Why You Need Revenue Goals in Your HubSpot RevOps Toolbox

Revenue Goals are arguably one of the most powerful RevOps tools that HubSpot offers! So, how can a HubSpot Admin create and execute a successful Revenue Goal strategy? 🤔💰

In this HubSpot Tips & Tricks video, we'll discuss Revenue Goals, a feature available in HubSpot Sales Hub Enterprise at the time of this publishing.

TRANSCRIPT

Hello LinkedIn! Happy Wednesday, happy last day of August. It's Liam Redding, HubSpot Strategist from Remotish agency. And today I'm going to be doing a demo on revenue goals.

It's one of my favorite features in HubSpot. If you have sales enterprise licenses, and you're not leveraging revenue goals in your portal, it's definitely something that you want to be considering. It gives you very powerful insights into revenue reporting, your quota, and how your team is pacing to that quota. As well as, when you put this in combination with the forecasting tool, you not only get insight into your goal for the month, for the quarter, for the year, and how you're pacing; but in addition to that, you would get the forecast and revenue for that period of time, as well.

So we're gonna go through some of the steps that I take my clients through, beginning with a spreadsheet or worksheet. This is condensed down just into some of the questions that are [often] asked, it is a little bit more thorough in the actual document. But some of those questions are:

Is revenue reporting set on a monthly or quarterly basis?

This is an important first consideration to make because if you update that from monthly to quarterly, or from quarterly back to monthly in the future, you erase all your historical data. So you want to make that decision up front and you want to stick to that. Then you need to decide:

What are your revenue goals based on?

In this instance, it was quarterly for the next one to four quarters. So then we break down, you know, Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4, what's that revenue goal for those quarters? And then the next question is:

How do those revenue goals break down across your pipelines?

Now, if you're coming into this process, and you're focused on a specific team or specific pipeline, it becomes very easy to go through this process. As you add layers of complexity with multiple teams, multiple pipelines, there's a lot of variables at play, that's when it starts to get difficult and you need to consult with experts. So the next question that you ask is:

How should the revenue goal be split across the sales team?

So that's another important consideration makes should that be weighted? Do certain sales team members carry more or less responsibility? Or should it be averaged? Does everybody share the same equal amount of responsibility for that total revenue goal?

Then you would type your answer there. If weighted, you would provide the approximate percentage responsibility that will be designated to each of those team members. And then if not, it will be averaged, and you would just divide by 100 by however many people you have. And the last question is:

Will the sales reps be working across all pipelines, or are certain reps assigned to certain pipelines?

As you can see, the more variables at play, the more complex this gets.

From there, we like to create this spreadsheet. So this is an example of you would do get that information into in this document that gives you enough information to then go through the process of calculating all that information out. So here you will be laying out in this example we're looking at quarterly. So this is Q4, Q1 of 2023, Q2 of 2023. And we have a breakdown of the all the reps that we have here, whether that's an SDR or an AE or BDR. You have them listed here and then what tier they are on. So this is the process that we were using for that client, I think it makes sense is to distinguish who's a veteran, who carries more weight. In this example, we were using a weighted approach versus who who might be new and still, you know, getting up to that for speed are ramping up. And then who's onboarding? Who are we going to be providing very little responsibility to?

Now we could see how that changes over the months. Obviously, as you have team members, join the team, leave the team, you know, increase their skills, increasing volume, things like that, you're going to want to adjust these goals. And these can become very customized based on your use case, or whatever sales goals that you have.

Translating Revenue Goals into HubSpot

From there, we're able to translate this then directly into into HubSpot. So we can take out for example, this is our total. So for October SDR one, this is the amount that they need to generate based off the figures that we have down here. So we can see there, it's equal for everybody with 15%. And then for the two onboarding reps that have 5%, it's $7,500. And then we can see after the January, we have an even split across all reps. At that point, the higher reps are the reps that are making more money, you might want to allocate them more percentage or like a separate column to pace to if you think that they can carry more volume at the same percentage. So there's some different things that you can do to tailor the spreadsheets to your specific use case.

From there, we're translating that into HubSpot. So there's gonna they're gonna be translated into goals. The goals tool, you can find that by clicking the gear icon, scrolling down to Account Setup, the drop down under Tracking & Analytics, and then goals.

From here, you can look at either users or team goals. You can create both of them: I actually consider that a best practice to do it for both the team and the user. The thing is, if you want to use some of the forecasting reporting, and the pacing reporting, you actually need to have that set up on a user-by-user basis. So you need to have users; teams is optional.

So from here, I'm gonna select a type [of goal] and it's going to be revenue. Do we intend to forecast? Yes. And then here's where you would select your contributors or your entire team, but this is going to be on a user-by-user basis. So here, select myself to the year 2022.

And then we can select a pipeline. So as you can see, now, if you had multiple revenue goals for multiple pipelines, you'd have to break each of those out. So how you would do that in a spreadsheet would be through these tabs, you'd have a tab for each pipeline, and then each pipeline would get its own set of goals. So we're gonna select the pipeline that this belongs to, we'll just say, Sales Pipeline.

And then we can input those amounts. So say, for example, I was SDR/AE 1 I'm going to come in for October. We're just going to do Q4: we have November, and December. And if we had multiple reps in here, like if there was just more than myself, everybody would get their own column. And then you would just paste in the figures for everybody, you would double check the calculations against what your totals say, then you would save your goals.

The Next Step is Creating Revenue Goal Reporting

So reporting is really the thing that wraps all this together. When you go through the forecasting process, you set up your forecast category mappings, your deal stage probability, all that good stuff, HubSpot then auto, auto calculates reports, for forecasting and your revenue goals. Now, you have to have all those things set up properly, but once they're set up, you can leverage the reporting, which is spectacular. It's really one of the strongest dashboards I think I've ever created in HubSpot was around revenue goals and forecasting, so that would be the next version of this video would be a video around creating a dashboard to track these things.

I do have an example. I started it and then I was going to take too long. So this could definitely be a part two of what that would look like. And here I just had at the beginning of my document or the the dashboard that I was using, I pasted the spreadsheet, you can also paste the document as well. And that keeps that at the very top of your dashboard, so that you can always go in and check and see what those figures are. You can't edit it from here, but you can see them.

And then you build out this one. Obviously, I need to populate this with data in order to show, but this would then populate the deal revenue forecast by stages. And it shows you a breakdown of the revenue that you've already closed for the month and then what's expected to be closed. And you can also build out reports to see what the quota is for the pipelines, and then how people are the sales reps are pacing to that.

So lots of interesting things. I think that this is one of the biggest tools from a RevOps perspective that's available in HubSpot. And again, if you have Sales Enterprise seats and you're not leveraging it, definitely something to look into. Let me know your thoughts comments, questions, concerns in the comments below. And I appreciate everybody's time watching this video. Thank you and I will be back next week!