If you're anything like me, you're guilty of downloading many pdfs over the years, saving them to your hard drive, and never actually reading them! True? 

So, we've broken down our "pdf" into six emails, a chapter per email. Each chapter should take a few minutes to read and can be your daily self-development guide for CRM. Or maybe not. 

Incoming Deals Volume Report

It is time to report on your prospects. How did that recent marketing campaign work out? Are the newsletters still generating opportunities? It is time to count beans and calculate how much business the marketing team brings.

The incoming deals volume report will tell you exactly that. This report breaks down the number of deals registered over a period of time and their percentage of the total deal count.

You can also filter the incoming deals report by team member or tag. 

This highly visual incoming deals report clearly shows which campaign is performing well and which needs reworking. Pipedrive CRM’s incoming deals volume report has two viewing options, stacked and expanded, to help you visualise how campaigns performed collectively and how they compare against one another. This data will guide you in your collaborations with marketing and is essential for measuring effectiveness.

Neither you nor the marketing team wants to shoot in the dark. Unfortunately, most marketing measurement tools come from click-through counts, likes, and opens. The incoming deals volume report will help you help the marketing team refine their work by differentiating between what generates interest and what generates business.

It’s 8 a.m. Monday morning. Your sales team is sleepily returning to work, pouring the morning coffee and firing up their laptops. You are at a conference table surrounded by your colleagues. You are here to report on last week’s closed deals and this week’s sales forecast. Accuracy is vital because nothing kills a meeting’s effectiveness like a fact-less anecdote. But it’s Monday morning, and you couldn’t bring yourself to spend your precious weekend minutes on Monday morning meeting prep.

This is when your CRM comes in, steps up and saves the day. Or should.

An innovative CRM has the power to tell you what your hazy memory of last week can not; it remembers with precision exactly how many leads your team generated, how many quotes were issued and how many deals were made. Ensure you use it to its fullest potential and pull these essential reports. Let your CRM do the heavy lifting on Monday morning and provide the key reports you need. And if your CRM doesn’t offer these reports out of the box, it might be time to find a new one.

Sales Funnel Analysis

This is your panorama report. The sales funnel analysis report tells you where your team stands and what your business has to lose or gain at all points in your pipeline. While each salesperson should be able to tell you which deals they won, what they’ve lost, and what they are waiting on, sales funnel analysis can tell you exactly where the whole team and the individual stand.

When you pull the sales funnel analysis report, you see the complex numbers of your team’s activity over a given time frame. You see how many deals came in, how many were qualified and what happened from there. And here’s where the real perk of this report comes in - you can see where your team stands and pinpoint where they need coaching. The sales funnel report calculates conversions at every milestone along your sales process, and this is the insight you will use well beyond your Monday meeting.

Sales funnel analysis conversion reporting breaks down into percentages, such as how many leads qualified, how many qualified leads were given a quote, how many quotes moved into the contract phase, and how many contracts were won. With this data, you can identify strengths and weaknesses in your lead generation and sales processes. If you see a high level of leads converting but never being quoted, you can determine if your “qualification” process needs repair or if follow-up is the problem. Or if you see an inordinate amount of business was lost between the quote and contract, it might be time to coach on closing the deal. This level of detail makes you much more than a Monday morning meeting hero – it outfits you with the information you need to be an accommodating boss.

It is time to report on your reports. How is the new guy working out? Is Jane still closing the most deals? Put personality politics and perceptions aside and use the won deals report to determine precisely what each team member brings. This report tells you the number of deals won by team members over any resolution period you choose. The report calls on the goals you set for your team and lets you know how the number of actually won deals is stacking up against your ambitions. Pipedrive CRM makes the report simple to read - displaying user stats in green or red depending on whether or not they are on track to meet their goal for the period.

The won deals report also paints a bigger picture of your team's performance and whether they meet their deal quota for the resolution period. The cumulative team goal is displayed at the top of the bar graph, making it easy to determine if your team is on track or if it's time to get cracking.

Won Deals Report

As with most reports, you probably want to see deals won on a team scale and an individual level. The Won Deals Goals report in Pipedrive CRM gives you both. Every bar is labelled with the actual number of deals in case that’s easier than looking at percentages (x-axis).

Reports that matter

Many CRMs offer customer satisfaction reports; while those insightful little reports have their place, your job is sales, not customer loyalty or product development. Look for a CRM that reports on the information most relevant to your job title: sales.

Your job is to ensure your sales team closes as many deals as possible. Of course, you want clients to be happy with the product and loyal to the company. After all, you want to sell to those clients again. But that data isn’t yours to track.

Choose the CRM that offers the insights your business needs. Pipedrive CRM developed its line of reports with you in mind. That is why they offer sales funnel analysis, incoming deals volume reports, sales forecasting, sales goals reports, and won deals reports. But that’s just the most essential report for a VP of sales. There’s a slew of other valuable reports in Pipedrive CRM that would make you a more productive, more informed leader.

Total Sales

The complete sales report shows the value of your won deals over time. To know where you are going, you must know where you’ve been. Use this report to build next quarter’s benchmarks.

Reports are essential for every data-driven company. They don’t just make your Monday morning meetings informative; they make your everyday decisions more effective. Regarding sales reporting, don’t rely on estimations and impressions. Use these reports to bring facts and optimise prospects and processes. Please don’t settle for a CRM that doesn’t offer this level of insight, and don’t overlook the opportunity to use it. Make your meetings meaningful, and your conference table contributions count. The whole company benefits when the sales team thrives – that’s the bottom line.