How to use CRM Reporting to Analyze and Boost Sales Performance

Imagine that I said this to you.

With the right sales reporting, your CRM can double your sales revenue in less than 30 days.

This claim sounds too good to be true. Can sales CRM reporting produce these results in your business?

Discover how CRM reports can significantly boost your sales revenue. In this sales CRM reporting guide, we’ll delve into the importance of sales reporting and forecasting, the key insights it provides, and actionable steps to leverage this data for maximum impact.

Essential Sales Metrics and KPIs for Effective Sales Reporting

Selling is competitive by nature. If you’re managing a productive sales team, you’re doing your best to close the leads marketing brings in. Your CRM helps close, nurture, and disqualify prospects, improving sales performance. 

According to Forrester’s research, “CRM is widely adopted. 70% of surveyed organizations have adopted CRM for customer service, 64% for B2B marketing automation and SFA, and 62% for field service.”

So why are CRM satisfaction rates so low?

Kate Leggett, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester, writes, “CRM initiatives fail to deliver on expectation. Organizations’ satisfaction with their current CRM solution is low overall.” A recent estimate found that the actual CRM failure rate was closer to 90%. 

Why is this the case? It’s a three-fold problem:

1. Organizations aren’t clear on the outcomes, sales metrics, and KPIs that matter to them. 
2. As a result, their lack of clarity means their desired outcomes are fuzzy, implicit, imprecise, or unrealistic. 
3. If they’re goal tracking, they’re collecting data instead of insights.

Which sales metrics are typically most important for businesses? Here are some essential sales metrics you should track.

Which KPIs are typically most important?

These sales metrics and KPIs are a helpful starting point. You should be able to create custom reports specific to your company or industry. 

Related: Not all sales metrics apply to your industry. Find out the top 12 sales metrics and KPIs you should track for construction, professional services, and real estate companies.

Why CRM Reporting Is Essential for Your Business

An analysis of your sales performance is important because it offers clear insights. 

Sales analysis can tell you where you were, where you are, and where you’ll be.

Using the sales metrics and key performance indicators I’ve mentioned above, your sales team can ask (and answer) important questions about your team’s performance, such as:

1. Is our lead response time improving or declining? 
2. Is our sales revenue increasing, stagnant, or decreasing? 
3. How many deals do we need to close (monthly, quarterly, annually) to hit performance targets? 
4. Have our win rates improved year-over-year? 
5. Have our close rates improved each month?
6. How many of our sales reps meet their monthly quota? 
7. Which products are our most profitable? 
8. How much time do our reps spend selling and closing deals? 
9. Who are the rainmakers on our team? What are they doing differently? 
10. Which of our sales reps produces the most profit for our company? 

The right data gives you the ability to answer important questions. These questions give your sales team the clarity you need to make important changes across your organization—how you train salespeople, the products that generate revenue vs. profit, your position in the marketplace, and more. 

Leveraging Pipeline CRM for Sales Reporting and Analytics Tool

While various tools can assist with sales analysis, this guide will explore how your CRM can serve as a powerful platform for generating insightful reports and actionable analytics. For this purpose, we’ll use Pipeline CRM.

With Pipeline CRM, you can (a.) start with a default set of reports you can use to extract insights and (b.) create ad hoc and custom reports to get answers to specific questions.

There is no need for complex Excel formulas, duplicate content, or separate spreadsheets.

Sales monitoring with a CRM means your technology stack integrates natively with marketing, sales, and support teams. Pipeline CRM integrates with the tools you already use via native integration or Zapier. It’s affordable, with monthly plans starting at $25 per user. The best part? Your team can be up and running in minutes.

Let’s see the capabilities of Pipeline CRM’s forecasting and reporting features.

Reports and Forecasting Solutions

You can navigate between reports using the left-side navigation. Reports are divided into three sections:

1. Historical Pipeline: includes deals won, win ratio, lost deals by loss reason, and won deals by source.
2. Active Pipeline (Sales Forecasting): includes forecasted to close, deals by stage, and active deals by status.
3. Activity: includes your activity report, activity scoreboard, revenue report, recent updates, and potentially your ROI report.

Trends Over Time and Comparisons 

Each report has three sub-sections to help you compare trends over time, deal owners, or custom deal types. 

1. Trends Over Time: report on deals over a given timeframe. It allows you to view trends over time.
2. Compare Owners: enables you to report and draw comparisons between individual salespeople or teams of salespeople. 
3. Compare Deal Types: enables you to compare specific types of deals by filtering custom fields that you track in Pipeline. 

Sales Reporting and Forecasting on Specific Time Periods

You can create reports or sales forecasts for various timeframes using the date selector in the upper-right corner of the screen on the Reports tab. The following options are available:

• Any time 
• Today, yesterday, and this week
• This month and last month
• This quarter and last quarter (calendar)
• This year and last year (calendar)
• Custom Range

Sales Reporting and Forecasting on Specific Owners or Types of Deals

You can drill-down on a specific sales rep’s deals (or types of deals) using the filter sidebar of the right side of your screen. 

In the Trends over time subsection, you can filter by owner, source, and/or dropdown and picklist custom deal fields. The Compare owners subsection allows you to filter by source and/or dropdown and picklist custom deal fields. And, you can filter by the owner within the Compare deal fields subsection. 

For the reports ‘Lost deals by loss reason’ and ‘Won deals by source,’ you can also specify what sources or lost reasons you are viewing. 

Take a look at the links below to get a breakdown of each report:

• Lost deals by lost reason
• Won deals by source
• Deals Won
• Forecasted to close
• Win ratio
• How to build a report that tells you which deals need attention

Learn more about Pipeline CRM sales reporting feature from our knowledge base.

Other Sales Reporting and Analytics Tools Worth Trying

Microsoft Excel: Best for Enterprises With Frankenstein Sales Tools

Does your team have a Frankenstein Stack? “A Frankenstein stack is characterized by multiple legacy systems stitched together over time, with add-ons, individual integrations, and tech workarounds.”

Many companies face a fragmented data landscape, with sales relying on a CRM and marketing using a legacy system integrated with web and sales analytics. This divide often necessitates data exports in XML or CSV formats for cross-departmental collaboration.

While this approach may be necessary for the time being, it introduces challenges like version control and data entry consistency. Excel, though a familiar tool, can be cumbersome for complex sales analyses.

If your organization is committed to using a legacy stack, Excel can be a viable starting point. However, for more robust and scalable reporting, consider exploring modern sales analytics tools to streamline processes and ensure data accuracy.

Here’s what sales reporting using Excel data looks like.

Your CRM sales reporting tool should include exporting to Excel-friendly options (e.g., CSV, TSV, XML,  etc.). If you’re using Pipeline CRM, for example, you can export your data to CSV and PDF formats. Here’s how:

Companies, Deals, and People

• Select the columns and set your filters to the records you want to export

• Click on the Export button > Export as CSV or Export as PDF

Activities

• Navigate to the Reports tab > Activity Report

• Set your filters to display the activities you want to export

• Click on the Export button

• Select either Export as CSV or Export as PDF

Agenda

• Visit the Agenda tab

• Set your filters to display the tasks and events you want to export

• Click on the Export button

• Select either Export as CSV or Export as PDF

Exports

Please remember that your export will only include the columns that appear on the page. If you would like to customize the data included in the export, click Add/Remove Columns to adjust the columns in the view. Any column that is checked off will display on the page. To learn more about filtering within columns, please visit the following link: Creating, Saving, and Sharing Custom List Views.

Power BI: Best for Self-Service Data Visualization and Analysis

Power BI is a connector. It enables you to pull a large amount of data from various data sources in multiple formats. It’s free if you stay below the 1 GB data limit, it’s easy to use, reports are easier to share, and you can schedule an automatic data refresh. 

Power BI goes beyond Excel by offering natural language querying. Simply ask your questions in plain English, and Power BI will use your data to provide insightful answers. For example, “What’s the total value of deals won/lost this year?” 

It works with lots of data sources, including Pipeline CRM. That said, you have to feed your data into their system. It’s a house of cards. If anything goes wrong with your data sources, your insights may not be as reliable. 

Sales Reporting in Power BI

Training with Excel is a helpful pre-requisite for working with Power BI.

There are lots of templates, formulas, and resources available for you to use with Power BI.  Here’s an example showing you how to use Excel to create a sales dashboard in Power BI. 

What about adding data sources in Power BI?

Tableau: Best Sales Analysis Tool for Generalists

If you’re using Tableau, you can pull data from almost any database or data source. It’s designed to be user-friendly, create data visualizations via its drag-and-drop interface, and share insights in a few simple clicks. Their platform is AI-driven and designed to work with the tools and formats you’re already using.

However, there are some downsides. For instance, Tableau comes with a hefty price tag. Here’s a customer complaining about “the 100-user minimum for “Viewer” licenses and Data Management Add On that starts at ~$6,000 /100 users.” It’s a great product if you don’t mind spending to get the insights you need. 

Sales Reporting in Tableau

Tableau’s product line includes embedded analytics, CRM analytics, Einstein Copilot, and data management products.  

Here’s how you can make a sales dashboard in Tableau: 

Wait a minute. You’ll need to get your data into Tableau first. How are you supposed to do that? Easy. Integration. You can integrate your Pipeline CRM and Tableau accounts with Zapier or Skyvia. 

How Do You Use Sales Reporting To Increase Revenue?

If you want to use sales reporting to increase your revenue, the formula is simple. 

Data (what) » Insights (why) » Action (how)

What does this look like in action? 

How do you put this into action? It’s a simple, six-step process. 

1. Choose a CRM or method for collecting sales data. 
2. Get buy-in from everyone on your team so they’ll use it. 
3. Collect data. 
4. Ask questions about that data to generate insights. 
5. Figure out how to address the issues raised by your insights. 
6. Take action. 

These steps aren’t complicated. It just requires a little bit of discipline and lots of consistency. If your team is consistent about using your CRM or collecting sales data, you’ll have data you can draw insights from. 

Once you have insights (questions), you’ll have what you need to find solutions and take action. 

Track, Report, and Forecast Your Sales Performance with Pipeline CRM

As we’ve seen, most CRM initiatives fail to deliver on expectations. Organizations’ satisfaction with their current CRM solution tends to be low overall. In fact, the estimated failure rate is at 90%. 

Organizations aren’t clear on the outcomes, metrics, and KPIs that matter to them. As a result, their lack of clarity means their desired outcomes are fuzzy, implicit, imprecise, or unrealistic. If they’re goal tracking, they’re focused on collecting more data. They should be focused on drawing insights from the data they already have. 

Sales analysis provides a clear picture of your past, present, and future sales performance. With Pipeline CRM’s advanced sales reporting, you can easily filter data, create customized reports, and share insights with your team for informed decision-making. 

Try out Pipeline CRM today for free for 14 days, and let us know what you think.