7 Ways to Simplify HubSpot Reporting Dashboards
If you have Hubspot, then you know the power of the platform. Initially, Hubspot offered companies a robust CRM platform. However, it expanded and now includes marketing, sales, and CMS solutions through its strategic partners.
That said, let’s say you recently obtained one of its solutions. Your team may wonder how to create the HubSpot reporting dashboards you need for success. We’ll explore it in this post based on our work with other leaders such as yourself.
Problem: You know that your tech stack is convoluted and complex. As a result, your systems don’t integrate, and revenue suffers. So, you decide with your team that you need another path.
Opportunity: HubSpot offers solutions to get you past the confusion, especially when moving your company toward centralized revenue operations. In short, it’s essential to streamline and remove friction and complexity.
Solution: HubSpot offers your company a decisive advantage for sales, marketing, and service team leaders. HubSpot operates on a single technology spine and automates data collection and architecture. As a result, you can easily create the HubSpot reporting dashboards to make more informed decisions.
7 Ways to Simplify HubSpot Reporting Dashboards
As company leaders understand, the modern business environment requires two essential things to grow sales. First, data information must be solid and easy to understand—across all company verticals. In other words, the right hand must know what the left hand is doing. No silos can exist because things change too quickly.
Further, tech brings with it new complexities if not integrated properly. As a result, you don’t need just any technology. What you need is the right tech, giving you the correct output. And ideally, you want it from a single technological architecture, like HubSpot.
Second, the other absolute necessity for revenue growth is engagement. Even if you don’t fully understand what your marketing team does, you want the engagement numbers to increase. As a business leader, you realize that the more awareness and engagement with your offline and digital marketing, your revenue pipeline increases.
Therefore, you want your company to have meaningful relationships with prospects and clients. Further, you want to provide customer experiences that empower your prospects in their journey with you.
Should you make the business decision to simplify your systems, let’s explore seven ways to make your HubSpot reporting dashboards easy.
1. Start With Your Business Challenge or Opportunity
First, you have to start with your strategic challenges and opportunities. Look, technology is excellent, but it still needs leaders with thoughtful and strategic thinking to create the essential output. So, as you prepare to make your HubSpot reporting dashboards, list your challenges and opportunities for revenue growth in every vertical.
Going through the exercise allows your team leaders to create the customized and visualized reports you and they need to see to process information quickly for decision-making. Moreover, when you see the top-level information based on the challenges and opportunities, you catch anomalies and drill deeper.
2. Determine the Metrics and KPIs You Need from HubSpot
The HubSpot ecosystem is exceedingly robust. For instance, you could report your inventory, marketing, sales, leads, social media, and KPIs. Sounds great, doesn’t it? Still, you want to select one topic per dashboard report for the best type of reporting.
For example, let’s say you want to know about your leads. To keep it simple, you need your HubSpot reporting dashboard to be on that topic. Then, you want to decide on the metrics and performance indicators you want to track for leads. Remember, you want data, but you want to develop reporting that moves to actionable improvements.
3. Organize the Reporting As if it Were Telling You a Story
Whether you want to get more results from marketing or reorient your business process management, all of it takes quantitative data. However, every number tells a story. In other words, data on its own isn’t going to compel people to act. Well, perhaps plummeting sales numbers will. Your team will get motivated by the vision you frame through your narrative based on the numbers.
Remember, you’re leading humans, and people learn and act because of stories. It’s an idea as old as time, but it still matters. So, when you combine your HubSpot reporting dashboards with compelling leadership narratives, you get bold action.
4. Add Descriptions to Each Report to Explain Context and Meaning
When creating HubSpot reporting dashboards, you want to take away the complexity. As the reporting gets used in meetings or the exchange of information, you need everyone to understand what they see. Therefore, it’s essential to add descriptions to every report because it provides context and meaning. And this is especially true for different units.
Let’s take sales and marketing as an example. Those two units must know what the other does, but they might not know all the jargon of the other’s discipline. Reporting descriptions help executives and teams learn context and meaning, so nothing gets lost in translation.
5. Make it Clear What Actions the Data Indicates
Ultimately, business leaders want reporting dashboards because they need information for decision-making. Your teams might see the data, but let’s face it, everyone’s busy. Therefore, c-suite executives could help lead strategy by expecting team leaders to create actions based on the data information from the dashboards.
And that’s especially necessary if deviations or inconsistencies from the norms show up on the reporting. HubSpot reporting dashboards could help you quickly spot problems and allow team leaders to take immediate steps to address them before they cost you time and money.
6. Get Feedback from Leadership Using Reporting Dashboards
C-suite executives rely on reporting dashboards, but so should unit leaders. Moreover, using HubSpot reporting dashboards allows everyone involved in decision-making to act. In other words, data helps inform and back up unit and company-wide efforts.
When critical decisions happen that affect the company’s trajectory, dashboard reporting allows for feedback from leadership. For instance, let’s say sales are down year-over-year. Obviously, this affects the company’s revenue growth and is a matter of high importance.
The dashboard reporting allows for easy-to-comprehend visual reporting, where you could drill down to make vital strategic changes to lead change.
7. Regularly Review, Revise, and Refine Dashboards and Data
As we know, technology necessitates a culture of learning. In other words, tech evolves continuously, and so do the challenges and opportunities for your business. Because of the inherent power of artificial intelligence and machine learning, it means your tech stack gets updated every day. Nothing’s ever static anymore.
Therefore, it’s vital to review, revise and refine the dashboards and underlying data output. In other words, when more functionality appears or new ways of visualizing data that improve the value you get from the HubSpot reporting dashboards, you need to make essential changes. It’s vital because your company needs the latest iterations concerning the information. That’s just how it goes.
In sum, everyone from c-suite executives to junior associates knows that the modern business environment is complex. Still, business leaders need to remove the complexity for teams, especially in measuring your business’s essential KPIs. HubSpot reporting dashboards go a long way toward setting you on the right path.
It allows for the easy importation of data with its massive integrations library. Moreover, its 300 dashboards enable executives and team leaders to view the data how they need to see it to make better-informed decisions.
Ben Stroup is Chief Growth Architect and President at Velocity Strategy Solutions where he helps leaders design, develop, and deploy smarter business growth strategies. Ben is a futurist, disruptor, and data champion. He leads a team that takes a structured learning approach to business challenges, which allows them to assist leaders in bridging the gap between ideas, innovation, and revenue—taking ideas from mind to market.
Velocity Strategy Solutions is an on-demand, next-generation business strategy and management consulting firm which provides clients with a relentless focus on data, execution, and results that positively impact the bottom line. Velocity delivers integrated people and revenue strategies combined with a disciplined approach to growth architecture that elevates the capacity of leaders, teams, and organizations to succeed and win more.