MRR Reporting with HubSpot Line Items: Technical Documentation

Introduction

If you’re using HubSpot for CRM and revenue tracking, you may have noticed that native MRR reporting doesn’t always meet specific business needs. Dear Lucy is a fully integrated MRR reporting solution designed for HubSpot, eliminating the need for manual spreadsheets and scattered data. In this guide, we’ll break down the setup and core features of MRR reporting with Dear Lucy and how it enables accurate insights - all directly embedded in HubSpot.

Connecting HubSpot to Dear Lucy for MRR Reporting

OAuth Integration – Plug & Play

The integration between HubSpot and Dear Lucy uses a secure, OAuth-based connection, making setup as simple as a few clicks. This connection ensures data flows directly from HubSpot to Dear Lucy, providing visibility without complicated processes or extra steps.

Data Update Frequency

The default data refresh rate is set to once per hour, allowing for frequent updates without any performance lag. If your team has specific reporting needs, the update frequency can be customized, ensuring you always have the latest insights available.

HubSpot UI Embedding

Dear Lucy is seamlessly embedded within the HubSpot UI. Users can access MRR data without leaving the HubSpot environment, meaning reporting feels like an extension of HubSpot itself. No more jumping between platforms or dealing with clunky, external add-ons - everything stays right within your existing workspace.

Essential Data Fields for MRR Reporting

To generate a detailed MRR report, Dear Lucy’s integration with HubSpot is designed to capture a wide array of deal data tailored to customer needs, including standard properties, custom properties, and line items. By pulling these data points together, Dear Lucy creates a comprehensive, actionable view of monthly recurring revenue. A typical setup includes the following data points.

MRR/ARR and One-Time Fee Report (HubSpot’s Line Items)

Necessary fields

• Net Price

• Billing Start Date

• Billing Frequency

• Term

Additional we support any default or custom line item property

• Currency

• Description

• Name

• Product

• Quantity

• SKU

• Unit Price

• Any

This data provides a precise view of recurring and one-time revenue streams, allowing teams to understand revenue composition and ensure accurate, itemized reporting.

SALES AND Revenue Forecast (HubSpot’s Default Deal Properties OR LINE ITEMS)

We support multiple forecasting models whether it’s weighted pipeline, unweighted pipeline, forecast category based, line item based or Dear LUcy’s proprietary deal scoring based forecast.

Necessary fields

• Amount

• Deal Probability

• Close Date

Additional we support any default property, custom property or custom line item property

• Amount in Company Currency

• Annual Contract Value (ACV)

• Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR)

• Currency

• Deal Name

• Deal Stage

• Exchange Rate

• Forecast Amount

• Forecast Category

• Forecast Probability

• Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)

• Total Contract Value (TCV)

• Recurring Revenue Amount

• Recurring Revenue Deal Type

• Recurring Revenue Date

• Recurring Revenue Inactive Reason

These fields enable detailed forecasting and probability-based insights, helping teams project revenue more accurately and prioritize high-value deals effectively.

Reporting Dimensions (HubSpot’s Default and Custom Deal Properties)

Default

• Business Unit

• Deal Type

• Pipeline

• Team

• Person

Additional we support any default property, custom property or custom line item property

• Products

• Country

This segmentation allows teams to drill into specific aspects of revenue performance, tailoring insights to unique business needs.

Transforming Raw Data into Insights

Our robust HubSpot integration seamlessly pulls in all relevant data into Dear Lucy’s proprietary database. Once captured, this data flows into a structured data model, where pre-built algorithms transform the raw information into comprehensive revenue insights. This approach enables users to access precise metrics on MRR, forecasted revenue, and a range of custom reporting dimensions, all tailored to their business setup.

MRR report and forecast in HubSpot

Additional MRR Reporting Features

Multi-Currency Reporting

Dear Lucy supports multiple currencies, allowing MRR reports to be automatically converted and consolidated into a unified company currency. At the same time, teams can view revenue data in their local currency, ensuring both a cohesive company-wide overview and tailored insights for each region.

Goal Tracking and Forecasting

Dear Lucy allows teams to set MRR budgets and revenue goals directly within the platform, enabling clear and consistent tracking against targets. With advanced algorithms, Dear Lucy provides real-time visibility into progress, helping teams stay aligned with revenue benchmarks and quickly identify areas needing attention. By centralizing MRR goal tracking, teams can continuously monitor performance and make data-driven adjustments to stay on course for growth.

Trend Analysis and Detailed Insights

From broad trends to granular details, Dear Lucy’s analytics offer in-depth visibility. Track revenue fluctuations, pinpoint potential issues, and stay ahead with insights that guide strategic decision-making.

Accessibility and Security

User Management and Access Control

Access to Dear Lucy’s MRR reporting is managed through Dear Lucy’s user management system, which supports SSO for secure, team-wide access. This setup ensures that only authorized individuals can view sensitive financial data, while also providing flexibility for broader sharing with external stakeholders, such as board members and investors. Users do not need to be HubSpot users, making it easy to extend access beyond your internal team as needed.

Public Links for External Sharing

Public links provide a view-only option for displaying the insigths. These links make it simple to embed Dear Lucy reports directly within HubSpot’s UI, extranets, or even on office TV screens, offering streamlined access for quick overviews and easy sharing with stakeholders.

Conclusion

MRR reporting for HubSpot just became simpler and far more insightful. By integrating Dear Lucy with HubSpot, teams can finally gain robust MRR insights that scale alongside business needs. Fully board-proof and HubSpot Certified, Dear Lucy is designed to work as a natural extension of your CRM - no additional logins, no data roadblocks, and no spreadsheet headaches required.

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Interested?

Dear Lucy offers embedded Sales Analytics for HubSpot. Book a session with our expert to learn more!

Salesforce Reporting vs. Dear Lucy: A Practical Comparison for Sales Teams and Admins

For technical teams like Salesforce admins, RevOps, SalesOps, and data specialists, efficient reporting tools are crucial. Yet Salesforce’s reporting often presents challenges that consume time, demand workarounds, and leave users wanting more intuitive, effective insights. Here’s how Dear Lucy provides a straightforward solution to these limitations, delivering powerful sales reporting, tracking, and coaching features out of the box.

1. Comprehensive Sales Target Setting

With Dear Lucy, sales target setting is both intuitive and impactful, allowing sales leaders to set high-level revenue goals and break them down into actionable targets by team, region, product, and even individual rep. Dear Lucy goes beyond simple revenue goals by enabling users to set targets across each stage of the sales funnel, establishing KPIs that drive action at every step. This ensures that teams are not just working towards end results but are also making measurable progress in pipeline development, conversion rates, and other critical metrics.

By aligning goals across specific funnel stages, leaders gain better insights into where support and focus are needed most—whether that’s nurturing early-stage leads, increasing activity in key accounts, or refining final-stage close rates. Dear Lucy’s flexible target tracking makes it easy to monitor progress and adjust strategy in real time, helping sales teams stay on track and hit goals with greater consistency.

Salesforce Limitation: In Salesforce, target tracking options are limited, particularly when it comes to setting actionable KPIs across the sales funnel. Configuring custom targets and KPIs often requires custom development or third-party plugins, leading many sales leaders to rely on additional tools or manual tracking to manage detailed funnel-based targets. This fragmentation can make it harder to maintain clear alignment and visibility across teams and territories.

2. Visual Performance Dashboards

Dear Lucy’s performance dashboards provide a clear, immediate view of KPIs, performance metrics, and progress against targets. Sales leaders can monitor goals in real time, and visually engaging dashboards make it easy to spot trends and performance gaps at a glance. These dashboards can include leaderboards of top performers, boosting positive competition within the team and celebrating individual successes. Beyond daily check-ins, they’re ideal for weekly sales meetings, enabling the entire team to stay aligned and motivated.

The intuitive design of Dear Lucy’s dashboards ensures that everyone, from sales reps to executives, can quickly interpret and act on insights, driving faster, more confident decision-making across the organization.

Salesforce Limitation: In Salesforce, dashboard customization is limited, especially when it comes to combining multiple KPIs effectively. Additionally, Salesforce’s dashboards often have a technical, data-heavy design that can be challenging for non-technical users to navigate. This complexity limits their effectiveness for sales teams and executives who need immediate, actionable insights without the need for specialized training.

3. Advanced Sales Reporting and Analytics

Dear Lucy empowers sales teams with advanced analytics, including pipeline snapshots, forecasting, cross-object reporting, and tools to reverse-engineer successful outcomes. By analyzing success across business units, countries, teams, or individual contributors, sales leaders can identify the precise activities, timelines, and resources that drive the best results. This reverse-engineering approach enables leaders to break down high-level goals into specific, actionable plans, fostering growth and operational efficiency at every level of the organization.

With predictive deal scoring, Dear Lucy also helps sales teams assess the likelihood of deals closing, allowing them to focus resources on the most promising opportunities. These comprehensive insights help teams stay agile and proactive, adapting quickly to changes in sales dynamics to consistently meet their targets.

Salesforce Limitation: Setting up advanced analytics, pipeline snapshots, and cross-object reporting in Salesforce requires extensive configuration, often demanding technical support and complex customizations. Salesforce’s forecasting tools can also be challenging to tailor to specific needs, limiting their usefulness for quick, data-driven decisions. Many users find themselves relying on external support or additional tools, leading to fragmented data visibility and a heavier administrative burden.

4. One-on-One Coaching

Dear Lucy’s built-in coaching tools support sales leaders in delivering personalized one-on-one feedback and setting OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) to drive both sales performance and professional growth. Leaders can leverage team benchmarks to give reps a clear sense of how they’re performing relative to their peers, motivating improvement and encouraging a culture of continuous growth. With data-driven insights linked to specific objectives, sales leaders can guide reps on exactly where to focus to meet targets and exceed expectations.

Salesforce Limitation: Salesforce does not natively support one-on-one coaching, team benchmarking, or OKR tracking within its reporting suite. This often forces sales teams to manually track these activities or turn to external tools for coaching and goal alignment. As a result, data silos emerge, making it harder to maintain a comprehensive view of performance, development, and growth across the team.

5. Streamlined Commissions Tracking

Incentivizing sales reps is simplified in Dear Lucy, where commission tracking and reporting is an integrated part of the system. This feature helps motivate sales teams, making it easy for reps to track their progress towards commission goals and for managers to reward performance transparently.

Salesforce Limitation: Salesforce does not include a native commission tracking feature, which means that most users resort to external tools or spreadsheets for commission management. This lack of integration complicates performance tracking and adds to the administrative workload, detracting from sales effectiveness and transparency.

6. Effortless Setup and Fast Access to Insights

Dear Lucy is designed for ease and speed, allowing sales teams to set up dashboards and reports quickly, without needing extensive technical expertise. Pre-built templates and an intuitive user interface mean teams can get started with impactful dashboards and meaningful reports almost instantly. Updates happen in real time, keeping insights accessible and relevant without requiring ongoing technical support.

Salesforce Limitation: Setting up dashboards and reports in Salesforce is often complex, time-consuming, and costly. The extensive configuration required to tailor Salesforce to specific reporting needs can delay access to insights and frequently necessitates technical support from data engineers or Salesforce consultants. These setup costs and delays can reduce the platform’s overall effectiveness for fast-paced sales teams and drive up administrative overhead.

Read more: Build vs. Buy: Choosing the Right Approach for Sales Analytics

7. Seamless Sharing Capabilities

For sales teams, Dear Lucy is conveniently embedded right inside Salesforce, providing instant access to powerful insights and performance metrics without the need for switching platforms. This seamless integration ensures that sales reps and leaders can easily access critical data while working in their familiar Salesforce environment.

Beyond this integration, Dear Lucy offers flexible sharing options that enhance collaboration both internally and externally. Users can display performance dashboards on office TV screens or embed them within intranets, ensuring that teams stay informed and aligned. The mobile-friendly design also allows sales reps to access essential data on tablets and smartphones, making information available on the go.

Additionally, Dear Lucy simplifies sharing with external stakeholders, such as board members and investors, by providing one-click access to relevant reports and forecasts. This ensures that the right KPIs and insights reach the right audience quickly and efficiently, enhancing collaboration and decision-making at all levels.

Salesforce Limitation: In contrast, sharing reports from Salesforce can be cumbersome. Users often face restrictions on sharing reports with non-Salesforce users, necessitating complex workarounds to circulate insights with external stakeholders. This limitation can hinder effective communication and slow down the decision-making process.

A Clear Comparison: Dear Lucy vs. Salesforce

To help sales leaders and admins make informed decisions, we’ve summarized the key differences between Dear Lucy and Salesforce in the following comparison table. This side-by-side overview highlights how Dear Lucy addresses common challenges faced by sales teams, providing an intuitive and effective solution for reporting, analytics, and performance management.

Key Differences Between Dear Lucy and Salesforce

Why Dear Lucy is the Ideal Alternative for Sales Performance Management

Salesforce has long been a staple CRM, yet when it comes to reporting and analytics, technical users often find themselves working around its limitations. Dear Lucy provides a comprehensive solution that aligns with sales leaders’ needs right out of the box. From intuitive sales target tracking and visually engaging dashboards to seamless coaching tools and commission tracking, Dear Lucy offers what Salesforce reporting often lacks: a streamlined, efficient, and easy-to-use tool that drives sales performance at every level.

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Interested?

Dear Lucy offers embedded Sales Analytics for Salesforce. Book a session with our expert to learn more!

Unlocking Sales Success with Sales Performance Management (SPM) Software

Achieving top-notch sales performance goes beyond simply setting targets and tracking revenue. It’s about managing the entire sales process in a structured, scalable, and efficient way. This is where Sales Performance Management (SPM) software comes in, providing a streamlined, data-driven approach to optimizing your sales efforts.

What is Sales Performance Management?

Sales Performance Management (SPM) is a comprehensive process designed to help sales organizations track, manage, and improve the work of their sales teams. It goes far beyond tracking quotas and revenue. SPM incorporates forecasting, planning, implementing, monitoring, and even rewarding sales performance at multiple levels.

SPM helps businesses ensure that their sales teams are working efficiently, hitting their targets, and contributing to overall revenue growth in a sustainable way. By aligning strategy with execution, sales leaders gain more control and visibility over sales performance across the organization.

The Key Components of a Sales Performance Management (SPM) Software

An effective Sales Performance Management (SPM) solution brings several crucial elements together to drive better sales outcomes:

1. Sales Forecasting

Accurate sales forecasting is essential to strategic decision-making. SPM software enables sales leaders to make informed predictions about future sales based on historical data and current trends. This includes predictive deal scoring, which uses data-driven insights to assess the likelihood of deals closing, helping sales teams focus their efforts on the most promising opportunities.

2. Sales Planning and Territory Management

Proper territory management ensures that the right resources are allocated to the right accounts and regions. With SPM, businesses can plan territories effectively, ensuring sales coverage is optimized. Additionally, the software allows for reverse-engineered growth plans, where leaders can map out revenue goals by working backwards from desired outcomes, taking into account current pipeline health and conversion rates across different sales funnel stages.

3. Sales Goal Setting

A powerful SPM system allows goal-setting across multiple dimensions—whether company-wide, across business units, for specific teams, territories, or even for individual salespeople. Goals are linked to key performance indicators (KPIs) and funnel stages, ensuring everyone is aligned with broader business objectives.

4. Sales Insights (Reporting and Dashboards)

Real-time insights through reporting and dashboards are the backbone of tracking performance. SPM software provides sales teams and leaders with the data they need to measure their progress towards goals, identify bottlenecks, and capitalize on opportunities. It fosters transparency from the board to SDRs, ensuring everyone has access to the same data and understands the company’s performance. This openness helps drive a healthy competitive sales culture, where sales teams are motivated to improve and celebrate individual and collective success.

5. Sales Analysis (Advanced Analytics)

SPM software often includes advanced analytics, allowing organizations to dive deep into sales data and uncover trends and patterns that might otherwise go unnoticed. This data is critical for sales strategy and improving future performance. SPM platforms can also provide pipeline snapshots, which capture the state of the pipeline at specific points in time, helping sales leaders track progress. The conversion funnel insights allow teams to analyze how leads move through the sales funnel, identify drop-off points, and refine strategies to increase conversion rates.

6. Sales Training and Coaching

Continuous development is key to a high-performing sales team. SPM solutions offer integrated coaching tools that help sales managers provide personalized feedback and training to their teams. Self-service analytics allows team members to access and analyze their own performance data, while data-driven coaching ensures that feedback is based on measurable performance metrics rather than subjective opinions, helping salespeople improve their skills and close more deals.

7. Rewarding Sales Performance

Recognizing and rewarding sales achievements is a core component of SPM. Whether through commissions, bonuses, or other incentives, SPM software helps automate and streamline the reward process based on performance data.

Sales performance dashboard for sales rep by Dear Lucy

SPM Software Integrates with CRM – Not a Replacement

One common misconception about Sales Performance Management (SPM) software is that it’s designed to replace existing tools, like a CRM. This is not the case. SPM software is built to seamlessly integrate with your CRM, not replace it.

While CRM systems are crucial for managing customer relationships, tracking sales activities, and storing key contact data, they often lack the advanced analytics, goal-setting, and forecasting capabilities that SPM solutions offer. By integrating SPM with CRM, companies can harness the power of both systems, ensuring data flows effortlessly between them. This allows sales leaders to access all relevant insights in one place, without duplicating efforts or relying on disconnected systems.

Ultimately, using SPM software alongside your CRM enables you to manage performance in a data-driven, structured way, while still leveraging the CRM for day-to-day sales operations.

The Status Quo: Manual Processes Hindering Performance

Many sales teams today still rely on spreadsheets, emails, and manual processes to manage their sales performance. Sales goals are scattered across various documents, and development plans are tracked manually, leading to inefficient processes, delayed decision-making, and inconsistent results.

For example:

• Sales goals are often managed in disconnected spreadsheets, which are difficult to update and share in real-time.

• Sales coaching plans are kept in isolated documents, leading to a lack of visibility into progress and follow-through.

• Performance tracking is labor-intensive, with manual data entry and analysis that’s prone to error and time-consuming.

These manual processes not only waste time but also hinder overall sales performance. As a result, sales leaders lack the insights they need to make proactive decisions and optimize team performance.

How SPM Software Solves These Problems

SPM software centralizes all of these processes into one unified platform. By automating data entry, goal tracking, and performance analysis, it allows sales leaders to focus on strategy rather than getting bogged down in administrative tasks.

The result? A more efficient, data-driven approach to managing sales performance. SPM software enables sales teams to work smarter, not harder, ensuring they hit their goals and contribute to the company’s revenue growth in a sustainable way.

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Interested?

Dear Lucy offers Sales Performance Management (SPM) across sales solutions like Salesforce, Microsoft, HubSpot and Pipedrive. Book a session with our expert to learn more!

From Limited CRM Reports to Actionable Sales Analytics

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems have long been the cornerstone of managing interactions with potential and current customers. They are invaluable for logging activities, maintaining records of opportunities, and ensuring that no lead slips through the cracks. But when it comes to sales insights that drive growth, CRMs often fall short.

While a CRM provides basic operational data, the deeper insights critical to making real-time decisions and identifying growth opportunities are often hard to extract. This limitation leaves many sales teams struggling to forecast accurately, track pipeline shifts effectively, or recognize key performance indicators (KPIs) that drive revenue.

So, how can you go beyond the limitations of your CRM and extract more actionable insights? This is where Dear Lucy comes in, providing advanced analytics and reporting that not only fill the gaps left by traditional CRM systems but also bring sales insights to the forefront.

Unlock the Full Potential of Your Sales Data with Dear Lucy

Dear Lucy is designed to complement your CRM, not replace it. It works directly within your existing CRM solutions like Salesforce or HubSpot to provide enhanced sales analytics and forecasting capabilities. Here’s how Dear Lucy can transform your sales reporting:

Sales Target Setting and Tracking Across the Sales Funnel

Dear Lucy enables businesses to set and track sales targets across multiple dimensions: company-wide, business units, teams, territories, and even individual salespeople. The platform provides a full view of sales funnel KPIs, allowing you to monitor performance in real-time. Whether you are looking at the big picture or drilling down into team performance, Dear Lucy gives you the insights needed to stay ahead of targets and adjust strategies when needed.

Predictive Sales Forecasting & Deal Scoring

Gone are the days of manually trying to predict future revenue. With Dear Lucy, sales teams gain access to predictive sales forecasts powered by real-time data. The platform’s deal scoring feature helps you easily identify the hottest opportunities likely to close next and flags opportunities that are at risk. This level of foresight helps teams prioritize the right deals and allocate resources more efficiently, increasing the likelihood of hitting revenue goals.

Pipeline Snapshot & Changes

Dear Lucy offers dynamic pipeline snapshots, allowing you to see not only the current state of your sales pipeline but also track how it has changed over time. The ability to view pipeline shifts is essential for understanding sales momentum, spotting bottlenecks, and identifying where deals are getting stuck. Real-time visibility into these changes helps sales leaders make data-driven decisions more swiftly.

Personal Coaching & Development Goals

Sales success is more than just closing deals—it's about developing talent and improving performance. Dear Lucy integrates personal coaching and development goals into its analytics suite, helping sales managers nurture their teams by offering insights into individual performance and progress. By tracking personal goals alongside team-wide KPIs, managers can tailor coaching efforts and help each salesperson grow into top performers.

Actionable Visuals that Power Strategic Sales Decisions

One of Dear Lucy's biggest advantages is its intuitive, actionable dashboards. Sales data can be complex, but with visually appealing reports and graphs, sales teams and leadership can quickly interpret key trends and act on them. Whether it's tracking revenue growth, understanding sales velocity, or identifying pipeline health, Dear Lucy ensures that insights are presented in a way that drives faster and better decision-making.

Dear Lucy’s Actionable Sales Analytics

Easy Setup with Proven Best Practice Insights

Implementing Dear Lucy is designed to be quick and seamless. The platform comes with pre-configured best practice insights, meaning your team can start using it to its full potential right away—without lengthy onboarding or configuration hassles. With minimal setup, your business can access powerful sales analytics and get real-time value, allowing you to focus on driving growth instead of struggling with complex setups.

CRM Reporting vs. Dear Lucy: A Detailed Comparison

While CRM systems provide basic reporting capabilities, they often lack the depth and flexibility required for advanced sales insights. The table below compares standard CRM reporting with the powerful sales analytics offered by Dear Lucy, highlighting the key differences across essential areas like sales target tracking, forecasting, and pipeline management. This side-by-side comparison will help you understand how Dear Lucy can significantly enhance your sales reporting and decision-making capabilities.

CRM Reporting vs. Dear Lucy: A Side-by-Side Comparison of Sales Analytics Capabilities

Conclusion

While CRMs are excellent for managing customer relationships, they often fall short when it comes to sales performance management. Dear Lucy bridges this gap by offering real-time, predictive, and visually powerful analytics that give your team the tools they need to succeed. The ability to set sales targets, track pipeline changes, forecast sales, and support individual development—along with an easy, fast setup—makes Dear Lucy a must-have extension for any sales-driven organization.

Don’t let your CRM limit your potential—equip your team with the insights needed to grow revenue and stay competitive.

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Interested?

Dear Lucy offers AI Powered Sales Analytics across sales solutions like Salesforce, Microsoft, HubSpot and Pipedrive. Book a session with our expert to learn more!

Build vs. Buy: Choosing the Right Approach for Sales Analytics

In today's fast-paced business environment, effective sales analytics are essential for success. Companies frequently encounter a crucial decision: Should they develop a custom in-house solution or invest in a ready-made analytics platform like Dear Lucy? The answer hinges on various factors, including time to value, total cost of ownership, maintenance, features and functionality, and the level of expertise available.

Time to Value

When building an analytics solution from scratch, time is a crucial consideration. Developing custom dashboards, setting up integrations, and fine-tuning the system to meet specific needs can take months, if not longer. Every minute spent in development is time the company isn't benefiting from actionable insights.

On the other hand, a ready-made solution like Dear Lucy delivers value immediately. With pre-built dashboards, real-time integrations, and proven templates, businesses can start using insights almost instantly. This rapid time to value allows companies to make data-driven decisions without delay, which can be especially crucial in fast-moving markets.

“Dear Lucy is one of the easiest tools I’ve ever integrated and implemented”
- Andreas Sjölund, CRO, Ingrid

Sales Analytics: Build vs. Buy Timeline Comparison

Total Cost of Ownership

The initial costs of building an in-house solution can seem appealing at first, but the true cost often comes later. Beyond the development phase, companies must budget for ongoing updates, troubleshooting, and technical resources to keep the system running. These hidden costs can add up significantly over time.

By contrast, when you invest in an existing solution like Dear Lucy, you get an all-in-one platform where updates, support, and scalability are part of the package. The predictable pricing structure ensures there are no surprises down the road, and you're able to focus on interpreting the data rather than maintaining the system.

Maintenance

A custom-built analytics system requires constant maintenance to stay operational and up-to-date. Bug fixes, updates, and changes to external data sources can demand continuous attention from IT staff. For many companies, this can become a costly and distracting burden.

Dear Lucy eliminates this problem by offering a solution that is maintained by experts in the field. Regular updates, security patches, and new features are handled behind the scenes, allowing you to focus solely on what matters—using the data to drive sales performance.

Features and Functionality

One of the biggest arguments for building a custom system is that it can be tailored exactly to a company's unique needs. While this might sound appealing, it often leads to feature bloat or missing critical functionality due to resource limitations. Additionally, it may take months, if not years, for an internal team to develop the same level of sophistication offered by a mature solution.

With Dear Lucy, you’re not only getting cutting-edge sales analytics, but you’re also tapping into years of refinement and feature development based on industry best practices. Dear Lucy includes a comprehensive suite of tools, from advanced forecasting to real-time sales tracking, designed specifically to boost sales efficiency. These features are tested and proven, meaning you don't need to reinvent the wheel.

Knowledge and Expertise

Building a sales analytics platform in-house requires deep knowledge not just of sales data but also of the technologies and methodologies behind effective analytics. Even if you have in-house talent, there's always a learning curve, and in some cases, expertise in sales analytics is not readily available internally. Additionally, continuous training is essential to keep the team updated on evolving best practices and tools, further straining resources and time.

A platform like Dear Lucy doesn’t just offer software—it comes backed by a team of experts in sales performance and analytics. This means you’re not only adopting a product but gaining access to industry-specific knowledge and best practices. With Dear Lucy's cutting-edge expertise available, companies can ensure a quick adoption of new functionalities. You’ll benefit from years of specialized experience and know-how, shortening the time to insights and decision-making.

Sales Analytics: Build vs. Buy Decision Overview

Evaluate Sales Analytics Costs: Build vs. Buy

When evaluating the costs of building a custom sales analytics solution versus purchasing an established platform like Dear Lucy, it’s important to consider all associated expenses. While building in-house may initially seem cost-effective, hidden costs such as maintenance, staffing, and ongoing development can quickly add up. On the other hand, Dear Lucy offers a streamlined subscription model that covers setup, training, and continuous updates. The following breakdown highlights key cost differences between the two approaches, allowing you to make an informed decision based on your company’s needs and budget.

Sales Analytics: Build vs. Buy Cost Breakdown

Conclusion: Choosing the Right Path

Both options—building and buying—have their pros and cons. Building an in-house sales analytics system might be ideal for organizations with very specific, complex needs and the resources to match. However, for most businesses, the time, cost, and expertise required to maintain a custom solution far outweigh the benefits.

Investing in an existing platform like Dear Lucy provides a quicker time to value, lower total cost of ownership, and access to best-in-class features without the hassle of ongoing maintenance. The platform's expert backing ensures your sales analytics are always up to date and optimized for maximum performance, enabling you to focus on what matters most: driving sales.

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Interested?

Dear Lucy offers AI Powered Sales Analytics across sales solutions like Salesforce, Microsoft, HubSpot and Pipedrive. Book a session with our expert to learn more!

Create Custom Sales KPIs Effortlessly with AI Tile Builder

We’re excited to introduce Dear Lucy’s latest innovation, the AI Tile Builder. While Dear Lucy already offers more than 300 pre-built sales KPIs and forecasts, we understand that businesses need to dig even deeper into their own custom CRM data. The AI Tile Builder lets you do exactly that, enabling you to quickly and effortlessly create custom sales metrics that perfectly align with your specific needs and reflect the unique aspects of your business.

Build Custom KPIs in Seconds

The AI Tile Builder is built for efficiency. Whether you're trying to track specific sales activities, analyse sales rep performance, or dive deep into sales forecasting, you can now create custom tiles tailored to your precise needs - all in a matter of seconds. No more manual setup or lengthy configuration processes.

No Coding Skills Required

Traditionally, building custom metrics required specialized knowledge of databases, data structures, and coding. But with the AI Tile Builder, anyone on your team can generate complex, customized metrics. All you need to do is ask it a question, and the intuitive AI simply responds to natural language prompts, eliminating the technical barriers that often slow down custom reporting.

Quick and easy sales insights with Dear Lucy's AI Tile builder

Data Accuracy You Can Trust

Sales data accuracy is a non-negotiable. To ensure you have complete confidence in the numbers, every custom tile built by the AI Tile Builder includes drill-down tables. These tables allow you to verify the underlying data directly, making it easier to understand how each metric is constructed and confirm its correctness.

Add Tiles to New or Existing Dashboards

Once the AI Tile Builder has created your custom tile, you can choose to add it to either a new dashboard or an existing one, giving you flexibility in how you organize and view your sales data. Whether you’re tracking sales performance across multiple regions or focusing on key products, the process is quick and seamless.

Sales Pipeline Analysis Dashboard by Dear Lucy

AI Tile Builder - A New Way to Work with Data

Dear Lucy’s AI Tile Builder fully transforms the way you work with sales data. For more details on how to prompt the AI Tile Builder and maximize its potential, check out our support article here.

The AI Tile Builder is currently available for our beta users, and we’re eager to see how teams use this game-changing feature to accelerate their sales reporting and forecasting. As part of the beta, you’ll get early access to this functionality and the chance to provide feedback to help us refine it further.

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Interested?

Dear Lucy offers AI Powered Sales Analytics across sales solutions like Salesforce, Microsoft, HubSpot and Pipedrive. Book a session with our expert to learn more!

Maximize Sales Rep Performance with 4 Essential Dashboards

In today’s competitive sales landscape, data-driven decision-making isn't just an advantage - it’s a necessity. For sales reps and their leaders, having access to the right insights can mean the difference between hitting targets or falling short. That's where powerful, ready-made sales rep performance and coaching dashboards come into play. These tools offer a clear path to understanding what sales activities are required to reach quotas, whether your team is on target with their goals, and how to predict and impact future results.

At Dear Lucy, we've crafted four dashboard templates designed to give sales reps and their leaders the edge they need. These dashboards are not just about tracking performance—they're about driving continuous improvement and fostering a disciplined, data-driven mindset. Here's a closer look at each:

1. SALES Rep Goal Tracking Dashboard

• Purpose: Ensure your sales reps are always on track to meet their goals.

• Key Features: This dashboard offers a weekly pipeline review, giving reps a clear picture of whether they’re on target to meet their quotas. By forecasting future results, it empowers salespeople to adjust their strategies proactively, ensuring that they can close gaps before they become problems.

Sales Rep Goal Tracking Dashboard

2. SALES Rep Coaching Dashboard

• Purpose: Elevate your 1-on-1 coaching sessions with actionable insights.

• Key Features: This dashboard showcases each sales rep's conversion funnel, highlighting their strengths and key areas for improvement. Whether you're a sales leader preparing for a coaching session or a rep looking to self-assess, this tool provides the clarity needed to refine sales methodologies and improve results.

Sales Rep Coaching 1-1

3. Pipeline Analysis Dashboard

• Purpose: Gain deeper insights into how opportunities progress through the funnel.

• Key Features: Understanding how cases move through the sales funnel is critical to identifying bottlenecks and areas for optimization. This dashboard provides a granular view of the pipeline, allowing sales teams to spot trends, analyze movement between stages, and make data-driven decisions to accelerate deal closure.

Pipeline Analysis Dashboard

4. CRM Hygiene Dashboard

• Purpose: Maintain data integrity and accuracy within your CRM.

• Key Features: Clean, accurate data is the backbone of effective sales management. This dashboard focuses on data quality, ensuring that your CRM is up-to-date and reliable. It’s an essential tool for identifying and addressing issues such as missing information or outdated records, enabling better forecasting and decision-making.

CRM Hygiene Dashboard

Why These Dashboards Matter

These dashboards are more than just tools - they’re a roadmap to sales excellence. By driving a data-driven mindset and fostering discipline with data, they empower sales teams to not only assess past performance but also to predict future outcomes and take actionable steps to improve. In an environment where every decision counts, these insights can make all the difference.

Driving Results with Data-Driven Insights

For Chief Sales Officers (CSOs), Chief Revenue Officers (CROs), CEOs, and sales reps alike, these dashboards provide practical examples of how data can be harnessed to drive better results. Whether you’re leading a mid-sized team or managing a large sales organization, these tools offer the clarity and direction needed to stay ahead in a competitive market.

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Interested?

Dear Lucy offers AI Powered Sales Analytics across sales solutions like Salesforce, Microsoft, HubSpot and Pipedrive. Book a session with our expert to learn more!

Automate Your SaaS KPI Reporting, Forecasting, and Target Tracking with Salesforce and Dear Lucy

In the fast-paced world of SaaS, understanding and tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) is critical for driving growth, managing investor expectations, and optimizing your business strategy. However, many SaaS companies using Salesforce find themselves limited by the platform's native reporting capabilities, leading to a reliance on manual spreadsheet-based processes. This not only consumes valuable time but also increases the risk of errors and inefficiencies.

Why Tracking SaaS KPIs Is Essential

For SaaS companies, having a clear and real-time view of your business metrics is non-negotiable. The most critical SaaS KPIs you need to track include:

• Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR)

• Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)

• Churn Rate (Customer and Revenue)

• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

• Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)

• CAC:LTV Ratio

• Net Revenue Retention (NRR)

• Gross Margin

• Sales Pipeline Velocity

• Average Revenue Per User (ARPU)

• Payback Period

These KPIs offer insights into the health of your business, enabling you to make data-driven decisions about growth strategies, customer retention efforts, and resource allocation.

SaaS KPI report and forecasts with Salesforce and Dear Lucy

The Limitations of Salesforce for SaaS KPI Reporting

While Salesforce is a powerful CRM, its native capabilities often fall short when it comes to in-depth SaaS KPI tracking, forecasting, and goal-setting. Here are some common challenges:

1. Manual Reporting: Salesforce users often resort to exporting data to spreadsheets for complex calculations, which is time-consuming and prone to errors.

2. Limited Forecasting Tools: Salesforce provides basic forecasting options, but they often lack the sophistication needed to accurately predict ARR/MRR and other key metrics in a dynamic SaaS environment.

3. Inadequate Goal-Setting: Setting and tracking SaaS KPI goals at various levels (company, business unit, or country) within Salesforce is not possible due to its lack of flexibility in goal setting.

4. Disjointed Data Sharing: Distributing reports and forecasts to sales teams, management, and investors often requires multiple formats and platforms, leading to inefficiencies.

How Dear Lucy Transforms SaaS KPI Tracking in Salesforce

Dear Lucy addresses these limitations by fully automating the reporting and forecasting processes, integrating seamlessly with Salesforce. Here's how:

1. Automated Reporting and Analytics: Dear Lucy pulls data directly from Salesforce, performing complex calculations to generate detailed SaaS KPI reports. This eliminates the need for manual data entry and spreadsheet manipulation.

2. Advanced Forecasting: The platform uses sophisticated algorithms to project future revenue, churn, and other key metrics with high accuracy, allowing you to plan ahead with confidence.

3. Goal Setting and Tracking: With Dear Lucy, you can easily set and monitor KPI goals at the company, business unit, and country levels. The platform visualizes performance against targets, helping you identify areas that need attention.

4. Seamless Data Sharing: Whether you need to share performance metrics as part of the Salesforce UI, through a dedicated web or mobile app, or as presentation material for meetings with your board or investors, Dear Lucy makes it easy and efficient. Why not have your SaaS KPI tracking on powerful TV dashboards at the office!

Maximizing Salesforce with Dear Lucy for SaaS Growth

By automating your KPI reporting and forecasting processes, Dear Lucy frees up your team to focus on what matters most—growing your business. Here’s how you can leverage this powerful combination:

• Integrated Dashboards: Dear Lucy integrates directly into Salesforce, providing real-time dashboards that give your sales and revenue teams the insights they need at a glance.

• Custom Reports: Tailor your reports to meet the specific needs of different stakeholders—whether it’s a high-level overview for the board or a detailed analysis for your sales team.

• Mobile Access: Access your KPI data on the go with Dear Lucy’s mobile-friendly interface, ensuring you’re always in the loop, no matter where you are.

• Presentation-Ready Visuals: Automatically generate visually appealing reports that are ready to be presented to your board, investors, or management team, saving you hours of preparation time.

SaaS KPIs by Dear Lucy seamlessly integrated inside Salesforce UX.

Conclusion: Drive SaaS Success with Automated KPI Tracking

For SaaS companies striving for growth, automating KPI tracking, reporting, and forecasting is no longer a luxury—it’s a necessity. By integrating Dear Lucy with Salesforce, you can streamline these processes, eliminate manual errors, and gain deeper insights into your business performance.

Don't let outdated reporting methods hold your company back. Embrace automation with Dear Lucy and Salesforce to stay ahead of the curve, impress your investors, and empower your teams to achieve their goals.

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Interested?

Dear Lucy offers AI Powered Sales Analytics across sales solutions like Salesforce, Microsoft, HubSpot and Pipedrive. Book a session with our expert to learn more!

Automate Revenue Reporting and Forecasting with Pipedrive and Dear Lucy

For C-level executives and revenue operations teams, effective revenue reporting and forecasting are essential to drive growth and make data-driven decisions. If your company relies on Pipedrive but struggles with limitations in sales and revenue reporting, Dear Lucy offers a transformative solution.

Automate Tracking of Recurring Revenue and One-Time Fees

Managing recurring revenue (ARR/MRR) and one-time fees through manual data pulls from Pipedrive to spreadsheets is not only time-consuming but also prone to errors. Dear Lucy automates the tracking of all your revenue streams, ensuring accurate and up-to-date information without manual intervention, reducing the risk of mistakes.

Comprehensive Reporting Using Pipedrive Data

Dear Lucy leverages data from Pipedrive's deal view and subscription or payment schedules to create detailed, customizable reports. Essential data points such as recurring amounts, number of payments, intervals, and start dates are automatically extracted and compiled. This flexibility allows Dear Lucy to adapt to your specific business needs, accommodating different currencies and varied reporting requirements.

Enhance Visibility with Data-Based Forecasting

Forecasting is crucial for revenue planning. Dear Lucy extends your visibility into the future by integrating data-based, predictive forecasting. By analyzing your open deals pipeline and historical data from Pipedrive, Dear Lucy provides accurate predictions of future revenue, helping you make informed strategic decisions. This extended visibility is invaluable for executives who need to anticipate market trends and allocate resources effectively.

Customizable Reporting by Team, Person, Country, or Pipeline

One size does not fit all when it comes to reporting. Dear Lucy allows companies to view reports and forecasts by team, person, country, or pipeline. This level of customization ensures that every stakeholder, from the board of directors to individual sales reps, can access the information they need in the format that works best for them. Live target tracking further enhances this by providing real-time updates on performance against goals.

Recurring Revenue Reports and Forecasts with Pipedrive and Dear Lucy

Stay Up to Date on Critical KPIs

Staying up to date on critical company KPIs is a significant advantage. Dear Lucy's automated solution provides continuous, real-time updates, ensuring that you are always aware of the current state of your business. This immediacy allows for swift decision-making and the ability to pivot strategies as needed to stay aligned with your goals.

Make Data-Driven Decisions to Boost Growth

In today's data-driven world, having access to accurate and timely information is key to making informed decisions. Dear Lucy empowers executives and revenue operations teams with the insights needed to drive growth. By automating revenue tracking and forecasting within Pipedrive, you can focus on strategic initiatives rather than getting bogged down in manual data processing.

Conclusion

For companies using Pipedrive, overcoming the limitations in sales and revenue reporting is now possible with Dear Lucy. By automating the tracking of recurring revenue and one-time fees and providing comprehensive, customizable reports, Dear Lucy ensures that your company stays up to date on critical KPIs. This enables data-driven decision-making and supports growth across the organization. Embrace the power of automated revenue reporting and forecasting with Dear Lucy, and take your company's performance to new heights.

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Interested?

Dear Lucy offers data-driven sales insights across sales solutions like Salesforce, Microsoft, HubSpot and Pipedrive. Book a session with our expert to learn more!

AI Sales Forecasting for Salesforce

Looking to leverage AI for sales forecasting within your Salesforce CRM quickly and effortlessly? Here’s how you can establish predictive, AI-driven sales forecasts using your current Salesforce license.

What is AI Sales Forecasting?

Sales forecasting with AI is the process of using artificial intelligence to predict future sales revenue by analyzing a combination of historical performance data and current sales pipeline information. Unlike traditional sales forecasting methods, which primarily rely on past performance, AI powered forecasting leverages algorithms to analyze various factors and trends, resulting in more accurate and insightful predictions.

Why is AI Forecasting Better Than the Traditional Way?

Traditional sales forecasting methods often involve manual data entry and analysis, which can be time-consuming and prone to human error. In contrast, automated, AI powered forecasting offers several significant advantages:

• Accuracy: AI algorithms can process vast amounts of data and identify patterns that are often missed by manual methods, leading to more precise forecasts.

• Efficiency: Automation saves time by reducing the need for manual data collection and analysis, allowing sales teams to focus on strategy and execution.

• Consistency: AI powered forecasting provides consistent results by eliminating human bias and ensuring that forecasts are based on data-driven insights.

• Adaptability: AI systems can quickly adapt to changing market conditions and incorporate new data, ensuring that forecasts remain relevant and accurate.

Quickly Streamline Your AI Sales Forecasting with Salesforce

You can now quickly establish predictive sales forecasts using your current Salesforce license without the need for vast amounts of work. Dear Lucy’s trailblazing sales forecasting solution integrates seamlessly with your Salesforce CRM. By leveraging advanced algorithms, Dear Lucy delivers highly accurate predictions for future sales outcomes, providing numerous key benefits:

• Automated Forecast Generation: Dear Lucy automates the creation of predictive sales forecasts, saving valuable time and ensuring precision.

• In-Depth Data Analysis: By analyzing both current pipeline data and historical sales data, Dear Lucy provides a comprehensive view of sales performance and future opportunities.

• Detailed Insights: Dear Lucy’s visualizations allow sales leaders to explore predictive sales forecasts at various levels—from company-wide targets to individual account executives. This detailed view supports targeted strategies and optimized decision-making.

Sales forecast encompassing closed opportunities, pipeline analysis and future pipeline projections.

Leveraging Predictive AI Powered Forecasts to Maximize Company Growth

Transparency and accurate, up-to-date forecasts are crucial for driving growth and making informed decisions across all levels of an organization. By providing clear insights into future sales outcomes, predictive AI powered forecasts empower management, board members, and sales teams with the information they need to optimize strategies and achieve their goals. Management can set realistic targets and allocate resources effectively, board members can make strategic decisions aligned with long-term objectives, and sales teams can focus on high-priority opportunities, all leading to enhanced performance and growth.

AI powered Sales Analytics by Dear Lucy embedded inside Salesforce

Summary

Dear Lucy provides a comprehensive and accurate view of your future sales, along with the tactical insights needed to achieve your goals. Achieve unmatched forecast accuracy in no time with Dear Lucy's AI driven solutions, all while maximizing your existing Salesforce investment.

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Interested?

Dear Lucy offers AI Powered Sales Analytics across sales solutions like Salesforce, Microsoft, HubSpot and Pipedrive. Book a session with our expert to learn more!