10 Essential CRM Reports For Driving Sales

All businesses need a CRM, yet not all can implement it successfully. 

One of the key factors that differ a company that is able to drive sales from the one that struggles is how they use CRM analytics. The latter is crucial for understanding what your customers are doing, where they are coming from, and how they interact with your brand or product.

This article will outline 10 essential CRM reports to help you determine how successful your business really is.

What is CRM reporting?

CRM reports, essential for businesses, analyze the sales pipeline. They detail the number, potential value, and projected closure dates of sales opportunities. This clear snapshot of sales activities aids strategic decision-making, enabling businesses to set realistic goals and track progress. CRM reports thus provide critical insights for effective customer relationship management.

CRM reporting includes loads of data for the analysis of business campaign effectiveness. We’ll break it down into three main categories: 

• Sales reports that help analyze pipeline performance.
• Marketing reports that allow evaluating marketing campaign strategies.
• Customer data reports that aim at providing insights into profitable customers.

How can CRM reporting help your business?

Did you know that businesses that use CRM software see sales increase by 29%, sales productivity increase by 34%, and sales forecast accuracy increase by 42%?

One of the reasons why CRM brings such results is CRM reporting, owing to which you can track your company goals, find problems, and come up with effective solutions, which will result in your steady business growth.

CRM reports allow you to analyze your customer behavior trends and patterns over time. This way, you can better understand how effective your sales and marketing campaigns are. In particular, CRM reports help you:

• Find any missing data points that may result in adverse business outcomes.
• Conduct sales performance tracking. Namely, they help you identify which sales reps are reaching potential clients and how many opportunities they’re passing up because of missing data.
• Monitor sales pipeline, identify trends, analyze customer segments, and much more.

Another significant advantage of CRM reporting is that it helps you never miss out on any of your customers, hence improving your customer retention.

Apart from benefits to the whole business, CRM reporting brings value to all roles within your company. For example:

• A sales representative can access their performance data and improve pipeline management by focusing efforts on the most problematic stages.
• A sales manager can track the performance of their team and elaborate on effective sales coaching techniques to improve the performance of each sales professional.
• An executive can analyze the reporting data to see whether the strategy they’ve chosen is right for their business reality.
• An investor can see whether putting their money was the right decision or whether the business has potential to pay off.

CRM reports, once being set up correctly, empower your company with actionable data, so you can take steps towards achieving your goals, decreasing operating costs, and increasing profitability. 

Top 10 CRM sales reports for your business

Now that you understand what CRM reporting is, let’s look at the list of reports to consider for driving sales in your company.

Top 10 CRM reports your business needs:

1. Sales funnel report
2. Contacts report
3. Profitability report
4. Activity report
5. Top-performing products report
6. Campaign performance report
7. Sales forecast report
8. Win-loss sales report
9. Lead source report
10. Goal progress report

1. Sales funnel report

When it comes to converting leads, the sales process often takes a unique course. No two businesses operate within the same context, so your marketing managers and sales representatives need to understand your lead’s journey well enough.

A clear, well-defined sales funnel report is the key to making accurate predictions about how your prospects are moving through the sales funnel and understanding any strengths or weaknesses within each phase of the process. This helps you build more effective communication with them and lead your prospects right to the closing stage.

In this context, sales funnel CRM reports are essential for conversion rate optimization. They come in handy when analyzing lead segments, deals, and possible bottlenecks along your customer journey. A comprehensive sales funnel report provides you with an accurate snapshot of everything related to the overall progress of your marketing and sales campaigns.

2. Contacts report

Contacts are your most valuable currency as a salesperson. You never know when someone will become a customer, so it’s essential to have contact information at hand to generate more leads and offer them what they need from the start. 

A good contacts report should include all sorts of data about how many times this person has been contacted recently by the sales representative and through what channels (e.g., email, phone call, social media, etc.).

You can use it as an opportunity-priority ranking system and quickly get in touch with people who might be interested in what your company has to offer. As it is known, a warm lead is way better than a cold lead, and a known contact can help you achieve the deal closure faster than an unknown contact.

3. Profitability report

The client who pays the most for your product or service might not actually be the most profitable. Although they will pay you more, you can’t concentrate your company resources solely on them, as this way, you might pass by other prospects who have the potential to become your high-level customers. It’s a paradox game that can cost you profits lost.

A profitability report can help you identify the truly profitable customers so that they are not left alone to fend for themselves in a competitive marketplace. 

Having access to specific information about customer profiles, your sales reps, marketers, and leadership can adequately assess profitability rates of all clients by a certain parameter (e.g., product category or geographic location) and focus effort on these customers.

4. Activity report

You should be able to integrate your CRM into every part of the business for comprehensive record keeping. 

With activity reports, you can monitor sent emails, calls, appointments, and subsequent actions of your sales reps combined with records in the respective database systems on a daily or weekly basis. 

These reports will allow you to familiarize yourself better than ever with who is contacting which clients and measure success rates when reaching out to potential customers. What is more, they help you track emails from unknown contacts that can harm you and take corresponding measures, e.g., implementing a service like PhishProtection that will help you stay safe from these kinds of risky emails.

With such a report, your sales reps can save a lot of valuable time and effort and gain clear insights into their conversations with every lead — so you can see what aspects you need to improve. 

5. Top-performing products report

One of the best ways to maximize profit margins, especially for an eCommerce business, is by focusing on top-performing products. 

A top-performing products report will help small business owners understand which products they should prioritize and work with. This way, when the time for sales promotions or cross-selling of other inventory items comes, this knowledge will help them make an educated decision about what products sell better than others. 

You can check out weekly updates about different ‘winners’ if you want quick insights into how well certain items are being sold at your company.

A top-performing products report is thus an effective tool for showcasing hot selling products, helping your company see the right way to grow its market.

6. Campaign performance report

Campaign performance reports help you dive deeper into campaign-specific engagement and conversion data. For instance, they can tell you which marketing channels work best at attracting new customers and converting them into repeat buyers.

These findings allow small business owners to maximize their gains by providing specific measurements, such as profit margins for different types of advertisements, and pointing at the most successful approaches in generating and managing sales leads.

Such a report will allow you to better manage your marketing budget and grow the customer base in a shorter time. 

With this valuable information, it’s easy to maximize the results from any campaign or strategy by measuring its impact on budget allocation and growth rate metrics, like the number of sales per day during promotion periods compared to non-promotion ones.

7. Sales forecast report

Depending on the buyer’s journey, there may be multiple segments that show their interest in buying a service or product. 

A sales forecast report allows sorting potential buyers with high and medium filters to see who might convert soon and who needs more personalized marketing strategies or follow-up methods, so they move along the conversion process faster.

This report helps you focus on those leads who are most likely to convert into buying customers and motivate less-ready potential customers with every possible manner of communication, reminding them about your special offers or incentives, so they hurry up completing transactions. 

8. Win-loss sales report

Your company can use win-loss sales reports to monitor the number of opportunities you land, thus keeping an eye on your ability to close sales. In particular, this report displays statistics for wins, losses, open opportunities, and the total number of opportunities per salesperson.

And what do experts think about doing a win-loss analysis? According to Todd Berkowitz, the Research Vice President of Gartner, companies that do a thorough win-loss analysis perform much better in terms of segmentation, product strategy choices, and sales enablement, which hence brings them 15% to 30% increase in revenue and up to 50% improvement in win rates.

9. Lead source report

When it comes to sales efficiency, the number one rule is that you can’t be effective if your effectiveness isn’t maximized.

To achieve this goal, you should find out where prospects are coming from and then work with them accordingly without wasting efforts on lead generation activities that won’t yield results anyway.

Lead source report will help you better understand what source of leads works best for your company, say whether you can gain the lion part of them via email, LinkedIn prospecting, or combine several marketing strategies to boost your lead generation.

10. Goal progress report

A goal progress report has the potential to change your sales team. You’ll be able to see exactly what they need, provide necessary sales coaching, and just make sure you’re giving them everything that will help them reach those goals quickly. 

This report is a great way to get an idea of where your individual performance stands and how you can contribute more. It also tells everyone on the team what direction they need to take for success, ensuring there’s no confusion about which strategy will work best with any particular role in the company.

Meanwhile, tracking total revenue or deals won over a specific period can give insights into how well you perform as a leader of your business unit.

Wrapping up

CRM is a multifunctional system with many features you can use for your business growth. One of such features is reporting. We’ve provided you with 10 CRM reports you can apply in your company for driving sales. 

And if you’re already using CRM reports, let us know which of them work best for your team. If not, we welcome you to Snov.io free CRM, which abounds in features you can effectively use for your sales and marketing campaigns.