This is the second of a two-part series on CRM reporting. Last week, in part one, we took you through the first steps in planning a report. Today, we move on to the steps to filter, organize, and start creating your report.
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Get to the specifics.
It’s unlikely that you’ll want to see every record from your CRM in a report, so you can narrow down the list with filters. Filters will especially be necessary if your main question is very focused and requires layers of analysis, like “Which of our VIP clients live in the cities of Wichita, Overland Park, or Kansas City?” Take a look at your list of who-what-where questions and think about the values in the fields—they’ll need to match up with your specifics when you build your report.
Taking the example we used in part one, we want to see all the sales we closed last month, so we need to specify that the Date Closed must fall on the first day of the month through the last day of the month. We also want the deals that were closed, so the state field needs to be “Won” (or whatever terminology your CRM uses).
When adding such parameters to a report, you’ll indicate a field, an operator, and a value. So, “Opportunities with a ‘Won’ status in the State field” could translate to:
State = Won or State… is equal to… WON.
Depending on your CRM, the date parameters for last month might be as simple and flexible as:
Date Closed (Actual) = last month
or as complex and rigid as:
Date Closed (Actual) is greater than or equal to 01/01/2015
AND Date Closed (Actual) is less than or equal to 01/31/2015Stacking parameters with logical steps like AND and OR can get tricky. You’ll find that AND narrows down your results, because each record must match all of the terms you enter. Using OR will add more results to the report, because each record can match either one term or another. Some report features, like Insightly’s advanced filter logic, also allow you to “nest” these arguments to create more complex filters.
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Organize your report.
If you need a report that breaks down information into smaller chunks and provides totals, counts, and other numerical value summaries, look at the grouping and summarizing options in your report builder. By segmenting your report into subsets, it can not only be more manageable, but it may offer insights that you hadn’t considered before. For our sales report example, we could get a breakdown of sales by each salesperson and see the total revenue each person brought in last month.
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Start creating your report, but be open to making changes.
After all that preparation, it’s time to start building your report. Check your CRM documentation to learn about the features that are available to you, and then start selecting the records and fields that will bring your report together. As you build and run reports, you may find that your initial results aren’t exactly what you expected. If you haven’t worked with reporting before, this isn’t unusual, so don’t be too hard on yourself. As we’ve seen above, there are many elements to consider when assembling a report.
Be prepared to reevaluate the selections you’ve made and adjust them if necessary. Take a look at the report results and compare them to the main question you’re trying to answer and the detailed questions you’ve listed. Are there other fields you can add to provide missing information? Can you expand or narrow down your results by changing your filters? You might even need to modify the question you started out with.
Don’t be afraid to experiment a bit. If nothing else, you’ll learn more about your CRM and the information you’re managing. And when you start gaining a better understanding of your business through your reports, you’ll find the effort is very much worth it.
Our previous installment of Reporting 101 took you through the first steps in planning a report.
Insightly CRM’s reporting features offer 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.
