5 Sales Reports your Business Can’t Do Without! (and 5 Other Reports for everything else)

8 Oct 2018

Reports are an essential part of any CRM system. They are a great way to get an overview of the various areas of your business.

There are three ways for you to access Reports in OpenCRM and I’ll be talking about two of them quite a lot for the rest of this blog.

1. Straight forward – You can always navigate over to the Reports module, of course, and click to run a Report to give you the information you need right at that moment.But our other two ways of accessing your Reports needs little to no action on you part to access the information.
2. Dashboard – Sticking a Report (the whole thing, just the totals, or just a graph) on your Dashboard means that, with a single click, you can view ALL the Reports you need to view on regular basis.
3. Scheduled Reports – And then of course you can have a Report delivered to your email inbox on a particular day of the week, month, or year.

So now on to the Reports that we think are most important to get that important overview of your sales team, as well as some other ideas for Reporting on the other areas of your business.

What are your sales team up to?

Most people start off their CRM journey by getting their sales team streamlined, but how can you be sure it is working? Well, the first step has to be to get an overview of the whole team before drilling down into the individual performances.

And that means Reports.

Activities: What are your sales people doing with their days?

Are they recording customer/prospect interactions? You’ve got a CRM so you can have rich history, but you only get that if your team use it.

A simple Report showing the hours they’ve recorded per day either sitting on your Dashboard or arriving in your inbox every Monday morning will show just that.

New Leads by Source: What’s working?

Bit of a no brainer, really. You want to know what Leads are coming in and where they’re coming from, so you know if you need to put money into your social media, website, advertising, or maybe get the team out to a few expos.

This is one of those Reports that might sit on your Dashboard that you only look at once or twice a month, or maybe it’s something that you analyse every single day. Either way, it’s there waiting for you.

Sales Pipeline: A must for every business

This kind of report, like all of our reports, can be filtered to show individual users or your whole sales team. Here you’re looking for what sales they have coming up, which ones look like they’re going to close before the end of the month, and which ones have already been won.

Now we’ve got that Pipeline graph on the Opportunities home screen, but having it show up in your email half way through the month serves as your reminder to check in with the team to see if they’ll all be achieving target this month.

Past Due Opportunities: Why has this been open so long?

Again, this is information you can easily see at a glance on the Opportunities home screen by looking out for this icon: . It tells you that a particular sale has been going on longer than the period you think it “normal.”

But maybe you want to see this information side-by-side with the number (or duration) of Activities recorded by the sales team, for example.

Having this all within your Dashboard just makes connecting the dots that much easier.

Lost sales: What went wrong?

Now you might want to go with a “Cold Leads” or “Lost Opportunities” (or both?) depending on where in your sales journey you want to focus, but either of these reports will show you when and where things are going wrong.

It’s not about parsing out blame, but you need to know if the number of Leads or the expected Revenue is lower than what is needed to keep the business on track.

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What about the rest of the business?

All businesses need their sales running smoothly, bringing new business in and keeping everyone in a job. But it’s not the end of your business and OpenCRM gives you the ability to run each and every department from one central location.

So what other Reports could you use to stay on top of these teams?

Overdue/Approaching SLA Tickets: Don’t let them fall through the cracks

Our automated Ticket escalation is a great way to alert your team to Tickets that need their attention. At the same time, the management team need to know about them too. These are the Tickets that might need some attention from someone a bit higher up the chain because they are dangerously close to slipping through the cracks.

Overrun on Projects: Should this be done by now?

Being able to see which of your ongoing Projects are overrunning on either time recorded or missing their target end date gives you a quick way to see any projects that might need your attention.

These Projects might need some more time allocated to them because of unforeseen issues or maybe a quick call from the MD will smooth over the fact that the deadline has slipped.

Either way, the key is knowing about it and scheduled Reports are perfect for this.

Campaign Results: Who’s clicking now?

Get a monthly (or weekly if you run a lot of email campaigns) update on how many click-throughs you’re getting from your campaigns (and even how much expected revenue is linked directly to these campaigns).

Keeping an eye on marketing ROI isn’t always easy, but with OpenCRM you’ve got the graph in front of you every day, showing you Campaign budgets and linked Invoice totals.

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Overdue Invoices: Why haven’t they paid up?

Think of it, every Monday morning you could have a Report sent to your accounts team showing them exactly which Invoices are overdue and by how much. They can then chase them and keep your cashflow on track.

Or maybe this is a total on your Dashboard that lets you know when these chasing calls just aren’t working and someone else needs to step in to get an Invoice paid.

Holiday Report: Not just to give you ideas for your next trip

Who is going to be away next week? Next month? Have a holiday report sent to you every Thursday, let’s say, that shows you who is going to be away over the next 14 days. Not only will you know how much resource your various departments have coming up, you will have enough warning to divert other people if you know a team is going to be short handed.

Having Reports emailed to you on a given day of the week (or month) or always sat on your Dashboard are great ways to give you an overview of a department or the business as a whole. Once you see the bigger picture, you’ll be able to see areas that need your attention or maybe even intervention.

At the same time, you’ll be able to see where to praise and encourage your team.

Reporting on the various modules in OpenCRM is easy once you know how and they are a great way to keep your business on track.