Struggling with spreadsheets to create revenue forecasts based on recurring revenue and one-off fees on your HubSpot line items? In this blog post we illustrate how you can fully automate revenue forecasting with HubSpot and Dear Lucy.

Accurate Revenue Forecasting is the key to making smart decisions and driving revenue growth. Still today, many companies struggle with spreadsheets and best guesses when it comes to forecasting.

What is Revenue Forecasting?

Revenue forecasting is a process of estimating how much money your business will bring within a specific time period - typically quarterly or annually. Revenue forecasts include both revenues from existing customer base, but also projections of anticipated revenues from sales, marketing and customer success teams. Effective revenue forecasting is needed to set budgets, realistically plan for the future and make informed decisions.

Struggling with Spreadsheets and Manual Processes

The process for creating revenue reports and forecasts is still highly manual in many companies. Oftentimes it includes exporting sales and revenue data from CRM into spreadsheets for further processing and analysis. With various revenue types like recurring revenue and one-off fees, often in multiple currencies, the process is highly laborious.

Automated Revenue Forecasting using HubSpot Line Items

HubSpot CRM customers have their key sales and revenue data spread around on various deal properties, typically on the following items:

• Existing Revenues: Recurring Revenue (MRR/ARR) and one-off fees are associated to deals on product line items with detailed information about unit price, start date, term and billing frequency

• Forecasted Revenues: Key information on pending or potential sales can be found within open deals on line items as above, but also on deal properties like expected close date and probability (most often based on pipeline stage)

Dear Lucy’s extensive HubSpot integration fetches all the above mentioned, detailed information about deals and turns it into automated revenue forecasts. To go beyond CRM’s reporting capabilities, Dear Lucy offers the flexibility to mix and match deal properties and line items, automatically perform currency conversions and distribute the revenue streams with a daily accuracy (instead of monthly aggregates).

For increased sales forecasting accuracy, Dear Lucy can build assumption models to only include deals with high probabilities or leverage the power of historical performance data.

Powerful Visualisations are Key to Creating Clarity on Revenue Drivers

In order to empower revenue teams to make better decisions across the organisation, revenue forecasts need to be visualized to help the teams better understand the revenue drivers. Clarity is the key to driving predictable revenues and optimised results.

Dear Lucy’s powerful visualizations present a unified view to future revenues across the business and enable easy access to drill down to team, business unit or sales rep levels. With multidimensional goal setting, you can turn your forecasts into actionable insights and visualize the progress towards goals. Live performance tracking is an effective way to accelerate growth.

Live Access to KPIs and Revenue Forecasts for all Stakeholders

Accurate revenue forecasts are the most valuable insights across the company management and revenue teams, but also for the board and investors to make smart decisions and drive revenue growth. Forecasts also play an important role in attracting further financing and investments.

Dear Lucy’s interactive sales and revenue insights work with your favorite devices like laptop, mobile or tablet, and you can seamlessly embed the dashboards inside your HubSpot, intranet or BI tools. KPIs and revenue forecasts can also be shared openly within the company on highly visual TV displays and used as live presentation material in sales and management meetings.

Interested?

Dear Lucy offers a wide range of sales and revenue insights for HubSpot. You can select your favorite KPIs and charts from the library of 300+ prebuilt metrics, bring your custom properties from HubSpot or have our team build metrics just for you.

Book a session with our expert to learn more!