However, where CRMs fall short is achieving a level of granularity that can surface all this insight in one place, which you’ll need as you scale. This is why ultimately you should make CRM just one pillar of your reporting stack, along with your marketing automation tool data, and then any Google sheets in which you collect data too.
The goal then should be to find a way to abstract data from all those sources, using tools like Tableau and Domo, that allow you to slice, dice and combine data from multiple sources in one place for a blended view. If you can feed and water those systems and have them run properly, then the data will empower you to be a genuine change agent for the business.
Rather than just feeding back numbers about past events, you can use it to align functions going forward, make smart decisions, and offer valuable insights as to where change is needed.
Of course, that kind of reporting stack doesn’t come cheap. At the other end of the scale, the low-cost way to accomplish something similar is to use a tool like Google sheets and plug in API data directly. Various tools offer rolling contracts of as little as $30 a month to create and define reports in your CRM, with a series of summary tabs, then using filtering to pull the right data in. If you set these up to automatically update on an hourly basis, it’s not quite a live feed, but you can be confident the information you’re using to make decisions is at least relatively recent.
What’s leading and what’s lagging?
Leading indicators and lagging indicators offer different insights to sales teams looking to scale. Lagging indicators let you look back at a certain point in time, helping you to understand how you got where you are; the primary lagging indicator is, of course, closed revenue; conversely, leading indicators get you to that closed revenue. The key leading indicators are metrics like the volume of discovery calls the team is holding. This shows you the level of activity that the outbound sales team is carrying out in terms of understanding new potential customers. This must be tracked through to a meeting, where ideally three things are present:
- An individual (potential champion) with a clear, identified pain point;
- Specific financial impacts; and
- A finite, compelling event (ideally).
It’s up to reps to accept this as a qualified opportunity. The volume of qualified opportunities moving into proof-of-value (POV) is the next key indicator, and then the output of POVs versus closed revenue closes the loop.
More data is always better – that’s an evergreen statement – but how much is enough? The baseline has to be the bare minimum data that you need to progress the opportunity through all its different stages. If you can’t understand the champion, identify the financial metrics and spot a compelling event, you won’t be able to move the opportunity forward.
The next question for data-hungry salespeople is how often they should review the reporting and analytics they gather. In my case, I look at everything daily. There are some numbers where that level of currency isn’t hugely valuable – for example, I can see pipeline creation and receive alerts in real time, but we run monthly reports to enable the serious analysis. Alerts on created opportunities and closed business are great to receive, and meeting volumes are a good metric to be able to see in real time.
But the true determining factor of how often you should report on any given metric is how quickly you want to be able to react to changes in it. For example, if your pipeline suddenly increases 10%, do you want to know straight away? Was it one big deal falling happily into your pipeline, or has an inbound/outbound strategy suddenly paid dividends? Similarly, if pipeline, or SDR calling volume, slows down in week 2, do you want to be able to take corrective action mid-month? The frequency with which you report and share data should be driven by how actionable that data is – and what you plan to do with it.
“It’s a huge mistake to discard a datapoint now as being irrelevant, only to find that a year from now, you need to start collecting it”