CRM reports you must run for deeper insights

How CRM reporting can change your business

The CRM report is a key CRM feature that fuels this statistic, as 47 percent of CRM users experience substantial gains in customer satisfaction. Businesses may use reporting to hone in on customer activity, enhance the customer experience, and maximize retention.

The CRM report not only helps companies to locate and sell with precision but it must be done correctly. The Harvard Business Review recently discussed the value of properly deploying CRM reports, highlighting the many issues that a poor CRM report poses.

It addressed sales reps withholding bad news, a lack of definition clarity, and poor tracking of results versus predictions.

Poor CRM reports may provide the illusion of regulation when providing poor facts. This isn't the most advanced approach to organizing, to be sure.

In this post, we'll look at the great significance of the CRM report and provide some tips for ensuring that it's used adequately in your business.

CRM reports are useful to businesses in a variety of ways, including the following:

• It helps them distill what is happening in the industry, a key advantage of deploying a CRM.
• The data it provides helps make strategic business decisions.
• Managers can track performance and make tactical changes where necessary.

A CRM report can take several forms (more on this in the following section) and is used by a wide variety of customers, including sales reps, middle management, C-Suite executives, and investors, all of which can greatly benefit from a CRM. It is one of the most important aspects to remember when adopting CRM is the reporting function.

A sales representative can assess their pipeline and decide where to focus their efforts.

A middle manager may monitor their team's success and use the information gathered to report to senior management and make operational adjustments.

An executive will see how the approach they devised is working in the day-to-day realities of business operations.

An investor will check to see if their investment is doing well or assess the value of a potential acquisition.

CRM report offers evidence that drives informed decision-making and can take several forms; let's look at some of the various types of CRM reports.

What insights can CRM reports provide into overall business objectives?

There are several types of CRM reports, each of which provides insight into a particular field of business activity.

Most CRMs can have some simple reporting capabilities:

Sales:

looking at the sales reports and how the business is performing against the target.

Marketing:

tracking campaigns and inbound leads from email to social media.

Customer data:

assessing the customer profile for the business and insight into the most profitable customers. Most CRM systems would include both out-of-the-box reporting and the ability for users to create customized reports.

Dashboards are the report's standard quick view window, structured to distill key information in a simple format.

Sales Pipeline reports

Key sales metrics must be tracked, particularly in corporate sales, where sales periods can be lengthy. Reports should assist the company in understanding how the sales force is doing and provide individual reps with guidance on key operations.

Since there is so much going on in corporate sales, it is very easy for tasks to slip between the cracks; sales results play an important part in keeping everything on track.

A contact report provides a sales representative with a bird's-eye view of the sales contacts in the database.

This can be broken down by sector, job type, level of engagement, last contact date, and other factors.

This data will be used to assess a set of contacts, allowing sales reps to recognize important contacts and openings for introductions.

For instance, if a sales rep wants to break into a new organization, he or she may find friends that have worked there, are at the same stage or work in a different field.

A sales funnel report summarizes all transactions in the sales pipeline. This helps sales staff in determining where they can focus their attention and ensuring that nothing is overlooked.

Sales funnels can follow a certain ratio in which a certain number of deals advance to the next stage of the funnel.

Sales staff will spot difficulties by seeing a quick overview of the funnel – either there isn't enough at the top of the funnel, which will trigger a problem in a few months, or deals aren't going down the funnel as predicted, highlighting an issue with the operation of the sales process or the quality of leads in the funnel.

Revenue Report

A revenue report will assist a company in tracking it against expectations and further delving into where the revenue comes from.

For instance, maybe the bulk of revenue comes from LinkedIn leads or outbound telesales – knowing this will help guide marketing efforts. It can even break down revenue by a sales representative and evaluate their performance.

A win and loss report can assist a company in determining whether it is winning or losing deals in real-time. This is extremely useful for comparing individual rep and team results to goals and business benchmarks.

Profitability reports

These reports do not focus on deals but instead on sales per client. This is extremely beneficial for business customers who rely on account-based marketing to increase sales from current customers.

The profitability report would contain expenses and sales so that the true worth can be determined. Customers that produce a lot of sales but need a lot of management, for instance, can have poor profitability.

A business may begin to make tactical decisions about where to focus account-based marketing activities by determining the profitability of existing customers.

Perhaps a particular business is worth putting in more effort, or there is a highly profitable type of customer. Whatever the findings, a company now has the information it needs to make strategic decisions.

Sales reps forecasts

Sales forecasts are one of the most critical (and difficult) reports to generate for all stakeholders. CRM can boost report accuracy by up to 40% when used in sales.

Sales predictions enable a company to prepare accurate reports and allocate resources appropriately. When a company is bullish on revenues and sees extra cash in three months, key capital acquisitions will be made early – so if this prediction is incorrect, they are wasting money they don't have. To summarize, reports must be as reliable as possible.

Accurate reporting is especially difficult in companies that rely on a small number of high-ticket transactions. Big sales are difficult to estimate, and there are only a limited number of deals – one deal not closing will have a huge negative effect on sales.

A considerable number of sales representatives struggle with forecasting – there are also several variables to consider, and predicting whether or not deals may close is difficult. Nonetheless, a reliable sales report is critical, and sales teams can work diligently to deliver accurate reports to the rest of the organization.

One strategy for more accurate sales forecasting is to produce scenario research that considers a variety of outcomes. This is a helpful exercise in and of itself because it requires the sales rep to thoroughly evaluate the details and come up with strategies for mitigating risk and achieving the best results.

Goal progress reports

These reports will cover a wide variety of operations, including sales and marketing and customer service. The reports examine a key metric and how the company performs in relation to that metric.

The goal progress report in marketing, for instance, might look at how many website visits to a specific page turn into email subscribers.

A report might look at the percentage of proposals that end in signed agreements or the total lifetime value in sales. A customer care report can examine customer loyalty or the time it takes for the company to respond to help tickets.

Goal progress reports are important in a few ways:

• They help a business determine the most important metrics in the business; the adage that you "make what you measure" means thinking carefully about what you track. These discussions should take place as a result of the use of goal progress reports.
• They assist businesses with understanding how they are doing in relation to key metrics. Performance against a wide variety of core targets should be measured alongside financial metrics, allowing the company to consider cause and effect.

A low response rate to service tickets can be associated with a reduction in consumer lifetime value. It is not always simple, but having a clear objective allows the analysis to begin.

The most valuable reports to run in your CRM

A business has different reporting requirements and can see value in other places; here are a few questions to ask when determining which reports are most important to you:

1. Will this report change how we run a business? What changes will it generate, and how important are they?
2. How time-consuming is it to run this report accurately? Do the benefits outweigh the costs?
3. Are there better reports we can use to drive change and improvement in our business?

Reporting should still be improved, and the importance of reporting should be balanced against the cost.

So many businesses report in the same manner, with no thought given about why. Hopefully, you now have a better understanding of the right CRM reports to use and, even more critically, how to handle the practice of CRM reporting.

CRM reporting: Types and categories

Before we get into the key forms of CRM reporting and some samples of reports to search for and run with your CRM program, it's important to consider the difference between canned and custom reports.

Three data types can help you understand what each report can give the business. Sales reporting, campaign reporting, and consumer reporting are the three categories.

Canned CRM reporting:

Canned CRM reports are already installed. These can be limited at times; however, they are simple to run and interpret.

Custom CRM reporting:

Custom CRM reports allow you to incorporate one-of-a-kind variables into your reporting suite. This entails learning the complexities of your company's sales or marketing process.

Sales reporting:

Sales reporting includes important issues about the sales funnel or pipeline. These data sources include revenue, total sales pipeline, updated sales targets, and sales team member results.

Campaign reporting:

This reporting is linked to marketing processes. Email data, landing page data, lead source generation, and other forms of marketing data are all included.

Customer reporting:

Customer reporting information should be accessible to all sales and marketing departments to improve their processes.