This is the first of a two-part series on CRM reporting. Next week, we’ll take a look at filtering and organizing your report results.
Once your company has successfully rolled out a CRM, the benefits don’t stop with more sales, higher productivity, and happier customers. Every CRM includes reporting tools to monitor and make sense of your data, leading to business metrics that will help you make smarter business decisions. You can jump right in and start building reports with the tools available to you, but spending a little time planning a report will save you lots of time when building it.
-
Determine the question you’re trying to answer.
A CRM could include pre-packaged reports, a report builder with a multitude of options, or some combination that allows you modify existing report templates. Clarifying what you’re after with a clear and specific question will help you determine the type of report you’ll create.
Gene Marks—small business owner, technology expert, author, and columnist—recommends that you ask the following business questions and create CRM reports to answer them:
- What is the status of our sales opportunities? – Sales Pipeline Report
- What is that status of our open quotes? – Aged Quotes Report
- What have our sales guys been up to this week? – Call Report
- What percentage of quotes have we closed? – Batting Average
- What sales did we lose and why? – Lost Sales Report
This step will also help you focus on the types of records you’ll use in your report. In Insightly, sales are tracked through Lead and Opportunity records, so you’d start there for sales reports. Work status reports would focus on projects or tasks. If your report requires information from two different kinds of records—organizations and their related contacts, or projects and their related tasks—you’ll select a report that allows you to combine the two.
(A little tech talk for the curious: Reporting that cross-references different kinds of records is done through a join query, which combines rows from two or more tables. Every database stores information in tables, which you can imagine as more complex versions of a spreadsheet.)
-
List the details that you need to answer the question.
Making a list of information you need to answer your question (names, dates, numbers, etc.) will help you select fields: the basic building blocks of reports. Fields are the smaller bits of information you enter when adding an item to your CRM, like first name, last name, and phone numbers. Think about the who, what, where, and when of the question you’re asking to lay out the field you’ll need.
Here’s an example of breaking down the details for last month’s sales figures using Insightly fields:
How much revenue did each salesperson bring in last month? Detailed questions Detailed answers Field names Where do we track deals? Sales opportunities Opportunity Name Which deals do we want? Closed deals Opportunity State When did they close? Last month Date Closed (Actual) What was each deal worth? Value of deal Opportunity Value Who closed each deal? Salesperson’s name Responsible User Who is the customer? Customer name Contact Name
In our next installment of Reporting 101, we look at filtering and organizing your report results.
Insightly CRM’s reporting offers robust options to make anyone a master of metrics.
Set up a trial account, import your data, and give it a try.
About the author: Tony Roma is Insightly’s Technical and UX Writer. He’s been helping businesses implement software solutions for over ten years. He’s been working with reports for even longer, and he still has days when building the perfect report is a challenge.
