Reporting on new vs returning contacts/deals

[ECornus]

Hi community, 

I have the profressional sales and marketing subscription and would like to report on new vs returning contacts and or deals. 
I would also like to report on information about these returning customers i.e their source or forms they submitted but I can't seem to create a report to do this. Has anyone successfully created anything like this, if so, can you please share your ideas?

[jolle · Accepted solution]

Thanks for the mention, @kvlschaefer! And great questions, @ECornus!

There are a few ways to go about this depending on the specific data you need. I have some potential starting points for you below!

Categorizing deals

You may have an existing default deal property called "Deal Type" with "New Business" and "Existing Business" as dropdown options. Whether you use that property or a custom one, you can have your sales team manually categorize deals from returning customers. Once you have that known property value, you can segment your deals and report on only the returning business ones.

Use the "Latest source" contact properties

Just like you have the "Original source" contact proeprties that tell you how a contact was originally created, you also have "Latest source" properties that will tell you the source of the most recent interactions from that contact (more info in this HubSpot Knowledge Base article). These properties will update over time as the contact continue to engage, so you can build reports around them. For example, you could filter your report so that "Number of form submissions" is greater than or equal to 2 and "Latest source" is known. That would pull in contacts who have converted and reconverted (within a specific timeframe, if desired) and show you their "Latest source." Just keep in mind that the "Latest source" values will continue to update, but you can always check out the property history on individual contact records to see how the values have changed over time.

Use the "Recent conversion" contact property

This property will store the name of the HubSpot asset (i.e., form) where a conversion most recently occurred. This is another use case for adding the "Number of form submissions" is greater than or equal to 2 filter to check out where contacts seem to be reconverting.

Use default HubSpot reports

These don't tell you much about contact activity, but they're a useful tool to get the overall picture. If you search "returning" within the HubSpot report library, you should see default reports like these:

Hope this helps at least get you started!!

[danmoyle · Accepted solution]

Thanks @kvlschaefer 😊

Hi @ECornus. In addition to what @jolle offers (always great ideas!), I was thinking of starting with the custom report builder. 

Primary data source = contacts. Then add deals and website activities. This will give you all of your contacts, any of their associated deals, and their webstie activity. You could then add information like page views (if 1, you know it's their first visit, if more, returning visitor), time of views, and more. 

From there, what you want to report on should be available. That's how I'd start. 😊 

[kvlschaefer]

Hi @ECornus,

Thank you for reaching out to the Community!

I wanted to invite our subject matter experts to this conversation.

Hi @danmoyle, @Jnix284, @jolle - Do you have any sales reporting tips for @ECornus's use-case?

Thank you! 

Best,

Kristen

[Jnix284]

Thanks for the tag @kvlschaefer , looks like @jolle and @danmoyle have it covered 😉

[jolle · Accepted solution]

Thanks for the mention, @kvlschaefer! And great questions, @ECornus!

There are a few ways to go about this depending on the specific data you need. I have some potential starting points for you below!

Categorizing deals

You may have an existing default deal property called "Deal Type" with "New Business" and "Existing Business" as dropdown options. Whether you use that property or a custom one, you can have your sales team manually categorize deals from returning customers. Once you have that known property value, you can segment your deals and report on only the returning business ones.

Use the "Latest source" contact properties

Just like you have the "Original source" contact proeprties that tell you how a contact was originally created, you also have "Latest source" properties that will tell you the source of the most recent interactions from that contact (more info in this HubSpot Knowledge Base article). These properties will update over time as the contact continue to engage, so you can build reports around them. For example, you could filter your report so that "Number of form submissions" is greater than or equal to 2 and "Latest source" is known. That would pull in contacts who have converted and reconverted (within a specific timeframe, if desired) and show you their "Latest source." Just keep in mind that the "Latest source" values will continue to update, but you can always check out the property history on individual contact records to see how the values have changed over time.

Use the "Recent conversion" contact property

This property will store the name of the HubSpot asset (i.e., form) where a conversion most recently occurred. This is another use case for adding the "Number of form submissions" is greater than or equal to 2 filter to check out where contacts seem to be reconverting.

Use default HubSpot reports

These don't tell you much about contact activity, but they're a useful tool to get the overall picture. If you search "returning" within the HubSpot report library, you should see default reports like these:

Hope this helps at least get you started!!