HubSpot Reporting Mindsets, Misconceptions, And Marvelous Disasters!

Do you live in a world filled with corporate data? Are you plagued by siloed departments? Are your lackluster growth strategies demolishing your chances for success? Are you held captive by the evil menace Lord Lack? Lack of time, lack of strategy, and lack of the most important and powerful tool in your superhero tool belt knowledge. Never fear, Hub heroes. Get ready to don your cape and mask, move into action, and become the hub hero your organization needs. Tune in each week to join the League of Extraordinary Inbound Heroes as we help you educate, empower, and execute Hub Heroes. It's time to unite and activate your powers. Before we begin, we need to disclose that Devin is currently employed by HubSpot at the time of this episode's recording. This podcast is in no way affiliated, affiliated with or produced by HubSpot, and the thoughts and opinions expressed by Devin during the show are that of his own and in no way represent those of his employer.

Man, you know what? I. I don't know why, but today that educate and empower piece, like, just jumped out of the audio to me, and I'm like, yeah, yeah, that's what we're about to do. We're about to empower and educate. You know what's sad, though? It's just us three guys here today. Don't tell nobody.

Where's Liz?

Well, she's. She's running around doing stuff, helping people, like, being a catalyst for catalysts, if you will. So, you know, sometimes that takes you where you just can't be. Somewhere on a Friday at 3pm but we still love her. We miss you. We can't wait till next episode where you're back. But, Max, Devin, how the heck are you guys today?

I'm feeling forgotten and abandoned by Liz. Oh, dang. Now. I'm good. I'm good. I'm feeling good. I feel all right. I'm in my neighborhood.

Yeah, we could roast. We could roast Liz the entire episode, couldn't we? Like the entire one. She's not here to defend. Defend herself. That would be terrible of us, though.

Do that.

Devon, how you doing, my man?

I'm fantastic. And I have nothing bad to say about Liz, even if she's not here, because I'm not trying to catch that heat. So, Liz, love you. Can't wait till you get back. Hope you're enjoying all the things that you're doing. And, yeah, it's. It's a lesser experience without you.

Yeah, Devin. Devin's thing was Devin sings I don't want to be part of a haiku. That's that's what I heard Devin say. I don't want to be part of a haiku, a poem, a song lyric. He's like, I got no time for that. No time for that. Well, it's interesting because all of us have been doing this HubSpot thing for a while. We've, you know, we've gone in different directions, done different things, and, and today we're really setting this up for a future episode. Just all, all you listeners out there know that this episode is the, the foundation, if you will, the base of what is an episode to come in a couple weeks, might be a month from now, but three weeks, I don't know. Anyway, we're going to do a deep dive on reporting. We actually have a special top secret guest. This going to show up and we're going to talk about HubSpot reporting. But today we're talking about HubSpot reporting. Mindsets, misconceptions, and dare I say, marvelous disasters. So we're going to go ahead and start with this. And Max, Devin, what is your personal relationship? Because we like to get personal here on the Hub Heroes podcast. What's your personal relationship been like with reporting inside of HubSpot?

I, I don't know the definition of the word tumultuous, but I feel like that's the best word to describe it. Yeah, I mean, you know, I always, I always was super scared of reporting. I'd say for the majority of the time I've been working with HubSpot, and I think a lot of it just kind of came from like, I don't know, I wasn't very good at math growing up. I didn't, I didn't pass a lot of math classes, be it in, you know, high school or, you know, middle school for that matter, or even college. So I always kind of felt like reporting was like, totally something outside of my wheelhouse. And like, I always found myself sort of hamstringing myself just saying, like, oh, you know, you know, reporting is my weak spot. So I might have you talk to someone else about that, like, just to get out of the conversation. But it wasn't until, like, I really had to learn it that I kind of realized it's not that hard, you know. So as of lately, I've, I've really been kind of digging into it a lot, trying to find my own easy way of understanding it. Just kind of like how I do with anything in HubSpot that I don't really kind of get at the beginning. And I'd say now I'M I'm really comfortable with it. I'm. I feel like I can build a report on almost anything in HubSpot, and I also feel like I'm. I have a pretty good understanding of, like, what its boundaries are too, you know, so, yeah, I mean, it's been up and down. It's been a wild roller coaster. It's been a, you know, it's been. It's been a. A line graph that goes up and down. That's. That's been the relationship.

Yeah, I thought it was going to be a journey map.

It's a bit of a scatter plot.

Oh, okay. A little hit or miss, maybe. Devin, how about you, my man? How. What is your historical relationship with HubSpot been, like?

Well, I can't come out with the dad jokes about the Gantt charts and stuff. Fricking nerds. But yet, for me, see, I've been using HubSpot reporting since it was an a la carte feature, you know, and back in the day, HubSpot recorded reporting was really good at reporting inbound metrics, but if you had wanted anything outside of that, it wasn't the best tool. So if I had to equate it to, you know, dating, it started out rough, but then we got counseling. And so for me, now with custom reporting tools being as robust as they are, and with me, I'm on the other end of the spectrum. I'm a total math guy when it comes to analytics and calculating and all that stuff. And there weren't a lot of features, and so you'd have to use outside tools if you wanted to drill down into certain things. So now just how robust HubSpot reporting is. And combine that with the ability to pull in data from custom objects and all those things, you can really get nerdy with your dashboards. And don't even get me started on embedding and all that fun stuff where you can literally just have a daily meme for pop up in your dashboard. That's just crazy.

Yeah, see, you did go to nerd level, though. You brought up memes with reporting. I'm just gonna throw that. You don't need dad jokes. You got memes for the rest of this podcast episode. It's funny, I wanted to start out that way with that question, because for me, HubSpot reporting actually has been a little bit of. And Max, I'm with you for a while. The bane of my existence. And what's funny is, as much as I would train HubSpot, and as many people as I would Talk to whether it was onboarding or consulting, everybody, I'd ask, hey, are your Achilles heels inside of HubSpot? Reporting would be number one. Workflows would always be number two. And so I finally realized, well, I'm in good company because everybody's just confused about how to do this stuff in here. Max, you said I'm not kind of a math guy. And Devin, you're like, oh, man, I'm the, I'm the polar opposite. I'm a math guy. Nerd man. I am more of a crayons guy. Right? Give me some crayons. Let me be creative. I've never really been a math guy. But here's the thing, because we're going to go into to mindset, we're going to go into mindsets. And Max, when you said that about the actual fact that you can figure it out. Right. You said figure it out. I started to think about how it was less about math and more of almost like a Rubik's Cube. And once you actually figure out how to solve that bad boy, once you figure out what you need to drag where, now all of a sudden you're a, you're a puzzle solver instead of like a mathematician.

Yeah.

Which gets really interesting and we'll talk about as we kind of move in here. But so for me, shedding the mindset that I had to be a mathematician to actually be good at reporting was a really great time for me because now I'm like, oh, oh. And it also gave me, by the way, a great next step to actually get better at reporting when I had that realization. But let's dive in a little bit. And what are some of the mindsets that you two have gathered along the way? Or, or because you have worked with some really smart people the entire time, have seen in like HubSpot reporting ninjas that you've been around. Like, what do you think the mindsets of these people are, Are thinking about or generating or maybe don't think about.

Yeah. I can say, like, for me, the. When it really clicked is in that that Rubik's Cube example is actually perfect. Like, I, I learned how to do a Rubik's Cube. I've forgotten since, but I learned how to do one right before the pandemic. Shout out to becca Stamp at HubSpot, who, who taught me how to solve a Rubik's Cube for the first time in my life. But what was super interesting about that analogy there is like, with the Rubik's Cube, you just kind of follow the Same steps until you get to a certain place. And then there's always a way to solve it. Right. It's sort of the same thing with reporting in that like, if you can put yourself in a pretty standardized like mindset or like give yourself a framework, right. That the, the one that really worked for me is I just Realizing HubSpot is HubSpot reporting. As long as you can understand the fundamentals of A, what data sour sources are you choosing, B, what parameters are you measuring? And C, how are you filtering the data? Right. If you know you just have to do those three things in order, you can build any report you want. Right. And as if you break it into those simpler parts and understand why you have to pay special attention to those three different pieces, you can really figure out any sort of report you have to build in HubSpot. Right. But you need like a framework versus just kind of going into it blind and like, not really, you know, solving those three things kind of in sequential order.

All right, so here's the thing with reporting is that you can't be looking at numbers for the sake of numbers. You don't want to be just diving into your numbers, looking at stuff, because then you can end up doing what's called P hacking, where you're looking at numbers and seeing mistaking correlation with causation and thinking that one thing has to do with another. Like there's a study out that if you eat more donuts, you'll lose weight. It's like, no, that's not, of course what happened. You're just looking at these numbers and putting them together and thinking that you know something happened there. What you should be doing everything in your reporting should start with a question, even if that question is as simple as how is our sales team performing? What you should be doing is you should be taking these reports and you don't even have to create them. There are so many custom reports in the HubSpot library that's been developed over the years and you don't even need to tweak them, not at times. You just load them and they're good to go. They have an entire dashboard that is preset with most of the reports that you would even need and gives you ideas on some of the things that you weren't even thinking about looking for. So if you're like looking at, we'll say website analytics. If you're looking at website analytics and thinking, yeah, we, we need to get more traffic, that that's not going to solve your problem. You can even get Russian bots to build your traffic if you want to. That's not actually contributing to your bottom line and fixing the problem. That's just one isolated report. Your reporting should be a part of a larger picture. Whatever report you're generating, a larger picture that is helping you understand where you are in relationship to your goals, where you are in relationship to your KPIs. And that's what's going to help you understand what you need to fix. So the thing is, is that reporting people get lost and look at the forest for the trees and forget that all of these numbers are actually people and human behaviors and interactions. And so you'll start making actions based on, oh, let's make this number get bigger or make that number get bigger. Whereas if you look at the whole picture, you can see that you might have a problem here, but it actually is going to be solved by you fixing something over here, like, like a low conversion rate further down the sales pipeline. This is something I literally just finished talking about a couple weeks ago at Experience Inbound in Wisconsin. Shout out to Stream creative and wider group for putting on an amazing event. And I apologize to everyone who was there who might have fallen asleep during my math lecture. But the thing is, is that it's all about looking at whatever's going on with your organization holistically and not getting so drilled down into one number or one set of numbers and forgetting why you're even doing this in the first place.

Love that you brought this up because there's a couple of things that come to mind. The first thing that I have to address right now is I need you to send me the data on that donut diet that you're talking about that I can actually eat more donuts and lose weight.

I. I was going to say I. Yeah.

Yeah. I'm just saying I'm down with that. But here's the thing. I love that you said, talked about starting with a question, right? Because the idea of starting with a question, when you ask a question, what do you want an answer? And that's what your data should be providing you. It should be providing you with an answer and insights. And answer and insight should then in your mind drive a direction that you're going to go, whether it be with your traffic or your sales or your lead generation, but action, insights, answers based on those questions. And here's the thing. When I'm teaching HubSpot reporting to companies, I literally talk about how success leaves clues. If you go into the reporting tool and you look at attribution reporting 7 questions under the create contact. 7 questions under the deal, 7 questions under the revenue. If you go into the custom report builder, what did they make sure to put in sample reports? How did they address those sample reports? Questions? You are trying to get an answer to the question. So if you even see how they're baking out parts of the HubSpot tool, it's based on this philosophy of questions. Now here's the thing I want to address because by the way, if you rewind this, Max laid out two to three things. Devon laid out one to two things. Like, you'll be able to rewind this and map together like a holy. But Jesus. That's my framework for HubSpot reporting moving forward. But I'm going to add in this one last element that when I figured out this is more like a Rubik's cube, less like being a mathematician is, I went and I looked at every single one of the pages that I could see, HubSpot default properties, and started to study them like they were the hottest things since, I don't know, sliced bread or the printing press or the iPhone or whatever you want to throw in there. Because then I wanted to know immediately what properties count.

Yep.

What properties are dates, what property like amounts. Because if I know the like created or became or counted or amounted. If I know those properties like the back of my hand and I start to attach those to my custom properties, my custom objects, or anything else that I'm tying together now you have a matrix for success. See, the thing about jumping into HubSpot reporting and not understanding the most important piece of it is that the data is being driven from properties that are being filled out by your reps, by forms being filled out by integrations. Like, so if you don't know this at a deep level, that's why we've been so historically confused on how do we get the right stuff to show on the page.

Yeah, I think that's a really good point. Like, too like, and you kind of said it. I'm going to say it again. Getting really good at properties is not only just one of the best ways to become a HubSpot expert, but it's also the best way to like, really understand reporting. Right. And you could do so many things with it. Like, especially if you're trying to like, measure when like, how many times something like very complex happened, you can have simply just like one single property that changes to indicate that that very complex thing happened to that record. And then literally you're building simple reports off of like Filters of that specific like, of that specific property or like count of records that has that property checked off. Right. And like you simplify the way you're building reporting is just by being super smart with the way that you understand why certain properties change, when they change, what causes them to change, what they change to, things like that, like get a really good handle on properties and like so much of HubSpot will be unlocked for you right off of that one simple concept.

Absolutely. And to be honest with you, like we're on episode 35 right now, ladies and gentlemen, we knew how important this was because in episode eight we literally did hubs custom properties, objects and groups 101 best practices. And I would say that if you're listening to this and you didn't listen to episode 8, go listen to episode 8 where we talk about custom properties. And I would say that you Google HubSpot Contact Properties Default Contact Properties HubSpot Default Deal Properties HubSpot Default Ticket Properties HubSpot Default Company Properties. You'll come up with four knowledge articles that again, when you take the time to read through them and start to understand the default properties and then tie it into your stuff, man, you will be jamming. All right, let's continue to move on. I want to know, I want to know from you guys what you think. Is there a kind of major thing that maybe HubSpot users are missing when it comes to reporting.

I absolutely got one. For me, it's lifecycle reporting. It is an unsung hero and that you can use lifecycle reporting to look at your conversion analytics. And what that tells you is when you, most people look at it, they say, hey, we have more SQLs and, or more MQLs and SQLs and all right, and so let's see if we can get that. That's part of it. But what you can do is look at those conversion rates, the percentages of how many people go from one life cycle stage to the next. And that will allow you to start thinking, okay, so we need to change this conversion rate. What can we do in order to affect that number? And like for instance, if you're having a problem between MQLs and SQLs, then what that could mean is that what marketing thinks is a qualified lead isn't the same thing as what sales thinks is a qualified lead. And those, that is a really huge, really huge metric. And the other one is just dashboards in general. The pre built dashboards for sales managers, for salespeople. They are beautiful and informative and they allow you to almost instantly get metrics on team performance. And it's, it's almost turnkey. It's beautiful.

I love that. I'm gonna jump in here, Max. I'm gonna let you bring up the rear on this one. And ladies and gentlemen, I fully understand that this is an audio podcast and I'm just gonna do the best I can do. But when I was thinking about this question, I remember something that happened after I had used HubSpot for maybe, let's say about eight or maybe nine years now. I've only been using it for a little over a decade. So that tells you that this is something that I myself was like, wait, what? You can do that? So if I'm on any report, which, by the way, it's just the easiest way to talk you through this. If I go to like a dashboard and I go to any report that I can click on, and you hopefully you know that you can click on the reports. By the way, somebody is out there listening, going, oh my God, you can click on reports. If you click on a report that you can click on and it brings up that list, right? And you can see like the date and the.

You.

Whatever the thing is that you're reporting on, you're going to see the metrics. And there's this little piece that sits there and I think hides from people, and it's called group data. And what you can do is you can actually select the Group Data tab. And so in the case in the report that I'm looking at, it then pops out and it says, select a dimension. And so you can look at that data. And again, in my case, I see published date, message, network, post, campaign, all sorts of different things that I can literally go in and look at or kind of give it a dimension or a pivot or a different thing. So if you don't know about grouping data, if you're curious about that, get the old Google machine out, get the old HubSpot Academy machine out, get the old, like, hey, HubSpot support, what the heck is this? And figure out, or maybe, or maybe just bring it up to the community and see if other people have been using it, what you can do with it. But the fact that so many people miss that and don't realize it's a thing that you can do was mind blowing to me as what I would call slightly seasoned user.

I think something a lot of people are missing is just like an understanding of, of. Of how like HubSpot reporting sort of fundamentally works and that, like, people don't realize that it's all objects based on, right? Like it's all objects and property based reporting, right? But then when I think also when sometimes people hear the word objects, they're thinking about deals, tickets, companies, contacts. But like they forget things like marketing events or objects, marketing, analytics events, emails, like assets that you have, These are all objects. If you think about HubSpot, it is a relational database, right? It's just a giant relational database and like technically everything you see in there that occurs more than once is some kind of object, right? Especially anything that you can bring in as a source, right. For your data when you're building those reports. So you know, I think like just having that, just like remembering and next time you get like frustrated because you think there's some sort of like limitation of what HubSpot reporting can or can't do, you need to remember you're working with an object based like database to build these reports. And like that should sort of help you structure the way that you should expect this data to behave when you're building reports around it, right? And sometimes that can help meteor your expectations, sometimes that can help get you to an answer quicker. Sometimes that can help you just like solution the type of report you need and the filtering and which objects you use. What do you choose as the primary versus like, like the other data sources that you're bringing in, right? Which is something I struggled with to understand, you know, for so long. So I think just like remembering, remembering you're working with a relational database where all these things are related to each other and that's what powers a lot of the cool like cross object reporting stuff you can do and things like that.

I'm, I am so glad you brought that up Max, because it's hard to see what you are talking about like from just a. I'm a regular everyday user. But when you go into the custom report builder and you see contacts, company deals, tickets, but then you see blog posts, landing pages, ad performance, media calls, quotes, payments, tasks, web active, like all these buckets, right? And one thing that I learned, and this is again a recent I literally there was a reporting deep dive that Kyle Jepsen's HubSpot admins hug did and it was super dope, super smart. But they talked about data joins and how these are actually creating a data join table and what that affects and, and again it's all about the hidden pieces that people might be missing. But the fact when you go to create a custom report that you can look over at the right hand side and see data join info and see selected data sources like contacts, companies, blog posts, and see numbers that actually equate to the contacts. And yes, ladies and gentlemen, you can click on the freaking numbers and actually see like the things that you're pulling in there. It's quite cool.

Can we, can we, can we make that like primary data object thing just like super clear for everybody right now? So the best way to think about it, right, is when you're, when you're choosing the data sources to, to, to build a report off of, the first question that asks you is what is your primary data source going to be? Right? Yes. So this is saying, which object do you want to include all of? When you're building this report, you could almost think of as, as like your very first, like filter you're setting, right? So the way that it works is when you select a primary one, think about all the objects they all have. They're all just like these tables in the background, which are essentially like lists of objects, right? So all these objects inside of HubSpot can relate to each other. That's kind of goes back to what we were saying about a relational database, right? So what happens is when you're, when you're choosing a primary data source, you're basically telling HubSpot's reporting tool, I want to bring in every single one of these objects and make it available to use in the report somehow, right? Then when you request, what do they call them? Secondary or other, what other secondary data sources? Secondary data sources. When you select secondary data sources, it's only going to bring in objects of those types that have an association to the primary one, right? So an example of this is, let's say you have a thousand contacts and 50 company records, but only 40 company records are actually associated to contacts, right? What's going to happen is if primary, if your primary data source is contacts, right, it is going to bring in all 1000 contacts for you to possibly use in that report, but it's only going to bring in the 40 company records that are actually associated to contacts. It's not going to bring in the 10 that don't have any association to the primary, right? So you just want to think like knowing that what table of objects do I want to bring in everything for? Right? And you know, generally in those cases, you're always building reports around objects and then you're doing some sort of like calculation or setting some sort of parameter or variable for whatever the XY axis is. But it's, it's going to be like pulling from another object to then like measure it. Right? So that was a huge unlock for me when I understood that. And you can visualize it because when you choose your different primary and secondary data sources on the right hand side now it has this really handy tool that I think you were mentioning, George, where it says, okay, if you select this as your primary and these as your secondary, this is how many company records we're bringing in, this is how many whatever records are bringing in. And this is how many of the primary we're bringing in, right? And it kind of shows you, like, okay, I'm working with all of these and only associated ones of these and blah, blah, blah.

Yeah, I love this. Which by the way, I, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention this is why outside of kind of reporting, but tied to reporting, whenever you bring in a custom object into your ecosystem, you want to think long and hard not only about just the stuff that you want to put in it, but how it should associate to the things on what you're going to want to report about it. Like, there's like just a key thing to think about there. All right, so moving onward and upward, I'm curious. I. And again, I think part of the Fixing the Rubik's Cube, right? Solving the Rubik's Cube that some people get stuck in is like, oh, well, what report do I need? Like, I don't. What. What are the seven to eight reports? Or like, what should a sales guy. What should a content market. What should a. So I'm curious if you guys over time have found a favorite report or reports that you're like, they're. They're my go to. Or even maybe just if not that a reporting tool that you're like, this is my favorite jam in HubSpot and this is why.

Oh, there's the number one way to have disasters just come upon you like it's the seventh seal has broken is if you have bad data in the first place. If you have bad data, bad data entry practices, if people are using different nomenclatures for things, if you have duplicate properties. Oh my gosh, deprecated properties that people are still using. Oh, that's so painful. And it makes getting good data impossible. Or if you just don't clean out, then the people that don't need to be in there and just like, I know, like I myself am guilty of this. I hate deleting anything. Like, I still have a poem that I wrote 15 years ago saved in my Google Drive because I can't help myself. But. And it was a really bad poem. But the thing is, is that if you have bad data, then you're gonna have bad reporting. No tool is going to save you from that. You gotta have clean data and clean reporting out. That's, that's the easiest way. And for me personally, I've inherited so many portals with bad data and just things everywhere. And you're just going back and you're looking like the meme of the guy of the first day on the job that lied about on his resume. Like that's how I feel like trying to dig through all of this. Because like at this point I'm gaslighting myself. Like, is it, is it me? Am I the problem? Like, am I just not understanding what's going on while trying to reverse engineer? Like just the shenanigans that happened before I came and it's not you, or I should say it's not me. It probably is you. You need to go through and dig.

Through.

And clean up your data. Even if that means partnering with a solutions partner that specializes in things like rev ops and reporting.

Yeah, let me jump in there real quick because Devin, you said life cycle and it's going to be real quick, Max, so don't be like, no, no, no, rain away. No, no, but Devin, you said life cycle reporting and I just want everybody who might not know because there might be somebody new to HubSpot listening to this podcast. Funnel reports. Funnel reports, Life cycle stage reporting. That's how you'll get there. Go ahead, Max.

I take one that says, so I'm.

Not going to make this a zebra commercial. But one thing I will say is one thing which just made it a.

Zebra commercial, by the way, by saying you're not gonna do it, you just did it.

I'm trying to be a grown up here, man.

Move on. There's nothing to say.

I want to spend one second on it and then I want to tell you what I, the one I, the, the real one that I really liked. But like the cool thing that I've, you know, realized and had been having a lot of fun with lately is like monthly recurring revenue reporting, right? Because the way it's built in HubSpot isn't so great, but it's not any fault of theirs. It's that the fact that you up until you had things like HubSpot payments or zebra bringing in like subscription data. It's not that HubSpot's reporting tools couldn't handle like MRR reporting. It's that the Data just wasn't structured in the right way in order to do that. Right. And so to kind of like take that conversation away from like a product placement for Zebra. That same idea goes for getting a healthy understanding of like, what custom objects can do for you from a reporting standpoint. Right. Oftentimes you just have to think about how you're structuring your data to get the right reporting that you're trying to achieve. Right. Moving past that, the big tool specifically that I am obsessed with right now is Customer Journey analytics, especially when you start pairing it with things like custom behavioral events. Right? So hear me out. What's super cool now is like, let's pretend you're like a SaaS company and you have some kind of SaaS product and you have a feature in that SaaS product that people use, right? A great use case for custom behavioral events is you can go and create an event and then through the HubSpot API, you can tell HubSpot when a certain event is taking place. So you might make an event for, you know, one of your users in your tool using some kind of feature that you have, right? You can tell HubSpot that that's happened through a custom behavioral event. And on that contact record you'll see, oh, Devin used the cool new feature, like, whatever it is now, the cool thing about Customer Journey analytics is it combines things like the normal marketing stuff you do in HubSpot, such as, like sending people emails, people filling out forms, visiting certain pages, doing all the normal stuff that you would, like, want to track. But it also brings in custom behavioral event stuff, right? So it's super cool now is you can literally build a report that like shows all the steps that you would want someone to kind of go through. And let's use that SaaS company as an example. Let's say you come out with a new feature, right? You create a custom behavioral event to track to see if people are actually using using that feature. And then what you can do with Customer Journey analytics is you can build this report that shows you how many people received the new email about the new or received the marketing email about the new feature, how many people opened the email about the new feature, how many of those people clicked the CTA to like go into the tool that's telling them to go, hey, try this new feature. And then how many of those people actually used that new feature and you could see it all in one report and how it, like that group of people starts with like a bunch of people getting an email and then it whittles down further and further and further until people actually got to the end of that journey that you would kind of put together. Right. So Customer Journey analytics is something that's like super exciting. Unfortunately it is like a Opera, sorry, a HubSpot marketing enterprise tool. So like, you know, you gotta have enterprise in order to be able to do it. But you can get really, really smart. Yeah, you can get really, really smart and use it as a tool to test your assumptions as a marketer about these different journeys that you're building. Even when those actions that people are taking are happening outside of the realm of what HubSpot can normally track. If you get really smart with custom behavioral events sense. Right. So Customer Journey Analytics Ms. With custom behavior events. A lot of cool stuff you can do there. Go try it.

Yeah, I love that, I love that. And you know, it's, it's hard to pick just one like, you know, it's like picking your favorite kid, which don't tell. Well now I won't say it because then they'd hear it. But no, I don't have a favorite kid. I'm just totally joking. But it's hard to pick one. But I'll tell you what, I've had one creep up over the last, you know, 11 months, almost 12 months that before I was like, ah, okay, nice. But as being a business owner, I'm like, this is my gym and it's goals and forecasting. Yeah, my gosh. Being able to go in and set a revenue goal and then being able to forecast and see all of the great dope stuff. And by the way, I think there's a little bit of like Pavlov's Dog, like, like gaming gamified. I don't know, there's something going on there psychologically because the fact that I can pick to be notified like when I'm gonna miss the mark or when I hit the mark or when I surpass the mark. And like I could be having the most shitty of crap days and all of a sudden I get an email, it's like, you have surpassed your goal. And I'm immediately like, Victoria, best day ever. And you know, and it's. But it's because I'm using a reporting tool that HubSpot set up with goals and forecasting. And then it also does some special magic in some of the pre built reports with actually seeing goals that move over time instead of just being a flat goal that you can set in Custom Report Builder. So that would probably be my favorite of favorites at least at this present time, to be honest.

Can I make, can I make an embarrassing admission?

Do you want to do that now or in the reporting disasters?

Oh, I don't know. I've never figured out the goals tool. I've never figured it out. I have, I, I, I, I need you to sit down and look at it because like I, I don't get it. That's my bad. I'll, I'll do better. HubSpot Product team I'm sorry, I'm, I.

Need a great Mortal Kombat like sound right now. Like finish him. Like right, right. Oh, I could have done my human. Yeah, we could have just done that. Anyway, we did just do that. So. All right, let's continue moving on because time flies when you're having fun and I do want to get to this kind of disasters conversation and that is have you been part or seen any HubSpot reporting disaster happen? What say you two?

I think the fact that you can go to the library and dig through. I know I touched on it before, but there are some I would recommend just going through the library and looking at all the individual reports. Like all of them. A lot of them won't make sense or won't be applicable, but there are so many that will, if anything, give you insight into numbers that you should be tracking that again are a part of that larger picture for the larger problem that you're trying to solve. So you don't get caught up in vanity metrics. But there will be things that will help you see that. But then on the other side, you'll see that when you're trying to use some of the reports, the data may be flawed or non existent because of how you're using the software. And that can lead you to some best practice tips like skipping steps and deal stages. If your conversion metrics are all messed up because people are going from step one to step five because they haven't been logging or because the prospect genuinely skipped that that's something that you should take into consideration because what may end up happening is that you may need to reevaluate your sales pipeline pipeline. You may need to look at the steps that are in your sales pipeline. Say, hey, this is how we used to do things, but now it's no longer applicable. Or maybe we just messed up when we initially created it, which is fine. It's only bad if you stay messed up. And so doing these things will help you be better at operations as well as reporting. So keep digging through that library. I think that's that's the best tip I can give for people who aren't total numbers nerds.

I just. I just got a really good idea for a hat because I'm sure we've all. You know, nothing makes me cringe more than looking at, like reporting on a dashboard and seeing no value in parentheses and having it be the biggest data point there is. I just want to make a hat now that just says no value in parentheses and see how many marketers and HubSpot users it absolutely triggers data.

Oh, I like that.

I was. I was halfway waiting for you to say, devin, if you, if you have bad data, you're gonna have a bad time, but you went in a more.

Educational direction than that.

Yeah, you and me both. Let me know how it works out. Yeah, I don't know if I've been involved in any. I mean, it depends on how, I guess, you classify disaster. I mean, I've just seen people dump hours and hours and hours and money and money into these dashboards that just don't tell you anything useful. Right? And I think, you know, we. We talked a whole lot about the beginning of, like, make sure a report is answering a question, right? I'd say a layer that you should take that mindset a little bit deeper or a layer deeper you can go with that mindset is say, what are you gonna do about it when the data looks one way or another, right? So not only have, like, all right, what. What question is this answering? Is there something that I would actually do? Is there an action I would take? Is there something that I would stop, start, or continue when the data tells me one thing or another? And if the answer is no, it's probably a pretty stupid thing to track and spend any time figuring out. Because sometimes, like, you know, building a report and getting it just right and like, waiting for the data to manifest over time. And so that takes a while, right? And like, that's all billable hours for somebody or time that could be spent better doing something else. And if you're. If you're wasting it all just to create unactionable data, that's just going to make you mad to look at, right? And not really give you anything from it, then, like, what's the point? Right? Losing a whole bunch of time is disaster in itself when it's the most valuable resource we have. Right. So, yeah, just. Just think about it and say, cool, what are we gonna do about it? All right. And you'll be good.

I love that. What are we gonna do about it? Because again, action Insights and action. So here's the thing. And I didn't say that it had to be like a major catastrophe. Like, it's just like a reporting disaster. I can't tell you the amount of people that I've seen during a training onboarding process, helping them with whatever, where they'll create the dashboards, create the reports, and then I'll circle back, you know, two weeks, two months, or a year later, and be like, so when's the last time you looked at those dashboards? Because you can tell that nobody's looked at the dashboard. Like, nobody's moved the dashboard. Nobody. So to actually take some action and then not use the action of what you have at your fingertips again, we could go back to how many times in 35 episodes have we said, quit using HubSpot like an email automation tool? Yeah, like, use it for what it is, which is like, something to run your entire freaking business on. And reporting should be not a small part that you're scared of because you feel like you're not a mathematician, but about, like a bazillion parts of what you're paying attention because you want to be successful in your business, in your sales, in your service, in your marketing, in your operations, in everything that you actually create. You need to be able to show success or failure to make smart decisions. So quit hiding from reporting. Go over to the HubSpot Academy, take the report certification, the reporting certification. Go look at search on Google HubSpot reporting. Deep dive, you know, HubSpot, super admin hug. Whatever you got to do, do it. All right, what is some last action statements, ideas, words of wisdom that you want to leave the Hub Heroes audience before we get out of here?

Guys, for me, start with simple questions. You don't have to start with complex, like, what is the conversion rate from. No, just start with how are we performing regarding such and such. How are we doing for our customers with blank. And then, like, how many customers are coming in from the website and just simple questions. And that's how you determine what reports that you're going to need in order to answer those questions and then be able to look at those reports and extrapolate data. Reporting isn't just about numbers. Reporting is about telling a story. And if you can use your data to tell a story, you're winning. And reporting is going to help you do that.

Mine seem to be. You'd be surprised how many reports are simply just using the count of X records property in those parameters. So a lot of reports are almost just as simple as filtering things in a smart way, thinking about date properties the right way and then just using those count of record fields and that's going be to comprise probably 90 of the reports you ever build. So keep it simple.

I like this simple simple kind of thing that you guys are going with. I'm going to give you a what I think is a simple three part mindset of a reporting master in HubSpot. One, you need to have the mindset of the great collector. There are many analyze tabs in HubSpot that hold reports that you can literally hit save report to add it to a dashboard or add it to your reports area. You didn't have to create anything. You had to click one button. You have to have the mindset of a great curator. Remember I think it was Devin said that there's literally an entire library with over hundreds of reports that you can curate into areas or for whatever you need. Again, dashboard or reports area to be able to use. And then after those two, because this is where most people start by the way, then you have to be thinking about how can I be a great creator? Because you see HubSpot, the way it's built, it can probably do 75 to 80% of all the reports reports you need outside of anything that you've created that is a custom property. And by the way, this is the tip I'm going to leave you with. If you have not gone to your properties area, filtered out anybody that created properties other than HubSpot in your portal and asked yourself what type of report could I make on any of these, you may be doing yourself a disservice. Hey ladies and gentlemen, we'll see you next week. I wish we had a haiku or palm, but we're gonna let you get back to your normal scheduled day.

Love you.

Do you live in a world filled with corporate data? Are you plagued by siloed apartments? Are your lackluster growth strategies demolishing your chances for success? Are you held captive by the evil menace Lord Lack? Lack of time, lack of strategy, and lack of the most important and powerful tool in your superhero tool belt knowledge. Never fear Hub Heroes. Get ready to don your cape and mask, move into action and become the Hub Hero your organization needs. Tune in each week to join the League of Extraordinary Inbound Heroes as we help you educate, empower and execute Hub Heroes. It's time to unite and activate your powers. Before we begin, we need to disclose that both Devin and Max are currently employed by HubSpot at the time of this episode's recording. This podcast is in no way affiliated with or produced by HubSpot, and the thoughts and opinions expressed by Devin and Max during the show are that of their own and in no way represent those of their employer, SA.