The HubSpot CRM Forecast tool is a strong offering purpose-built to support modern businesses that sell either one-time products or subscriptions. HubSpot CRM customers with Sales Hub Professional or Enterprise have it built in without any additional cost.
What makes HubSpot Forecasts great:
(1) Uses the concept of Stage-based Forecast Category buckets for rollups, allowing rep or manager overrides
(2) Has a simple but powerful interface for reps to update many Deals and key Deal fields at once in a table view
(3) Ready-made reporting in the Sales Analytics folder once you've implemented
(4) Snapshot reports are built in, so you can see how a rep or team's forecast changed over time and if you're getting better
(5) Built-in Deal Scoring and record previews make it easy for reps and managers to inspect key forecasting factors
When to consider other solutions:
(A) If you have a consumption or usage-based billing model
(B) If you have a lot of unpredictable self-service transactions
(C) If your reps are heavy adopters of another tool like Gong, with their own forecast offering
Setting up Forecast Categories:
Think of Forecast Categories as buckets of Deal Stages. Much like in Salesforce, HubSpot has a solid set of suggested categories pre-configured, including: Pipeline, Best Case, Most Likely, Commit, and Omitted. Here are some ways you might think of each default Category:
Omitted: Includes Closed Lost as well as other entry-level stages that you might not want to include just because it's too early.
Pipeline: An initial meeting has been held, although the technical evaluation or buyer committee involvement and validation aren't yet mature
Best Case: For Deals progressing nicely towards the Close Date, but also could still fall apart due to at least one key factor.
Most Likely: Pain and high-level pricing are validated, your Champion is optimistic, and there are no longer major blockers or unknowns to getting the deal done.
Commit: The buyer has verbally accepted or is very close to it. It should be extremely rare (< 1% of Deals) to move to Lost from here.
These default Categories make sense for most businesses. Consider customizing them by either renaming them to lean into existing vernacular or by removing categories, such as Pipeline or Best Case, which may be redundant. We don't recommend adding more categories, which defeats the purpose of having high-level bucket rollups.
How to Edit Forecast Categories:
To edit forecast categories, go to Deal object properties, search for Forecast Category, and edit like you would any other dropdown field by renaming labels or adding/removing values.
How to Map HubSpot Deal Stages to Forecast Categories:
To map HubSpot Deal Stages to Forecast Categories, go to Setup > Forecasts > Pipelines. Then select a Pipeline that you're including in your forecast, and use the table to map Deal Stages:
Setting Up Forecast Types:
Forecast Types are the most confusing aspect of the Forecast tool. Think of them like a unique pairing of Date property & Amount property — that's all they are. Most businesses will use the same fields, Close Date and Amount, negating the need for Forecast Types, but it's also possible that you might use different Date or Amount fields for different pipelines where Forecast Types could be useful.
Despite how prominent they are in the Forecast tool:
Forecast Types will not save a pre-determined view of Forecasts settings for you
Forecast Types will not be usable in the Sales Analytics reporting (yet)
Forecast Types will not be useful for you if you use Close Date and Amount across all of your Deal forecasting and Pipelines
What's Missing in HubSpot Forecasts:
(1) A way to save pre-built views with the right Pipelines/Date selectors set; it would be great for a seller to be brought right into their own Forecast view with all of the right settings pre-selected.
(2) A place for Managers to put their own private forecasting notes on a Deal.
(3) A way to highlight the weighted pipeline in a forecast submission within the Forecast tool itself. Instead, it shows the unweighted amount, which is confusing.
(4) A sharable view of a specific Forecast done at a point in time for a user or a team with a concise set of notes on key highlights or assumptions.
(5) AI capabilities. It would be great to have HubSpot fill in the gaps of any missing rep forecasts or to help us estimate the amount for in-period Deals that are not yet in the CRM yet but could still be closed for the period.
Overall HubSpot Forecasts is a very solid platform who's biggest selling point is its deep integration with HubSpot Deal Data. If reps are using the forecasting tool, they're cleaning up their Deals within HubSpot live. That means you can get rid of a spreadsheet and clean up your HubSpot data at the same time, while being able to measure success over time.
