Your complete guide to HubSpot sales reporting

You know the feeling. You’re staring at a dozen HubSpot dashboards, and while the numbers are all there, something’s missing. HubSpot sales reporting gives you some seriously powerful tools to see your pipeline, guess at future revenue, and check in on your team’s activity. But numbers on a screen rarely tell the whole story.

The real challenge for most teams is connecting the dots. Your report might tell you what happened (a big deal was lost), but it can’t tell you why (the prospect mentioned a key missing feature in a support ticket last month).

This guide will walk you through the reporting tools HubSpot has to offer, from the dashboards you can use in five minutes to the nitty-gritty of custom reports. We’ll cover the metrics that actually matter and look at how to dig deeper to find insights that help you make better decisions.

What is HubSpot sales reporting?

So, what exactly is HubSpot sales reporting? Think of it as the control panel for your sales engine, built right into the HubSpot CRM. It grabs all the data from your contacts, deals, and logged activities and turns it into reports and dashboards you can actually use.

An overview of the HubSpot Sales Hub dashboard, a key tool for sales reporting.

You generally have two ways to tackle reporting in HubSpot:

1. The Sales Analytics Tool: This is where you find HubSpot’s library of pre-built reports. They’re perfect for getting a quick look at things like your deal forecast, sales activities, and pipeline health without needing a degree in data science. They answer the most common questions right out of the box.

2. The Custom Report Builder: When you have a question that’s a little more specific to your business, this is where you go to build a report from scratch. You can pull in different data sources (like deal info and marketing campaign data), get really specific with filters, and pick the charts and graphs that make the most sense.

The thing is, even the best custom reports take time to build, and they’re all limited to the data that’s already living inside HubSpot. That can leave some major blind spots if your team is discussing important details in places like Confluence, Slack, or Google Docs.

Standard vs. custom sales reports in HubSpot

HubSpot gives you a mix of ready-made reports and the option to create your own. Figuring out when to use which is the key to getting what you need without pulling your hair out.

The simplicity of standard reports

The Sales Analytics tool (which you get with Sales Hub Professional and above) is your go-to for quick wins. It’s packed with reports you can use immediately for daily and weekly check-ins.

Here are a few of the essentials you can start using today:

• Deal Forecast: This gives you a data-backed guess at future revenue by looking at the deals in your pipeline and how likely they are to close.

• Sales Performance: A great way to see how everyone on the team is doing by tracking closed deals, revenue, and win rates.

• Activity Tracking: Keeps an eye on the little things that lead to big results, like calls, emails, and meetings.

• Deal Pipeline Waterfall: This one shows you how your pipeline has changed over time. It’s a great visual for seeing new deals coming in, deals you’ve won or lost, and any changes in deal value.

These reports are perfect for a quick pulse check on how things are going. But since they’re built for everyone, they might not zero in on the specific numbers or goals that are most important to your team.

When to use the custom report builder

When you need to answer a very specific business question, it’s time to roll up your sleeves with the custom report builder. It lets you dig a lot deeper by mashing up different data sources to create a view that’s unique to you.

For example, you could build a custom report to figure out:

• The win rate for deals that came from that big marketing campaign you ran last quarter.

• The average time it takes for a lead from a trade show to become a paying customer.

• How your custom business objects, like subscriptions or projects, are tracking over time.

The catch? The custom report builder isn’t exactly a walk in the park. You need a good handle on how your data is structured, and getting the filters and settings just right can be tricky. It’s easy to sink a lot of time into building a single report, which is where many teams just give up.

The essential reports every team needs

Alright, no matter what you sell, there are a few core reports you’ll probably find yourself living in. Let’s walk through the must-haves and how to think about them.

1. Deal pipeline and funnel reports

This is your map of the sales world. A deal pipeline report shows you exactly where every active deal is in your sales process. The funnel report takes it a step further, showing you how many deals make it from one stage to the next.

A view of the HubSpot sales pipeline, an essential part of sales reporting.

• What it tells you: You can quickly spot bottlenecks, see if your pipeline is healthy, and understand your conversion rates between stages.

• Where it falls short: It shows you what is happening, but it can’t tell you why. If deals are piling up in the "Demo" stage, the report doesn’t know if it’s because of pricing objections, missing features, or just bad qualification. That context is usually buried in call notes, emails, or support tickets.

2. Forecasting reports

Forecasting helps you look into the future to predict revenue and set goals that are actually achievable. HubSpot has a few reports for this, including one that groups deals by how likely they are to close (like Commit, Best Case, and Pipeline).

• What it tells you: It gives you a realistic idea of how much revenue you can expect to bring in and shows if you’re on pace to hit your targets.

• Where it falls short: A forecast is only as good as the data your reps put in. It’s also based entirely on historical data from inside HubSpot, which means it can’t account for outside factors or useful tidbits from other departments that might affect a deal.

3. Sales activity and productivity reports

These reports are all about the inputs: how many calls were made, emails sent, and meetings booked. They’re super helpful for managing the team and making sure everyone is putting in the effort.

• What it tells you: You can see which reps are the most active, get a sense of the effort needed to close a deal, and check if the team is sticking to your sales process.

• Where it falls short: This is all about quantity, not quality. A hundred calls don’t mean much if they aren’t effective. Without a feature like Conversation Intelligence (only on the Enterprise plan) or information from outside HubSpot, you can’t easily connect all that activity to actual wins.

This is where the numbers on your report meet the real world. A tool like eesel AI can fill in the blanks by analyzing what’s being said in support tickets and internal docs. It surfaces the recurring questions or problems customers are having. This gives you the "why" behind your HubSpot numbers. For example, if your "Deal Lost Reason" report shows a spike because of "missing features," eesel can tell you exactly which features people are asking for across all your company knowledge, turning a vague report into actionable feedback.

4. The deal lost reason report

Learning from your losses is just as important as celebrating your wins. This report groups your lost deals based on the reason your reps select when they close it out.

• What it tells you: It highlights the most common reasons you lose deals, whether it’s price, a competitor, or a bad product fit.

• Where it falls short: The reasons are often too simple. A rep might choose "Competitor," but the report won’t capture the subtle feedback about why the competitor’s product was a better fit for that specific customer.

Sales Hub pricing for features

Okay, let’s talk money. What you can actually do with HubSpot sales reporting really depends on which plan you’re paying for. The free tools give you a taste, but the real reporting muscle is in the paid tiers.

Here’s a quick look at what you get at each level:

• Sales Hub Starter (Starts at $15/seat/month): You get some basic, pre-built dashboards. It’s enough to get a bird’s-eye view, but you can’t do any deep analysis.

• Sales Hub Professional (Starts at $90/seat/month): This is where things get serious. You unlock the full library of sales reports and, more importantly, the custom report builder. If you’re serious about sales data, this is the minimum plan you’ll need.

• Sales Hub Enterprise (Starts at $150/seat/month): This plan unlocks everything, including advanced features like Conversation Intelligence to analyze calls, custom objects to fit your unique business model, and a much higher report limit.

It’s worth pointing out that some of the coolest features for getting more context, like Conversation Intelligence, are locked away in the most expensive plan.

Connect your data for the full HubSpot sales reporting picture

So, what’s the big takeaway? HubSpot sales reporting is fantastic for showing you what’s happening in your sales world. Using the standard and custom reports, you can keep a close eye on your pipeline, predict revenue, and manage your team. These tools give you the hard numbers.

But the real magic happens when you can finally answer why it’s all happening. HubSpot is great, but it can’t see the game-changing conversations happening in your help desk, the product ideas being thrown around in Slack, or the competitor notes tucked away in Google Docs. That’s where the story behind the numbers lives.

To make decisions that really move the needle, you have to connect those two worlds. When you bring all your company knowledge together, you can finally give your HubSpot reports the context they’re missing. Instead of just seeing that a deal was lost to a competitor, you can understand the exact reason why and figure out what to do about it.

Ready to find the "why" behind your sales data? eesel AI works with HubSpot and all your other apps to create a single source of truth that makes your reports smarter and more actionable. You can get it running in minutes and see for yourself how connecting your knowledge can change your sales game.