Without data backing up your decisions, you can’t be positive that your marketing and sales strategies are fueling your company’s growth.
Reporting provides you with data-driven insights that allow you to improve your marketing and sales strategies over time.
And, reporting on your customer relationship management (CRM) data specifically allows you to understand who your best-fit customers are, where your best-fit leads are coming from, how different types of prospects are moving through your marketing and sales process, the velocity of your marketing-sales funnel and more.
In addition to those tactical reports, you can also gain insights at the executive level to understand how you’re tracking toward your top KPIs: revenue, acquisition, retention and expansion.
Here are six Salesforce reports your revenue team should be using:
1. Leads Generated by Month and Their Qualification
How many leads were generated month-over-month, and what percentage of those are qualified?
You want to look at both volume and quality at once because it gives you the best sense of what success actually looks like. If you’re just looking at one factor or the other, you won’t have a full understanding of how you’re tracking toward your lead creation goal.
Are the activities you’re doing attracting the right people, and are you attracting enough of them to hit your goals further down the funnel? Or are you seeing a decreasing number of qualified leads being produced from the same quantity of leads being converted?
2. Opportunities Created Month Over Month and Their Value
How many opportunities are you creating month over month in terms of both number of accounts and dollar value? What do those numbers look like on an individual or team basis?
Unlike the number of leads generated per month, this report can just focus on quantitative data — after all, for a prospect to become an opportunity, they need to be high quality
Knowing the number of opportunities you’re creating in combination with your opportunity-to-closed-won win rate will allow you to start creating sales forecasts. For example, if you know your win rate is pretty consistently 30%, and your team created 20 opportunities in a month, you can safely assume that six of those will close. Being able to predict the number of customers and amount of revenue you’ll have coming in will help your company make other business decisions, like hiring.
3. Opportunities by Campaign
Which campaigns are driving the most won opportunities?
This helps you understand which marketing initiatives are contributing to the most won pipeline, which in turn can help you determine what tactics to invest more resources in and what activities you should stop doing.
For example, you might use campaigns to track the events you participate in. Then, as the contacts you created from those events start to close, you can see if you’re generating a return on investment (ROI) and should continue attending those events in future years.
4. Marketing-Sourced Revenue Generated
What percentage of your revenue is being sourced from marketing as opposed to through outbound and referrals?
The benchmark for marketing-sourced revenue is 25–30% according to research from Sales Benchmark Index, and knowing how you’re tracking toward that benchmark can help you understand how impactful your inbound strategy is. You can correlate the success of your inbound program with how much revenue marketing is generating.
While this report isn’t as granular as multi-touch marketing attribution, it will help you prove the ROI of your marketing team as a whole.
5. Closed-Lost Opportunities by Reason
What are the reasons prospects are choosing another solution over yours?
When analyzing this report, it can be helpful to look at it in the context of multiple timelines. What was the biggest closed-lost reason for the past year? What about in the past 90 days?
Understanding the long-term closed-lost trends will indicate which larger strategies you need to start evaluating. Looking at this on the short-term, on the other hand, can help you fix some issues immediately before they turn into long-term trends.
The more specific your property values are, the better your report will be. For example, if your options include both “competitor” and “price,” what should reps select when they lose to a competitor because of price? That ambiguity can make it more difficult to take action based on this report’s findings.
6. Closed-Won and Closed-Lost Opportunities by ICP or Persona
Out of all opportunities that were closed-won or closed-lost over a given period of time, which ideal customer profiles (ICPs) or buyer personas fell where?
Answering this question will help your marketing and sales teams know who your best-fit buyers are and validate your profiles. If you’re seeing a significantly higher loss rate with one ICP, maybe those types of companies aren’t as good of a fit as you initially thought.
These insights will help marketing know who to target and sales know who to prioritize.
The Takeaway
These Salesforce reports can help your revenue team make data-driven decisions to help your company grow. But, the actionability of these reports is dependent on the data integrity.
If the data in your CRM isn’t accurate and up-to-date, these reports won’t display accurate findings. So, it’s essential that your marketing and sales teams are staying on top of updating contact properties.
