It’s absolutely essential that you track valuable metrics to see how your marketing—and your business as a whole—is performing.
That’s especially true for companies that use customer relationship management (CRM) platforms. These tools help you gather and organize customer data so you can learn about your audience—but that learning only happens if you take the time to conduct analytics using your CRM.
That’s the reason for using CRM reports, which can help you compile and view metrics in a coherent format for analytics. But which CRM reports should you keep up with, and what can each one tell you? Keep reading to find out.
6 types of CRM reports
There are countless types of CRM reports out there, but not all of them are necessarily going to help you. However, there are a handful that you should be aware of. We’ll cover them below, examining what each one is and how it can help you.
1. Sales pipeline report
Almost any CRM with CRM reporting features should include a sales pipeline report. This type of report looks at your overall sales performance for a given time period. It does so by examining metrics like conversion rate and the number of deals in each stage of your pipeline.
This report is valuable because it gives you a very basic, straightforward look at whether or not your marketing has been successful—more specifically, whether or not you’re earning revenue, and if so, how much.
You can use this report to help you see where your sales process is struggling so you can improve it. For example, maybe you see that your conversion rate is staggeringly low for a particular location. You can then revamp your marketing for that location to drive more sales.
2. New leads report
A new leads report looks at exactly what it sounds like—how many new leads you’re earning over a given period of time. Driving leads is crucial, because without leads, you won’t have anyone to convert.
In addition to helping you monitor your lead volume (that is, how many leads you currently have in your pipeline), a new leads report lets you segment your leads to see how many leads you’re earning from each individual source.
A new leads report is great for giving you insights into how effective your top-of-funnel marketing is. Maybe you have a high sales rate, but you’re not generating many new leads. That tells you your bottom-of-funnel marketing is fine, but your top-of-funnel content needs more work.
3. Revenue forecast report
A revenue forecast report gives you a look at the amount of revenue you’re expected to earn in the near future based on your current metrics. Naturally, this measurement is only an estimate, but it’s still worth looking at when you’re trying to plan for your budget and sales going forward.
You can typically adjust revenue forecast reports based on how far ahead you want to predict, as well as by confidence level. A high confidence level focuses only on the amount of revenue your CRM is confident you can earn, while a low confidence level also accounts for potential revenue that’s less certain.
Learning this information is a simple way to see if you’re on track to meet your revenue goals. If you find that you’re expected to earn far less revenue than you’d planned on, for instance, you’ll want to reevaluate your budget and probably revamp some of your marketing to drive more sales.
Yet another vital type of CRM reporting feature is the losses report. A losses report shows you an overview of all the sales opportunities you’ve lost within a given time period. That happens whenever a lead goes with a competitor or simply decides not to buy from you.
As disappointing as it is to look at all the sales you’ve missed out on, it can teach you quite a lot. These reports do more than simply show you how many sales you’ve lost—they show you why you’ve lost them.
You can segment your reports by different groups to see which ones are most heavily affected. That will give you insights into what factors are causing you to lose sales—for instance, if most of your losses are happening around one particular product, you know you should assess the weaknesses of that product or its marketing.
5. Funnel report
A funnel report is in some ways similar to a standard sales pipeline report. However, the main difference is that a funnel report considers both sales and leads, and puts more emphasis on how those leads are progressing through your sales funnel.
You can easily segment funnel reports by different stages of the marketing funnel to get a picture of how effective your campaigns are. For instance, you might compare how many top-of-funnel leads you have versus how many middle-of-funnel leads you have.
You can also look at the quality of those leads in addition to quantity by looking at different lead values. Overall, this information lets you easily compare different stages of your funnel to see which of your campaigns are proving the most effective and which ones need work.
6. Activity report
An activity report allows you to easily evaluate team performance.
With Nutshell’s activity report, you can filter by users or teams, select the timeframe you’d like to report on, and compare activity to previous timeframes. You can even set up quotas and goals for your team.
In addition, you can connect activities to outcomes like won or lost leads, so your team can focus on actions that drive the best results.
Seamlessly save, share, and export activity reports to keep your team in the loop.
Upgrade your CRM reporting with Nutshell
There are a handful of CRMs out there that include CRM reporting features, but none do it quite like Nutshell. Our CRM has an entire tab dedicated specifically to analytics reports, and you can view all the above types of reports there.
Better yet, though, you can use Nutshell to create countless custom reports based around just about any metric of your choosing. That means whatever it is that you want insights into, you can find those insights through Nutshell.
Interested in trying out our tool? Just check out our free 14-day trial!
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