Forecast by Deal Quantity, Line Items, or Custom Objects
I'm very interested in the recent updates to forecasting sales, but we are not able to use it as it's currently set up. We are not focused on revenue yet, therefore, we only set goals for the sales team to sell SaaS. The forecasting functionality would be great if we could somehow forecast subscription sales, but revenue alone does not work for us. An easy solution would be to implement the ability to set Goals based on Number of Deals Closed.
However, my proposed solution wouldn't work when a salesperson sells 2 subscriptions on one Deal. We could certainly work around this issue by creating 2 separate deals, and that wouldn't be much of a problem.
An alternative approach requires more background to how our HubSpot is set up. Currently, we have a Product SKU that records the subscription in a Deal Line Item. Once the Deal is completed, we have a Custom Object called Subscriptions that is created. If the salesperson sold 2 subscriptions on the Deal, then 2 Subscriptions are created. These Subscriptions are synced with our company's admin page via the API to keep our customer account data current and accessable in the form of HubSpot properties. I have 2 proposed solutions:
1) Create the ability to track Line Items/SKUs in the pipeline against a Goal.
2) Create the ability to track custom objects such as our Subscriptions.
I too would like to see functionality in Forecasting added to build forecasts based upon new line items added. This would allow me to more accurately forecast and include Won deals that have expanded to new line items.
Agreed, this is critical for forecasting or reporting. Having the ability to set a goal based on the line item type ex: Hardware vs/ Software would be extremely helpful.
We already set sales goals and do forecasting starting with product types that each sales person needs to sell a certain amount of in order to reach their goal. HubSpot only allows the setting of goals per sales person. It would be helpful if there was a way to set and measure progress against particular line items, which would make up the goal, even if it was just a percentage.
The reason for this is we usually know for each of our regions what products are most likely to sell and generate the most revenue in the coming 12 months. It helps our sales teams to have specific achievable goals and measurable tracking against those goals month after month. This has been done using Excel and we were hoping to automate it in HubSpot, but at the moment it doesn't look like we are able to.
Selling multiple products from our own software to ISVs to services in the forms of one-time, perpetual and subscription, the basic forecasting (and goals) capabilities are just not good enough to use across a multi-regional organization. An enhancement that would allow line-item category or type reporting would go a long way on allowing us the ability to use the forecasting tool and make the sales enterprise seat worth it in my eyes.
Allowing for line item forecasting would make HubSpot much more useful and allow it to easily inform purchasing. A forecasted quanitity property that's a product of the foreacst probability and quanitity seems like a simple addition.
I also have a use case for forecasting and custom reports by line item-to see the cumulative amount of anticipated active subscriptions and when those would start/end over time would be very helpful.
I second this very important idea. Our business is capital equipment, besides forecast of revenue, the forecast on line item quantity is more important for the company production and resources planning.
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