Best CRM reports to run in marketing and sales

When it comes to customer relationship management (CRM) reports, things can go one of two ways. Either, it can:

1. Drive results
2. Drive you up the wall

When done right, your CRM reports should reflect your key performance indicators (KPIs) and help you achieve them. Whether that’s identifying leads, tapping new business from target customers, or increasing your wallet share in existing accounts. 

There’s no one-size-fits-all in CRM. You’ll need to figure out what reports you need to run so that you can get the most juice from your software. 

What CRM reports should I run? 

From a sales and marketing perspective, there are certain gold-dust CRM reports you could run, such as: 

• How your pipeline, conversion rate, and sales activities look
• How your marketing is performing; who is visiting your website, opening your emails, and engaging with you on social media
• Who is currently in a sales cycle and who is looking to buy a product that you supply

But where do you start? As any growth-hungry business knows, there are only so many hours in a day – and you don’t want to spend all of them trying to get actionable insights from reams of CRM data. 

Being selective is the key. The first step is to work backward from your most important measures of success, such as CSAT scores, total pipeline value, or cost per lead. Then you’ll need to ask yourself “what do I need to know about my customers and their journey to improve these KPIs?”.

In some cases, the KPI might be identical to the report you’ll generate from within the CRM, such as the total pipeline value. Other times, it may be that another layer of information is needed, which may take a little brainstorming to figure out. 

If you’re not sure about your success metrics, check our favorite KPIs for improving customer experience. 

How to build a powerful suite of CRM reports

A good CRM provider – including Workbooks – will work with you to figure all this out and more. By assessing your current tech stack, workflows, and the business intelligence you need to continue growing, you select which CRM reports need pride of place on your dashboard. 

4ways Healthcare used our shared-success approach during CRM implementation, to get the most out of the vast amount of data they had on tap. It worked – helping them grow 10% more than their competitors. 

But, if you’re going it alone, here are some of the most powerful CRM reports you can add to your fleet to supercharge your sales and marketing activities.

The best CRM reports for sales

Sales by region

Your CRM platform may come with all manner of bells and whistles – but don’t overlook the most simple measures of success. When you log into your dashboard, you need to see an immediate snapshot of your team’s performance. 

Your YTD sales by region (and total global sales) should be set up as a configurable report that allows you to see not only the cash value of your sales but how it aligns with your yearly targets.

CPU ratio per sales rep

CPU ratio is a forecast based on your rep’s deal appraisals. Business is sorted into three buckets – committed, possible, and upside, where committed is your surefire new business and upside are the deals that your reps are dubious about. 

Drilling down into your new business by degree of certainty gives you a more accurate sales forecast by week, month, quarter, or year.

Current opportunities pipeline

 An actionable report on your opportunities pipeline should not only tell you what the opportunity is and its worth – but who it is allocated to, what stage it is at, and what activities are scheduled for it. 

Most importantly, this allows you to see where there are opportunities but no follow-ups. By highlighting deals at high risk of slippage, you can take action and avoid losing new business. 

Conversion rate by rep

For your CRM reports to help you meet KPIs, they should empower your sales team to perform at their best. By looking at the win rate and average deal size per rep, you can assess where your team’s strengths lie and strategise accordingly. For example, by being able to view who has the best success in closing large deals, you can rejig your activities to allocate the best team member to certain deal types.

On that note, here are four insane lead nurturing strategies for when you’re looking to increase conversions.

Pipeline by rep

Another useful way of assessing sales rep performance is to review the pipeline by rep according to whether the deals are qualified, unqualified, engaged, or preferred. 

Having an overview of lead status by rep lets you see how your sales team is performing, and how successfully they’re taking new business through the pipeline from qualified leads through to the preferred stage (where your company is in close runnings to win their business). This way, your team can prioritise their strategy and see weaknesses in the sales cycle. 

The best CRM reports for marketing

Closed won by campaign 

By viewing how many deals you closed by each campaign this year, you get a snapshot of which types have the best ROI. Of course, this depends somewhat on the initial investment. An event will naturally be far more resource-intensive than a newsletter. 

By analysing which are your most lucrative campaigns – a process known as attribution – you’ll get a good idea of how to plan your upcoming budget, especially by identifying outreach types that yield little success.

Unassigned leads

Once your marketing team identifies leads, you need to launch the details to the sales team. By having unassigned leads set up as a report on your dashboard, you can see instantly whether any hot targets are gathering dust. 

New opportunities by month, by campaign

The opportunities generated from campaigns may vary seasonally, or month-by-month depending on a myriad of variables. Fast-paced companies can benefit from a more granular view of campaign success to ensure they hit the ground running each month and continually refine their approach.

Excess stock

Why would the marketing department want an overview of existing stock levels? If your CRM report can flag where excesses are building up, you can decide whether to run a specific campaign to stimulate more interest in that product and shift stock.

Webform submissions 

One of the best things CRM can do for a marketing department is give a 360° overview of customers and their digital footprint. Webform submissions show where people are going on your website and what content is hooking them in. These buying signals can then be set up to generate sales leads. 

Let’s say someone downloads one of your whitepapers and then navigates over to your pricing and implementation page. This is a strong signal for buying interest, so you’ll want to generate a real-time CRM alert to make sure your sales team makes that call pronto. 

But these are far from the only measures that can boost your marketing activities. Check our top five marketing KPIs and how CRM can help you track them

Remember – it’s all about refinement 

The best approach to CRM means continually checking in and refining your approach. Take stock of whether your CRM reports are giving you the visibility you need – and if not, what needs to change? Is it the input, the way the data is presented, or do you need another metric entirely? 

Our free guides are written to help you get more out of your CRM. Choose one from below and it’s yours to keep:

Understanding what you need from CRM

Implementing CRM – how to do it right

Creating the conditions for CRM success