Your CRM does a lot for you – manages contacts, manages projects, integrates with a number of other cloud-based services to simplify your workflow. One often overlooked feature is built-in reports. Knowing how to use the options at your disposal to their greatest potential can give your business just the edge it needs.
Custom Reporting: Legacy Reports
If you don’t need a lot of customized reporting tools, the legacy reports are a good place to start. These include configurable reports based on activities and opportunities, and display information in basic graph form. Legacy reports include:
- Opportunity Category Breakdown Report
- Reasons for Losing Opportunities Report
- Opportunity Pipeline Stage Distribution Report
- Opportunity Funnel Analysis
- Opportunities by Responsible User Report
- Opportunities by Organization Report
- Opportunities by Custom Field Report
- Total Incoming Opportunities Report
- Value of Opportunities Won Report
- Completed Tasks and Events Report
With these reports, you can:
- Easily locate the number of opportunities each salesperson is creating – making it easier to reward your most active salespeople.
- Determine which salesperson closed the most deals in the last month
- Examine reasons why your company is losing business
- Determine your most valuable clients and see how much they are contributing to your overall revenue
- Find the most and the least satisfied customers, to reach out to them directly with a highly targeted marketing campaign to breed customer loyalty.
- See which user(s) completed the most tasks
- And more…
Custom Reporting: Advanced Reports
You can create your own custom reports using our intuitive drag-and-drop user interface. Start with one of the report templates to save time and keep things organized, and then rely on advanced Boolean logic filters to create reports based on the criteria you designate. You can include summaries on rows of calculations, making it easy to leave notes for anyone else who may be viewing the report.
With a paid plan, you can enable report scheduling and smart alerts – send an alert to the appropriate person if a certain criteria is met, such as an opportunity over $X entering the pipeline.
You can export your reports to Microsoft Excel print hard copies for distribution. Though our advanced reports don’t include graphs yet, they will soon. In the meantime, it’s possible to export the data into other graphing tools, such as Excel or Microsoft BI.
Advanced report options allow you to go beyond what the legacy reports have to offer, so you can share information with management and even your clients, if necessary. When you have the report scheduling feature, you can automatically send reports at regularly scheduled intervals, for easy comparison over time.
Is your business making use of these reports? If so, what have you noticed? It’s easier to keep track of what’s going on in the business overall, and to share information with the employees who need it. If you’re not using these reports, you’re wasting time sorting through the information, or acting without it.
Take a few minutes to explore Insightly’s reporting features, and you may be surprised at what you find. Let us know how you’re making the advanced reports work for you.
At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a variety of verticals. Learn about Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.
