5 Must-Have CRM Reports, to Get the Best Out of Your System

If you have a customer relationship management (CRM) and want to improve customer satisfaction, you should use it to generate reports with valuable insights on customer behavior. These documents will allow you to assess the efficiency of your team, make improvements to the sales pipeline, and create personalized marketing campaigns to maximize your profit.

In this article, we'll tell you about the most important types of CRM reports that sales managers across all industries use to improve business growth. Plus, we'll share a step-by-step guide on composing custom CRM reports.

Why Do You Need CRM Reports?

In a nutshell, CRM reports are generated documents essential to better understand what's going on in your business and to make informed decisions. They enable you to make more sales, achieve your goals more efficiently, measure key performance indicators like ROI, understand your ideal customer profile, keep track of sales trends, and promptly detect problems.

Based on the reporting capabilities of your software, such reports can be instantly created with the CRM reporting tools and are highly used by sales and marketing departments. The y can help create personalized marketing campaigns and answer data-based questions.

In this article, we'll analyze the step-by-step process of creating any type of CRM report. They are all built on similar principles and differ only in details.

How to Create a CRM Report in 3 Steps

First, you should decide whether you need to create a CRM report from scratch at all. Alternatively, you might want to use a ready-made one to track key metrics.

Most probably, your CRM platform reporting features a lot of handy templates that you can use for free. You can either customize them a bit or use their default variants.

The biggest drawback of ready-made CRM reports is the fact that they might be too generic. They might fail to include metrics that are essential for your industry and company.

Their custom reports are much more helpful and allow you to get actionable insights and answers to specific questions. Below, we'll analyze the process of creating custom reports for any type of business.

Step 1: Weed Out Inaccurate Client Information with an Audit

Let's start with the statistics:

• Around 30% of all the data that businesses have about their clients is inaccurate

• 40% of consumers switch to a new email address once every two years

• Every year, businesses lose $32,000 per sales representative because of outdated client information

To avoid losses and maximize your revenue, you should update your customer database systematically. The most common reason for mistakes in the database is human errors, followed closely by a lack of internal communication between company departments.

Determine Who Can Access Sales Data

You should decide which team members will have the right to access customer data and edit it within the CRM system. If something goes wrong, you'll quickly find out who is responsible for it.

Ideally, only a small group of people should be in charge of the database with your client information. Centralizing ownership of CRM data is the most efficient way of adding value to it.

However, the business processes of some companies are organized, so almost all of the staff need to work with the CRM platform. If this is your case, you should:

• Educate everyone about your security measures

• Make sure all staff members invent complex passwords

• Appoint a supervisor who will ensure everyone works with the CRM system correctly

• Explain to your teams how to handle phishing attempts via phone calls or email

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Monitor CRM Data Errors

You'll need to set a schedule for reviewing and updating the information. Plus, it would be wise to inform your team members about the most common errors connected with working with customer data:

• Incorrect tagging or custom field errors

• Automation that changes the wrong things

• Forms that double-submit

To avoid these issues, you should choose a good customer relationship management system and explain to your employees what and how they should do it manually to ensure everyone is on the same page.

Tips on How to Set Up CRM System to Monitor Valuable Insights

If you have never used customer relationship management (CRM) software before, you might struggle to fill it with data. Here is what you should do to collect exhaustive information about your customers in one place:

• Import data from Excel, Google Sheets, or other spreadsheet programs

• Check your old emails

• Get the information from printed documents in your file cabinets if you use them

• Integrate your payment processor, forms tool, project management tool, support tool, and other software with the CRM

If you tick all these boxes, you'll import into your database the detailed history of your past transactions with each of your clients.

If you end up with too much CRM data, you should leave only those facts that are relevant to your sales activities. For instance, you should know how often this person used to buy your products in the past and how actively they used your promotional offers. But if this person loves to discuss politics with your reps after finalizing the purchase, you can delete this information from the database.

Step 2: Pick the Right Types of CRM Reports

It's not enough to collect the CRM data. To be able to monetize it, you need to interpret it — and that's exactly what reports do. All reports can be classified into three categories:

• Sales-related

• Customer-related

• Campaign-related

All of them should help you make data-driven decisions as well as set and achieve sales goals.

Main Sales Reports

In this article, we will look into several CRM report types. We consider these to be the most important when working on customer satisfaction and creating marketing campaigns.

Sales pipeline report. It enables you to assess the state of affairs in your sales pipeline. You'll be able to detect new sales opportunities, set goals for your sales team, and forecast your revenue. When creating a pipeline, reports can filter your sales by territory, time period, type of consumer, and other parameters.

Goal progress report. When you set a goal for your team, they will need to complete multiple stages to achieve it. The report allows you to monitor the productivity of your employees at each phase of achieving the goal. You'll understand which measures you should take to boost your team's efficiency.

Sales conversion report. Your team might generate a lot of leads but not all of them will convert. You should always strive to improve your conversion rate, and the report will facilitate the process of achieving this goal. You'll identify the percentage of customers who failed to convert, analyze their behavior patterns and detect methods that will let you motivate consumers for the purchase.

In addition to sales conversion reports, you can generate lead source analysis reports. It is commonly used to calculate ROAS and CPA. The lead source analysis report will help you choose the best channels when planning the budget for campaigns.

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Profitability report. How much revenue does each product bring? Which products bring you the most profit? At what time and through which sales channels? You'll detect those products that perform worse than others and will either fine-tune them or modify your sales strategy for them. With a profitability report you'll be able to set more realistic profitability goals for future sales.

Sales forecast report. Forecasts make sense only if you compare the actual results with what was predicted. Sales forecast reports will enable you to see to which extent and in what aspects your forecasts turned out to be true. You'll use this data to improve your sales strategy and set more realistic goals for your sales team.

Sales performance report. This report goes hand in hand with a deal predictions report. With sales performance reports, you can keep track of the accuracy of the predictions for the deals forecasted. The system will compare the number of sales with the data from the previous period so you can adjust your strategy.

A CRM can generate many more types of reports — for instance, if you want to improve customer service, you can generate customer service reports. Other essential CRM reports you should keep an eye on when working on sales processes include revenue forecast reports and sales activity reports.

Step 3: Determine Relevant Metrics to Measure

To be efficient, you need to set goals for your team members and track their progress in achieving these goals. Here are a few examples of pipeline and channel metrics metrics that you might find helpful:

• Close rate

• Renewal rate

• Amount of new revenue

• Sales stage duration

• Sales cycle duration

• Revenue generated by a campaign

• User goal completion rate on the web

• Time per website visit

• Customer lifetime value

• Cross-sell ratio

• Up-sell ratio

• Email list growth rate

• Average time to resolution

• Average number of service calls per day

• Complaint time to resolution

• Average service cost per service interaction

• Percentage compliance with SLAs

• Calls lost before being answered

• Average call handling time

Plus, you might want to know the number of your:

• Prospects

• New clients

• Retained clients

• Sales calls made

• Sales calls per opportunity

• Open opportunities

• Proposals given

• Campaigns

• Campaign responses

• Campaign purchases

• Clients acquired by campaign

• Client referrals

• Web page views

• Cases handled

• Cases closed the same day

• Customer callbacks

Metrix Classification for Custom CRM Reports

This list is far from being complete. To facilitate the process of selecting the most relevant metrics, you might want to classify them all into three buckets:

• Business performance

• User adoption

• Customer perception

All the metrics that you use for data analysis should fit your overall strategy. For each department of your company, you should set only those metrics that are relevant to its activities.

However, it doesn't mean that you should set to your marketing team all the metrics that are related to marketing. Instead, you should define your goals. Let's use an example to explain what we mean.

Essential CRM Reports to Minimize the Expenses

Let's imagine that your goal is to minimize the expenses of acquiring and managing clients. Here are the metrics that you should consider:

• The number of new clients — How much does it cost you to attract a new client?

• The number of retained clients — This metric will enable you to discover the difference between acquiring new clients and retaining those whom you already have. You'll see on which points you'll need to focus more effort.

• The sales funnel duration — How much time do your sales reps now spend on each client? Do they need to devote more time to each person to sell more? Or do they need to reduce the time they spend on each individual to be able to communicate with more clients?

These metrics will help you learn how much time and money you need for your existing expenses as well as forecast what else you'll need to do to keep scaling.

CRM reports to Shorten Sales Cycle Length

Now, let's consider another example. Let's imagine that you strive to reduce the length of your sales process timeline. In this case, you should focus on the following metrics:

• Sales cycle duration — How long is your current sales cycle? How much time does each of its phases take? Will the performance of your sales team improve if you decrease or increase the duration of specific stages of the pipeline?

• Number of sales calls per opportunity — The fewer calls your employees need to make to motivate the client for the purchase, the better. How can you reduce the number of calls you make?

• Number of new clients — You should calculate the number of acquired clients within limited time intervals, such as each quarter.

CRM report insights Necessary When You want to Expand Emailing list

In our third example, let's imagine that you'd like to expand your email list. Here are the key metrics for this goal:

• Number of campaigns — Do you need to send more or fewer emails to the recipients?

• Number of new clients acquired by campaign — Which campaigns deliver the best results and which ones the worst? How can you fix the performance of your weakest campaigns? How many new clients can you expect to get after each campaign?

• Email list growth rate — How many new subscribers joined your email list in the last fixed period of time? How many campaigns did you carry out to reach this number? What are these campaigns?

Creating CRM reports to Improve the Follow-up Process

To improve your clients' follow-up process, you can resort to these metrics:

• The number of calls handled per sales rep per day — That should enable you to define the right workload for each professional

• The number of cases closed the same day — This should allow you to detect the gaps in service and identify the average lifespan of your current follow-up process

• The number of client callbacks — How many times did your sales reps need to contact each client?

Once you define optimal metrics for each of your goals, you should stick to them. Use them to measure your success systematically and compare your results over time.

What Is the Best Software for Generating CRM Reports

Among all the solutions that are available on the market, you might want to opt for Bitrix24. It features ready-to-use reports that you can customize and lets you build tailor-made ones. This software enables you to use all the metrics that were mentioned in this article and many more. You can try the basic functionality of Bitrix24 for free. It's available as an on-premise or cloud solution and a mobile app for iOS and Android.

Final Thoughts

Hopefully, you found this article informative and now you have a better understanding of how to make the most of CRM reports. This information will help you make data-driven decisions with the help of your CRM. The most important reports are those focused on your pipeline, goal progress, sales conversion, profitability and sales forecasts. To compile them, you might want to use Bitrix24.