Tracking your contacts and conversations isn’t the only tasks a CRM is good for.
If you choose the right one, it can save you a ton of time on analyzing your sales numbers and creating your financial forecasts for the future.
A study by IBM found that being able to consolidate sales data was one of the top four most important features that businesses wanted out of a CRM.
But not all CRMs are built the same. Some CRMs offer better reporting features than others, so choosing the right CRM can impact everything from your sales process to your productivity.
We’ve found the top six CRMs based on their reporting features. Let’s dive in.
Nutshell’s reporting is all about one thing: customization.
The CRM’s custom reporting features lets sales teams easily find the sales insights that are most important to them, and filter the data by a wide range of variables.
Nutshell’s Sales report is designed to help sales teams know where they stand, providing a quick yet comprehensive insight into overall sales performance and how your team is performing compared to previous time periods.
Nutshell’s robust suite of reporting tools also gives sales teams up-to-the-minute data on:
New Leads: How many new leads is your team adding, and where are they coming from? This report sheds light on your team’s prospecting performance and how successful your marketing is.
Losses: Analyze lost deals to determine when and why you’re not winning new business.
Forecast: This report tells you the overall value of your pipeline, your projected sales, and whether or not your team is on track to make its quota.
Activity: Want to know if your team is putting in the right effort to turn leads into paying customers? This report shows you the amount of customer touches they’re making, and whether or not those touches are leading to sales.
Funnel: This report shows you how many leads you have at each stage of your pipeline and how well your leads are moving between stages, so you can identify and address any bottlenecks.
Custom: This allows you to prepare and save a report to meet your specific needs, based on a wide range of filtering criteria.
Snapshots: A collection of charts that offer daily trend information on the health of your business, and show you how your pipeline growth, win rate, and sales-cycle length have evolved over time.
You can even break down your reports to see which of your sales reps is closing the most deals:
If you need a CRM with reporting features that can adapt to your business and uncover actionable insights from any corner of your sales activities, Nutshell should be your first look.
Price: Starting at $16/month for Nutshell (includes Sales, Forecast, New leads, Losses, and Custom reports, as well as Snapshots), or $42/month for Nutshell Pro (includes all the reporting in Starter plus Activity and Funnel reports).
Copper’s reporting capabilities are built around reaching goals. Inside their CRM reporting dashboard, there is a separate “goals” dashboard, so sales managers can monitor and help their teams meet quotas.
It works like this. Sales managers set target goals for their sales reps, and then they track their teams progress in the dashboard. Sales managers can set up a bunch of different goals aimed at:
Sales revenue: How many deals are closed in a certain period
Won opportunities: The number of opportunities a team wins in a certain period
Lead Conversions: The number of leads a team converts in a certain period
Activities: The number of actions a sales team completes in a certain period
The CRM’s reporting features aren’t only about goal setting. Sales teams can also forecast their expected sales, and compare them to their actual sales to see if they’re on track. The CRM does this by measuring the overall value of opportunities a sales team has won, and adding them to a weighted value of open opportunities still in the team’s pipeline.
Price: The basic Copper plan starts at $19 a month, and includes basic and sales reporting. To access activity reports, lead and sales insights, and goal tracking, you’ll have to pay $119 a month for the business plan.
NetHunt CRM is perfect for reporting if your sales team lives in G Suite.
Although it’s not the most well-known CRM on our list, NetHunt is worth a shout-out, as it not only integrates with Gmail and Google apps, but it allows you to add filters to your reports.
This means you can build any kind of report imaginable. Sales teams can pull figures from quotes, lead numbers, and overall revenue to see how they are performing from any angle.
And because all of the data is pulled from G Suite, your team doesn’t have to input any extra numbers. The CRM draws figures from your actual work.
The report builder works on filters. This allows teams to find the data they’re looking for not only by one criterion, but multiple values.
For example, let’s say you need to see where all your deals are at in the Negotiation” and Proposal stage that have been labeled as “critical” priority. All you need to do is adjust your filters in your Sales pipeline, and you’ll have the information pulled up instantly:
NetHunt is a great CRM for teams that don’t want to overcomplicate tasks. They live in Gmail, and they just need to get things done.
Price:Free plan available. NetHunt’s Professional plan starts at $24 a month, which will give you the above features plus campaign analytics and access to integrations like Zapier.
CRM #4: Pipedrive
If you want advanced forecasting in your CRM’s reporting features, Pipedrive should be on your radar.
From the CRM’s dashboard, you can split your sales team’s efforts by conversion rates, progress and deals won (or lost) from a quarter, six-month or yearly period.
Once you have the numbers in front of you in Pipedrive, it’s easier to see where your sales team is experiencing bottlenecks, and which sales reps are struggling to close more than others. You can also break reports down by individual reps:
Or by a custom time period:
Once you know where each rep stands and how the quarter is shaping up, you can use Pipedrive’s advanced sales forecasting tool to make sure your team stays on track.
The CRM will look at how likely your reps are to close future deals (based on historical data) and take into account which deals the team has already closed. Then, it’ll pump out a revenue forecast, so your company knows how much of a budget they have to play with.
Price: Free trial. Pipedrive’s Silver package starts at $15 a month which will give you basic access to activity reports and sales goals. However, if you want to access the CRM’s cumulative revenue forecast, it’s only available on the $60/month Platinum plan.
Would it even be a list of top CRMs if we didn’t mention Salesforce? Salesforce has behemoth-sized reporting features that offer endless customization. Using its suite of reporting tools, you’ll be able to answer questions like:
Which products are my top sellers?
Who are my highest value prospects?
Which marketing campaigns have been the most successful?
How satisfied are my customers?
All you need to do is choose your desired date and range from the dropdown boxes provided in the reporting dashboard, and the tool will build out custom reports:
Of course, if you want to go beyond these settings and create more advanced reports, you can. The dashboard gives you the tools to add custom formulas to your matrix and joined reports, and even build your own reports using the report builder:
You can go as in-depth as you need to, but you actually don’t need to be a CRM expert to get super powerful reports out of the Salesforce dashboard. The tool is powerful enough to know what information your team needs to succeed.
Price: Depends on what you need and what you’re willing to pay. (Salesforce is known for a la carte pricing.) Still, a bare-bones package with basic reporting features starts at $25 a month.
Looking for a free CRM that also gives you reporting features?
HubSpot’s CRM builds valuable forecasting reports based on the amount of revenue for deals in each stage of your deal pipeline. It calculates forecasts by deciphering the probability of a deal pulling through, and how much it’s worth to your bottom line.
The CRM also gives sales teams a deep dive in their overall sales performance. You can download summaries of your team’s sales progress which shows which reps have been assigned to which prospects, and how many of the created deals in your pipeline have actually been won.
A cool reporting feature from HubSpot is its rep leaderboard. This feature breaks down how many deals each rep has closed and how close they are to closing any new deals. If you’re looking to create a bit of healthy competition to push sales within your team, this is a unique way to do it!
The best part? The basic plan is free forever. However…
Price:In-depth reports are only accessible on paid plans. The Advanced CRM plan starts at $50 a month and includes the standard sales report (available on the free plan) plus productivity reports and a custom reporting dashboard. The professional tier ($400/month for five users) includes all of this plus an additional custom dashboard.
When looking for a new CRM, you should always start by determining what your team needs the most. Does the software easily uncover the metrics that are most important to you?
If you’re all about forecasting and making sure your team is hitting their targets, then you need to look for a CRM that specializes in these features, like Copper. However, if you’re after a CRM that does a lot of the number-crunching for you and is completely customizable, a tool like Nutshell will be a better fit for what you need.
Not all CRMs are built the same. Some are super easy to use, but lack the advanced tools a sales team needs to identify bottlenecks in their pipeline or see which reps are performing better than others. Take the time to figure out which CRM is the best fit for your reporting needs. After all, it’s a crucial tool that can supercharge your sales team’s success.
Pssst! Think Nutshell is the right CRM for your team? Take it for a test spin with our 14-day free trial! You’ll be able to explore our sneaky powerful platform and discover if it’s the right fit for your company.
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