How to overcome the common issues with Hubspot reporting

From pinpointing your target audience and providing personalised ad campaigns, to a more efficient sales process - Hubspot offers various tools to help your business grow. With it being divided into five easy-to-manage hubs, it enables you to take control and improve your marketing, sales and customer service, all in one place. 

But no business tool is perfect. According to reports, users regularly face issues when working with HubSpot’s reporting function. While some of these problems are caused by the platform’s limitations, others are avoidable. They are often the consequence of poor data quality, or sales and marketing teams being unable to answer the question: “What do I want to see?”

The reporting feature on HubSpot doesn’t come cheap. A business using these tools could be paying over $11,000 a year. They should be using it to its full potential, especially because it plays a key role in forecasting performance and hitting goals. 

Misusing HubSpot’s reporting function could do the opposite of its designed effect: hindering, rather than supporting your business growth.

With that in mind, below are some common issues people face.  By solving these, HubSpot reports can become a trusted source of marketing insight, allowing for data-driven decision-making and an accurate view of marketing performance.

Usable rarely means flexible 

When weighing up which CRM to use, one important factor is how easily your team can use it. If a tool is counterintuitive and hard to navigate, your team could be wasting time that is better spent elsewhere.

But usability often comes at a cost and can mean sacrificing flexibility and sophistication. If you can log in and, with minimal effort, obtain the information you need, then there won’t be much room for customisation.

We can draw an analogy by comparing Apple and Android. Apple's IOS and user interface is intuitive and easy to navigate. But they have a "closed ecosystem" which leaves little room for customisation. If you buy a product from Apple:

• it will not function well with non-Apple related products;
• you cannot download apps, widgets or change a layout unless approved by Apple;
• fixing or changing your products hardware will be difficult. Gone are the days of replacing your phone battery with ease.

Android, by comparison, is a more complex interface to get to grips with and can take time to understand. But Android products are much more customisable compared to their Apple counterparts.

In this example, HubSpot is closer to Apple than Android; it focuses on usability. Despite providing a vast number of tools, it has an interface that means your team can easily find the information they need.

For some users, this is one of HubSpot’s major selling points. For others, this causes frustration when trying to use the reporting feature. HubSpot has a variety of reporting functionalities, but for some it doesn’t offer the flexibility they need, particularly if they have a reporting model which goes against the norm.

The inflexibility of Hubspot

To illustrate the lack of HubSpot’s flexibility, let’s consider a case study. 

One of our clients works in an industry where every lead and consumer interaction matters. For that reason, they consider every relevant and unique form submission as a Market Qualified Lead (MQL), as long as the contact matches a relevant persona and the organisation is a match with their ideal client profile (ICP).  They mark a unique submission as an indication that a contact  is interested in their services and a potential customer.

With this strategy in mind, we might question whether HubSpot can adequately report leads this way.

In Hubspot, Market Qualified Leaded are reported in one of two ways:

1. New Market Qualified Leads: This highlights the number of contacts which have become an MQL within a given timeframe.

While this method has some strengths, it is not suitable for reporting our client's engagements. Contacts can only become an MQL once, so repeat engagements - where a consumer is especially interested in their products - often slip through the cracks on this approach.

2. Form submissions: This provides a list of form submissions by showing all the contacts who submitted a form within a timeframe. The forms reporting tool within HubSpot can also show cumulative form submissions in a certain time period.

Unfortunately, this method also has drawbacks. The lists tool will only show unique contacts who have submitted a form within a timeframe, not the cumulative number of form submissions by those contacts in that period. Therefore, if the same contact submits multiple times within a period, this would not be identified by HubSpot’s report. 

Using the forms reporting functionality does allow you to see cumulative form submissions by all contacts in a certain time period. But it doesn’t allow you to exclude certain forms or irrelevant contacts. 

In short, our client is not able to report on their MQL generation in the ways that they want to. 

This technical example highlights that the rigidness of HubSpot affects many users' ability to build a report that meets their needs. If you’re in a similar boat, looking outside of HubSpot to build your reports is the only way you can get the flexibility you need.