“How many orders do you think you can receive this month?”——There are still very few sales organizations that can confidently answer this question. The optimistic bias of the person in charge, the intuition of the manager, and the "actually impossible" business negotiations that pile up at the end of the month. If forecast accuracy is low, all management decisions such as recruitment, marketing budgets, inventory, and development resources will be distorted. In this chapter,HubSpot's forecast function, AI Deal Score, forecast category, quota managementWe will explain how to combine these to build a sales forecasting system that "talks with data rather than intuition."
A sales forecast is a prediction of how many orders a company can receive in the current fiscal year (this month/this quarter). Highly accurate forecasts speed up management decision-making, while less accurate forecasts distort company-wide resource allocation. The first step to improvement is to understand why the forecast is off.
| cause | specific symptoms | How to deal with it with HubSpot |
|---|---|---|
| Optimism bias of the person in charge | Business deals that keep saying "I can do it this month" but can't be closed keep piling up. The person in charge is reluctant to admit the loss of an order because they want to believe that there is still a possibility. | 1:1 Opened a sales email |
| 1:1 Reply to business email | Setting dates based on wishful thinking, such as ``I set it to the end of the month'' or ``Somehow it ended up being March 31st.'' Does not reflect the buyer's decision-making process | Track the change history of the scheduled closing date and manage "how many times the closing date was changed" using opportunity properties. Treat deals with many changes as caution flags |
| Lack of pipeline quality control | Opportunities for which qualifications have not been confirmed, decisions for which the decision maker has not been identified, and opportunities that have not moved for more than 6 months are mixed in the pipeline, distorting the overall numbers. | Regularly cleanse your pipeline using a "pipeline quality score" that combines MEDDIC property input status, Deal Risk signal, and last activity date. |
HubSpot has a dedicated Forecast toolis available, allowing each person in charge, manager, and VP to manage pipeline prospects at different levels of granularity. Available for Sales Hub Professional and above.
HubSpot's Forecast tool allows you to enter forecast categories thatManager overwrites “adjusted value based on own judgment”can. If the person in charge says ``Commit'' but the manager determines that ``Best Case'' is appropriate, the outlook in the ``Manager View'' can be revised without affecting the numbers on the portal. By accumulating this overwriting history, it becomes possible to quantitatively evaluate ``whose forecast is actually accurate?''
AI Deal Score is a function in which HubSpot performs machine learning based on past order/loss data and scores the probability of winning an order for each deal currently in progress from 0 to 100 (Sales Hub Professional and above). Accuracy will increase if you have data on more than 200 business negotiations over the past two years. We provide data-based business negotiation evaluation that does not rely on the subjectivity of the person in charge.
| category | referenced element | Impact on score |
|---|---|---|
| Opportunity attributes | Amount, industry, company size, source of negotiation, stage accuracy | Opportunities with attributes close to ICP tend to have higher scores. |
| engagement | Number of emails opened, number of replies, number of calls, number of meetings, date of last activity | Opportunities with active engagement have high scores, while deals with inactivity drop sharply. |
| Movement of business negotiations | Frequency of stage changes, number of stay days, and number of changes to scheduled closing date | Business negotiations that proceed smoothly have a high score, while stagnation or postponement of the schedule results in a lower score. |
| conversation intelligence | Competitive mentions, price concerns, positive/negative mentions in calls | Competitive mentions and negative price mentions lower your score in real time. |
| MEDDIC input status | MEDDIC custom property input rate/Economic Buyer identified flag | Opportunities with all MEDDIC tend to have high scores (setting required) |
Forecasting has meaning only when there is a "target (quota)". HubSpot's Forecast tool lets you set quotas at the rep, team, and company level and track their progress in real time. Settings are performed from "Sales → Forecasting → Set Quota".
| Automatic approval for 10% or less, manager approval for 11-20%, and executive approval for 21% or more - these three stages are set as CPQ rules. Accumulate discount reasons and performance data through the approval flow. | Content | Suitable case |
|---|---|---|
| Amount-based (Revenue) | Set a monetary goal of "¥X orders this month" for each person/team. most common format | B2B sales where the unit price of a contract varies widely - When managed using annual contract value (ACV) |
| Count-based (Count) | Set a number goal of "close X cases this month" | Product with uniform contract unit price / Low unit price and high turnover sales model for SMB |
| Activity-based | Activity goal of "X calls/Y meetings this month." Can be set in parallel with order targets | If you want to manage pre-order pipeline generation activities such as inside sales (SDR) |
If you continue to set quotas at 120% of the previous period, the motivation of those in charge with low achievement rates will drop sharply, leading to them leaving the company. Best practices for setting quotas areA level that 60-70% of the team can achieve.”. Quotas that everyone can easily meet eliminate opportunities for growth; quotas that no one can meet destroys morale. Adjust to a realistic level each quarter by referring to HubSpot's achievement data.
Forecasting tools are meaningless if you just look at them.Weekly Forecast Review MeetingIt is important to structure data and design it as a place to transform data into decisions and actions. Here is a typical agenda design for managers to complete in 30-45 minutes each week.
| anti-pattern | what is the problem | what to do instead |
|---|---|---|
| Ask “How are you doing?” | Questions to which the person in charge is likely to give an optimistic answer. Unable to extract specific information | Ask specific facts such as "When was your last conversation with the decision maker? What did they say?" |
| Review all items at the same depth | Due to lack of time, discussions on important business negotiations become shallow. | Focus your time on commit deals and AI divergence deals, and briefly check pipeline deals. |
| Just report the numbers | The report ends with “¥X” and the next action cannot be decided. | Each session concludes with an action of ``who, what, and by when''. Log tasks instantly to HubSpot |
| Publicly criticize those in charge of low achievement rates | Forecasting accuracy worsens as staff report numbers ``more optimistic than reality'' | Personnel with low achievement rates will be provided with individual 1on1 support. Design the general review as a place to share information rather than a place to find problems. |
Customer pain, competitive advantage, NG messages, and the tone of the person in charge
Document the definitions of Commit, Best Case, and Pipeline, and create a state in which all people in charge input data using the same standards. Particularly for organizations whose definition of ``commit'' is vague, start here first.
The list of discrepancies between the person in charge accuracy and the AI score is the most important agenda item for the weekly review. We have also set up a workflow to alert you to a sudden drop in score to catch ``business deals that have deteriorated without you even being able to see them'' at an early stage.
There is no meaning in a goal that everyone can achieve or a goal that no one can achieve. Adjustments are made quarterly while referring to HubSpot's achievement rate data, and individual settings are made according to differences in performance for each person in charge.
→ Used to provide individual coaching to personnel with low activity levels and to improve the skills of personnel with high activity and low order intake.
Aggregating the "close rate of deals called commit" by person in charge and team each quarter. The quickest way to raise the quality of forecasts across the entire organization is to horizontally spread the methods of people and teams with high forecasting accuracy to the entire organization.