deal stages don't allow me to perfectly report on how many demos were conducted by our sales staff. At least with that way our pipeline is currently structured...

I considered tracking the number of Meetings booked in the Sales Productivity reports. But meetings includes all kinds of meetings and not just demos. So that won't work.

I even has a Contact List of all contacts that have requested or booked a demo through the various form submissions (there are several ways someone can book a demo, see more details below). I can filter this by timeframe, so that is helpful albeit a manual counting process each time we want to track a new timeframe. However, this doesn't account for those that actually followed through with the demo. It only tracks those who at some point requested it.

For reference, here's how demos are currently booked:

Prospect fills out a HubSpot Meetings link - several calendars set up to book demos so we can track unique calendar successes across website)
Manually via email - sales will receive a request to book a demo, they coordinate a time with prospect, and manually set up a calendar invite in gmail
Prospect fills out a Facebook Ad Lead Form with a "book a demo" call to action - we then schedule a time to connect either manually or via HubSpot meetings link
Prospect fills out a pop-up form on website requesting a demo with sales - we then schedule a time to connect either manually or via HubSpot meetings link

So, I guess my questions are:

Has anyone else run into the issue of accurately reporting on how many demos and/or free trials your prospects have booked/signed up for in HubSpot?
How have you been able to perfectly report on the numbers of each and conversion rates of each?
Any creative solutions to the issues I stated above?

I am open to restructuring the way we currently track this but every new way I have thought about comes with other issues that I don't know how to solve.

Hope to hear from some of you!

BrianDL · ‎Feb 5, 2020

Hi Tori,

For conversion rates, I've created a similar solution for other elements of our business such as the close rate for deals that we have a Proof of Value (POV) on vs. deals that we do not. We track POVs with a few properties - checkbox for POVs, their phase, and so on.

The easiest solution I'd recommend is using a custom property to track demos (and the number of demos i.e. 1, 2, 3) and any other properties you've mentioned. This should be pretty straight forward so long as you don't have more than a handful of demos per deal. Then you can create a custom report based on the metrics you've mentioned.

Finally, the fun part... automation!

Since you use swimlanes for the activity, you can create workflows that update the properties as a deal moves between stages.

Hope this helps a bit!

Best,

Brian Carter

toricook · ‎Feb 5, 2020

Hi Brian,

Thanks so much for your response!

So, you would create a custom numerical field for "# of demos" on contact and company records. Then add a workflow anytime someone "books a demo" (trigger) and "increase or decrease property" value by 1 (action). I assume that if a demo is manually booked by sales, then they would update that new custom field manually.

Am I understanding that correctly?

A few questions I have about that:

How would I be able to run a report on the timeframe of when those demos were booked? How many demos were booked this quarter, for example?
How would you show the conversion rates to customer over a given timeframe? So let's say I want to look at how many demos were booked this quarter and how many of them became customers in the same quarter?

Also,

I realized that something I wrote may have been unclear. I don't want to necessarily track how many demos per each contact and company.

I want to count up the number of contacts in my database that had a demo (each month, quarter, year, etc). And I also want to count up the number of companies that had a demo (each month, quarter, year, etc) for better B2B reporting.

So let's say that Joe booked a demo for company A. And Barbara booked another demo for company A. Then Sara booked a demo for company B. All this month.

I would want to show that two companies had demos booked this month and three contacts had demos booked this month.

I can actually pull up this information in contact list views or reports. However, from a contact list view I can't necessarily show the conversion rates of these contacts/companies to customer status.

This is where deal stages and funnel reports come in handy. However, I'm having some issues accurately reporting on the number of demos using deal stages. Because some people have a "demo" with sales but never go through the "demo deal stage" because they are already in a later deal stage in the pipeline such as "free trial."

BrianDL · ‎Feb 5, 2020

Ah totally makes sense! So the initial answer I had could work for some of what you need, but not all of it.

I've created a similar scenario to track BD activity and how well they do over any given month/quarter/year. I used a date picker and then automated the date based on actions an AE would take with the deal. I imagine you could do something similar except change the stages to "Demo 1" etc.

Here is a screenshot of the properties and the report created:

Hope this helps!

-B