15 Important CRM Reports Your Business Should Use

If your business has invested in customer relationship management (CRM) software, you might be using it, primarily, to track and manage leads throughout the sales process, or as a database of customer information.

While the aforementioned are perfectly good uses of a CRM system, did you know you can leverage your CRM further to gain more benefits from your investment? After all, in addition to storing current customer data and sales information, a CRM also records details of your company’s past sales transactions. Therefore, your business has all it needs to drive analyses and insights and make data-driven decisions by harnessing that information through CRM reports. 

But, while it is possible to harness and utilize this data, since there is a lot of CRM data to wade through, you might feel overwhelmed with questions about how to use it. How will you know which pieces of data to harness and analyze? Which CRM reports are the most useful, and how can you use them to enhance your company’s profitability?  

If you’re new to CRM reporting, you might feel inundated with questions about the best ways to use the reports, but don’t worry. At Making That Sale, we understand there is a learning curve when it comes to making the most of your CRM software and CRM reports, and, to help you learn, we’ve prepared this guide introducing you to the 15 most important CRM reports that your business should use.

How Can CRM Reporting Help Your Business?

First of all, why bother with CRM reporting at all? Isn’t it enough that a CRM system helps you track current leads and manage current sales? While tracking leads and managing sales are vital processes that bring invaluable bottom-line benefits to your business, learning to make the most of CRM reports can help you get the most out of your CRM system.

Almost 80% of sales organizations use CRM systems for sales reporting and process automation to boost their own internal processes. Therefore, if you neglect using your CRM to its fullest potential, you run the risk of falling behind against competitors.

While a CRM’s lead tracking system is certainly useful, ignoring your CRM system’s reporting capabilities would be tantamount to ignoring money that is right under your nose. Here are four separate ways CRM reporting can improve your business processes.

Measure Your Business’s Health

Frequently generating and reviewing sales reports is just like going to the doctor’s for regular checkups, setting the standard for what’s normal at your company.

By benchmarking your sales department’s performance at steady intervals, you can conclusively determine how fast your company is growing, whether growth is on par with expectations, or whether there are areas for improvement in your sales processes.

Identify Effective Sales Strategies

A CRM can instantaneously process and analyze more data than a human could ever hope to comprehend to reveal areas of failure or success in your sales process.

For example, a CRM report could highlight exactly where in your sales pipeline customers are lost, disproportionately. Knowing where the loss is occurring then allows sales managers to divert more time and resources to retaining these customers.

In a similar vein, if your sales organization notices an uptick in revenue, sales volume, or sales performance, different reports can help you identify the exact cause of this happy news. CRM reporting can be used to strengthen areas of weakness and to highlight areas of strength, thereby using a twofold strategy to improve your sales operations.

Build Better Customer Profiles

As your business grows and changes, your target audience may shift away from the customers you originally set out to serve. Perhaps you developed new products, or customers from a new audience discovered an unanticipated desire or need for your product.

Though your business might have started out with a clean-cut ideal customer profile (ICP) when you first opened your doors, generating frequent reports on your customer demographics and attributes will help fine-tune and update your ICP, building a stronger and more accurate picture of your ideal customer based on the reality of your most profitable customers.

Monitor Sales Team Performance

On top of sales figures and customers, CRM platforms also log the performance of each individual sales rep, allowing sales managers to monitor activity and how business activities translate to results. On top of team-wide performance, a CRM system tracks metrics such as the number of leads an individual rep processed, the number of emails they sent or calls made, and the number of sales they closed.

Rather than relying on employee self-reports or micromanaging employees to track sales performance, a sales manager can generate a CRM report to obtain performance reviews for every member of the sales department. Generating such reports saves time and effort, and ensures accurate and objective reporting.

5 Sales Pipeline Reports

To start us off, let’s look at five CRM reports that are available to view on the company’s sales pipeline. The sales pipeline is the repeatable process by which your salespeople turn inbound leads into paying customers and is the foundation for activities engaged in by your entire sales department. As such, these are likely the most important reports you will need to generate to ensure your business is in good health.

1. Sales Funnel Report

Your sales pipeline is the road or highway a lead takes to become a customer. Therefore, your sales funnel report is a live traffic report for this road. It tells you how many leads, prospects, and sales opportunities are traveling along the pipeline at each stage of the sales process. 

That’s why our first sales pipeline report is the sales funnel report, which gives sales managers a broad understanding of the sales department’s current health.

Ideally, your company should have a gently decreasing number of customers at each stage of the pipeline as potential customers gradually drop out or are disqualified. Any sharp dips, bottlenecks, or congestion signifies an issue or an inefficiency in the sales process that needs further attention. 

By generating a sales funnel report, your business can take a headcount of incoming customers and allocate employees and resources to each pipeline stage as necessary. 

You might even go one step further to create a pipeline development report, which will show how your sales funnel numbers have changed in between sales periods. If you’ve made changes to the pipeline, analyzing the pipeline development report will tell you if changes made seem to be for the better or worse.

2. Conversion Rates Report

When looking at the sales performance of each pipeline stage, it can be helpful to determine what percentage of leads convert to sales, from one stage to the next. 

Though you’ll naturally have fewer and fewer leads at each subsequent stage as customers are disqualified, you’ll still want to investigate any unnatural dips in the conversion rate. To improve your final bottom line, you might be able to bolster potential dips with extra support and sales enablement materials, to achieve a more profitable outcome. 

As your business grows and obtains more net customers, comparing conversion rates reports is a much more accurate measure of your company’s efficiency than a raw sales funnel headcount, as they reveal if your sales processes are proportionately scaling and keeping up with your influx of customers.

3. Stage Duration Analysis Report

How long does it take for each lead to make a purchase? Eight out of ten American consumers named speed one of the top elements of a positive customer experience, so facilitating faster sales cycles is key to improving customer satisfaction.

A stage duration analysis report describes the average amount of time it takes a lead to pass through each stage of the sales pipeline. 

Though you might intuitively know the average amount of time it takes to complete a single sales cycle, a stage duration analysis report reveals if one stage might last disproportionately longer than the others, unfairly lengthening your sales cycle duration and turning customers away.

4. Sales Forecast Report

From the leads in your sales funnel, a sales forecast report extrapolates and predicts how many leads your business expects to close in the next sales period. This is useful in setting reasonable goals and expectations for your sales reps in the next period.

By using high and medium filters to identify highly qualified prospects and sales opportunities in the funnel, your sales department can hone in on and pay more attention to the highest-value leads, closing them first and ensuring that your true revenue stays close to forecasted revenue.

5. Lead Source Performance Report

Your business’s marketing and sales campaigns are interconnected. The inbound leads generated from marketing campaigns turn into prospects and sales opportunities for your sales teams to nurture into customers and sales. 

Our last sales pipeline report is a marketing report that describes the conversion rate of leads to customers, for leads brought in from each of the business’s marketing campaigns or communication channels.

This report helps your business optimize its marketing budget allocation and signals to your sales team which lead sources and channels show a higher chance of bringing in leads that become customers.

4 Sales Revenue Reports

Our next category of CRM reports is sales revenue reports, which deal with the revenue generated by the sales department. It is important to pay close attention to sales revenue reports as they are vital for your company’s strategic planning processes. Your company’s decision-makers and financial teams will always be eager to hear what these reports say because the findings help them plan your business’s budgets.

6. Revenue Report

First and foremost, how much gross revenue has your sales department brought in this sales period? Your sales teams are the primary breadwinners for your company, so your decision-makers are eager to see if you’ve generated enough revenue to break even with costs.

You may also want to generate a revenue growth rate report between sales periods. Revenue growth rate reports are used to determine if you’re making more or less money over time. 

7. Sales Goal Progress Report

At the start of each week, month, quarter, or sales period, your sales leaders likely work together with other decision-makers to set a sales goal, whether by revenue or volume.

A sales goal progress report measures how close your sales team is to reaching that goal – whether you’re falling behind and need to put in extra effort to catch up or if you’re on pace to meet or exceed expectations.

With an updated view of the money your sales teams will bring in, your finance team can tweak their financial strategy to accommodate the shortage or surplus as necessary. 

8. Top Products By Sales Volume Report

If your business operates in an e-commerce or retail space and sells a wide variety of products at different price points, a report of your company’s top products by sales volume tells your decision-makers which products have the highest market demand. 

With this information, your company could choose to run special promotions on these best products or increase the margins on a product to drive further revenue and profit. 

9. Profitability Report

Some customers or accounts will intrinsically be more valuable than others as they place larger orders or come back for repeat purchases.

A profitability report goes into detail about these high-value customers by analyzing the revenue they bring in versus the cost needed to serve them. With this information, your salespeople can identify and prioritize truly profitable customers and deploy personalized marketing strategies to close them faster. 

You can also take a profitability report one step further by using the traits from these highest-value customers to update your ideal customer profile. You might discover that a new target market has opened up for you or that your target audience has shifted from who your business originally intended to serve.

4 Sales Performance Reports

Next are our four sales performance reports, which detail sales reps’ performance. With this information, a sales leader or manager can evaluate performance, arrange for training, or reallocate resources as necessary to improve the department.

10. Team Activity Report

A team activity report details the exact actions your sales reps have been performing in the course of their jobs – the number of calls made, appointments scheduled, emails sent, or leads processed made by each individual rep and by the team as a whole.

By analyzing trends in these activities, a sales manager is able to identify specific practices that contribute the most to sales. For example, if you identified that your top-closing sales rep made 20% more phone calls than the rest of your reps, you might encourage the rest of the team to reach for the phone more often.

11. Individual Pipeline Reports

While we might have generated a CRM report for your department-wide sales pipeline, generating further reports on your sales reps’ individual pipelines can help you identify each rep’s contributions to the larger pipeline. 

By comparing everyone’s pipelines, you can identify your star reps who close the most and the fastest, and reward them appropriately. You may also discover reps who need a little more training and support, and you can then allocate extra resources to help them reach their full potential.

12. Average Time To Close Report

Overall, your average-time-to-close report measures how efficient your sales process is. However, on an individual basis, average time to close reports identify how long it takes for each rep to close a sale.

Although a fast customer journey is preferred, on average, it’s more important for your business to have a consistent customer journey between each transaction, to maintain a uniform customer experience. As such, it’s important to compare your reps’ individual average times to close and take steps to speed up any laggards.

13. Win-Loss Report

How many opportunities have your sales reps won or lost in each period? Your win-loss report describes the exact number of deals your sales team has closed versus the number of potential sales that got away. You can express this either as a ratio or a percentage of opportunities won, out of the total number of sales opportunities. 

Of course, you’ll want this number to be as high as possible. But as we mentioned earlier with the sales funnel report, it’s inevitable that leads gradually drop out from one pipeline stage to the next.

Using the win-loss reports on a more granular scale is better, because it allows you to identify each sales rep’s success rate. If you find that one sales rep is closing relatively few sales as compared to the rest of the team, it could be that there is a need for extra training or incentives.

2 Customer Loyalty Reports

Our final use of CRM reporting is to measure customer loyalty, describing customer behavior after interacting with the brand. 

14. Lost Sales Report

If a potential customer hasn’t followed up with your business in more than 30 days, it’s safe to assume they’re a lost sale and need to be removed from the sales pipeline.

But rather than leaving it at that, a lost sales report goes one step further than simply recording the number of lost opportunities. It goes on to measure exactly where and why a sale was lost. Perhaps leads from a certain email marketing campaign are disproportionately lost, or a large number of leads are looking for a product that your business doesn’t provide.

Knowing the exact number of lost leads by reason highlights specific and actionable areas for improvement, helping you cut away inefficiencies so you can provide more of what customers want.

15. Customer Churn Report

Customer churn refers to the percentage of customers who stop patronizing your company within a given sales period. This is mostly used by subscription-based companies but could also be used by product-based companies that see a lot of repeat customers.

According to Invesp, it costs five times as much to attract a new customer than to keep an existing one, and existing customers spend 31% more than new customers. As such, a high customer churn rate means a large potential revenue loss for your company.

By monitoring and keeping customer churn rate down, you can improve your revenue and lower your costs in one fell swoop.

5 Best Practices for Generating CRM Reports

Now that you know exactly what sort of CRM reports you should be monitoring, here are five key tips to making the most of your reports.

1. Have A Goal In Mind

What are you trying to unveil by analyzing this data? How can this report be used to improve and correct the path of your sales strategy going forward?

By having these questions in mind, you can prioritize which CRM report to generate first and focus on insights that matter the most at the moment.

2. Determine Your Reporting Timeframe

Your CRM report will look drastically different depending on whether you analyze data from the past week, month, quarter, or sales period. With this in mind, take care when determining your reporting timeframe.

In general, you’ll want to analyze data from longer periods of time for broader, high-level reports that set your department’s entire sales strategy. Conversely, CRM reports from the past week or month would be more suitable for minutely correcting your sales team’s day-to-day activities.

3. Use Images To Enhance Your Report

Whether your CRM report was generated for your own personal use, to be shared with your sales reps, or as part of your report to other company leaders, images such as graphs and tables go a long way in ensuring your CRM report is comprehensible and memorable to readers. This is especially important for reports that track metrics over time.

Higher-priced CRMs with more features may be able to generate graphics and tables based on the data report, creating a more polished report for easy use. Even if your CRM doesn’t have this feature, quickly plugging the data into Excel and generating a graph can greatly enhance the quality of your communication.

4. Tailor Your Reports To Your Audience

Though most of these CRM reports will be read and shared between sales leaders, managers, and representatives, some of them will instead be shared with other company functions such as the executive suite, marketing team, or finance team.

As such, when creating a high-level CRM report for another department, take a moment to think: What key pieces of information matter the most to these people? Once you determine which key pieces of information are needed, highlight these insights and cut down on sales-specific terminology and data. Your coworkers will appreciate the extra effort, and inter-department strategizing will go much more smoothly.

5. Develop Great Data Management Procedures

In a global survey by Deloitte, 90% of executives said that their organization collects data from the physical world through ERP, CRM, or PLM systems, but only 50% say that they use the data efficiently.

In other words, a common pitfall for businesses using CRM systems to generate reports is that their reports don’t make the best use of the data collected. This is likely due to improper data collection and management practices that result in incomplete or inaccurate data.

As such, your sales organization should take steps to collect only as much data as it needs to generate its CRM reports and to ensure that your sales teams are inputting customer details frequently and accurately. 

With a streamlined data collection process creating the best CRM reports, your business will be well-equipped to plan, set, and optimize its sales strategies, driving unprecedented sales success.