CRM Analytics: A Simple Guide for Small Business

Found in customer relationship management (CRM) systems, CRM analytics tools help businesses gather insights on performance, activity, and trends based on stored data. The data interpretation process becomes more streamlined by centralizing sales information and analytics features into one platform. In this article, we explore what small businesses need to know about CRM analytics and which CRMs provide the best analytics features.

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What Can CRM Analytics Measure?

CRM analytics features help you better understand both pre- and post-sale activities with leads and customers. Some of the measurables for activities, production, and efficiency before a deal is closed to improve new business sales include the following:

• Lead conversion rates: Percentage of total leads that convert into a deal or move to the next stage of the sales pipeline.
• Total sales activity: Total number of calls placed, emails sent, proposals generated, meetings scheduled, or product demos completed. These can be used to compare individual reps or teams and find connections between activity and sales production.
• Quality of prospects: Measures how well reps are researching leads, typically done as a percentage of total qualified leads compared to the total contacts with their data added to a CRM.
• Top opportunities: Insights on the top lead or deal opportunities based on total expected value and the likelihood of closing the deal.
• Sales pipeline bottlenecks: Based on conversion rates of the different stages of the sales pipeline, you can see which areas need more resources, additional training, or new sales tactics to improve.
• Customer service satisfaction: This lets you pinpoint which areas of your customer service need attention to improve quality, such as speed of responding to customers or average duration of a case.

Plus, using CRM data for post-sales activities, production, and efficiency helps improve customer retention and service productivity. Some of the best measurements CRM data can be used for after a deal is closed include:

• Cross-selling or upselling conversion rates: Percentage of successful sales compared to attempts by an account manager to convince a customer to buy complementary products or services or upgrade their current solutions.
• Top customers: A look at the best customers to maintain excellent service based on what they spend and provide more nurturing or additional promotions to those who are less active.
• Product or service performance: Comparison of products and services to see which ones bring in the most revenue and should be offered or suggested to prospects more.
• Sales rep production: A look at individual or team performance in terms of total deals closed and revenue generated.

Who CRM Analytics Tools Are Best For

Anyone responsible at an organization for making business decisions about sales or marketing initiatives or tasked with providing advice should be using CRM data tools.

• Business owners and high-level decision makers: CEOs, VPs, and directors can use CRM data to make executive decisions, such as setting targets or making new hires.
• Department team heads: Shows managers their team’s productivity level, areas for improvement, and reps who might need more coaching.
• Agents and representatives: Allows agents to see their performance and determine whether they are on track toward meeting their targets—whether revenue goals or volume of activities.

CRM Analytics Examples

Though there is limitless potential for what CRM metrics tools can do, there are a few basic “must-haves” users should prioritize when choosing a CRM provider. Some of the main CRM data analytics examples include:

Lead & Deal Conversion Tracking

Lead and deal conversion metrics show how well your sales team performs at getting opportunities through various stages of your sales pipeline. This CRM data analysis is necessary for pinpointing parts of the sales process that are slowing down your ability to generate new customers.

Zoho CRM is a popular product that stands out for its reporting and analytics capabilities, particularly when monitoring the pipeline. In addition to generating reports, Zoho CRM lets users view comprehensive conversion metrics on a dashboard to see how well leads and accounts are converting stage-to-stage. There are even filtering options to view conversions based on region or sales rep.

Zoho has metrics for CRM that show lead conversions. (Source: Zoho)

Sales Performance Monitoring

Sales performance refers to the activities completed by individual reps or teams as well as total production in deals closed or revenue generated. While much of this will be raw data, CRM data analytics tools can break down things like calls made, emails sent, or meetings created by a rep.

HubSpot CRM is known for its clean reporting features that include customizable charts and the ability to gather data and insights for analysis easily. Users can break down total productivity by sales reps and aggregate various activity data into one report, such as notes created and tasks completed with prospecting activities.

HubSpot activity tracking (Source: StartaDesign)

Sales Forecasting

Forecasting is a powerful feature that lets you estimate how much revenue is expected over time based on current deals pending in the sales pipeline and typical conversion rates. Creating these projections keeps your team on track to complete their sales goals and plan for future expenditures.

Salesforce is a highly acclaimed CRM for its advanced analytics features. Sales managers can easily view a dashboard to see revenue projections by quarter, division, product, or service line, and individual rep in one dashboard view.

Salesforce sales forecasting dashboard (Source: Salesforce)

Lead Source Tracking

By tracking where your high-quality leads come from, you optimize your resources and time spent on the channels that produce the best results. CRMs let you track this by indicating where that opportunity came from on your deal and lead records, such as at trade shows, networking events, online, or inbound from social media marketing campaigns.

Bitrix24, for example, takes all of the aggregated lead information and generates visual reports for opportunities in the pipeline. In addition to the sales funnel and conversion analytics, users can see the proportion of their leads based on how they were generated. There are also filtering features that allow you to see if certain channels have higher conversion rates or revenue potential than others.

Bitrix24 lead funnel and source analysis (Source: Bitrix24)

Want more insights on reporting and analytics CRM features? Here are our picks for the seven essential reports every small business should use.

Lead Scoring

Lead scoring is the process of assigning a predetermined value for each lead to reflect their likelihood of becoming a paying customer. It is influenced by different factors, including industry, job title, and past engagements with your business, including purchases and inquiries. Lead scoring is a helpful tool because it gives a good indication to agents on which leads to prioritize.

Zoho CRM has advanced lead scoring tools that assign value to leads based on various factors, such as how they engaged with your email campaigns or how close they were to making a purchase. It also allows users to set up a wide range of automated actions like updating certain fields or notifying the record owner that a lead has been qualified and needs to be pushed to the next stage of your business process.

Zoho CRM lead scoring function (Source: Zoho CRM)

Campaign Performance Analysis

Campaign analysis provides users with various metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of their sales and marketing campaigns. Some of the data that can be measured using these analytics include visitor-to-contact rate, contact-to-customer rate, click-through rate, delivery, open, and click rate, as well as interaction rate.

Insightly provides various campaign analytics tools that help users assess their marketing campaign performance. Users can create campaigns using split testing and analyze which one converts better. Users can also determine which aspects of their marketing content are the most compelling based on the interaction of their leads, such as link clicks and form submissions.

Insightly campaign evaluation analytics (Source: Insightly)

Best CRMs With Robust Analytics

Most CRMs have analytics features to some extent. Some stand out for having more advanced capabilities than others or could allow analytics features to be accessed for a lower cost compared to others. Here are a few of our picks for the best CRMs with analytics tools.

Starting Price*	$14 per user, per month	$25 per user, per month	$14.90 per user, per month	$15 per user, per month
Best For	Business that want robust artificial intelligence features for insights	Larger sales teams looking for advanced sales forecasting	Small teams that want low-cost reporting and analytics	Users who want extensive customer service analytics tools
Key Analytics Features	Zia AI feature for predictions and suggestions on workflows and assignments	Comprehensive and customizable sales forecasting; Einstein AI sales assistant	Visual dashboards with activity reports and goal tracking	Data analysis between marketing and sales

*Pricing based on annual billing; monthly billing is also available at a higher monthly price.

Zoho CRM

Zoho CRM can take analytics to the next level by using artificial intelligence (AI) to offer suggestions based on the system’s findings. The Zia AI feature can suggest what tasks to complete next, which workflows can be automated, and ways to boost team performance. This CRM offers standard reporting for free, while the advanced features require the Enterprise plan.

Zoho CRM Zia predictions and suggestions (Source: Zoho CRM)

Salesforce

Salesforce provides users with reports and sales analytics similar to other CRM platforms. The main differentiator, however, is how advanced the sales forecasting features are. In addition to general revenue predictions, Salesforce helps users estimate custom data fields specific to their business. There’s also the Einstein AI feature to make predictive forecasts on revenue, deals, and pipeline efficiency as well as insights behind its predictions.

Salesforce Einstein customer prediction builder (Source: Medium)

Pipedrive

Pipedrive is a sales-focused CRM that offers many of its reporting and analytics features, such as deal reports, activity reports, and user-goal tracking reports. More advanced features also let users project revenue, including recurring and subscription-based revenue, for businesses that use those models.

Pipedrive’s analytical CRM tool offers revenue forecasting with goal tracking (Source: Zapier)

Freshsales

Freshsales has analytics tools for lead website behavior analysis, deal insights, lead scoring, and individual agent performance. Its territory management features allow users to generate revenue metrics from your sales CRM by source and salesperson. Freshsales also lets users download visual reports that can be created using ready-to-use templates.

Freshsales sales analytics dashboard (Source: Freshsales)

Benefits of CRM Analytics

When used correctly, CRM data give a business a distinct competitive advantage over competitors by seeing things that raw CRM data will not show. Some of the main benefits of using analytics features include:

• Improves conversion rates: Using data to understand customers and find bottlenecks in your sales process improves lead quality, efficiency, and conversions.
• Helps predict spending capabilities: With sales forecasting analysis tools, you can estimate how much revenue will be generated and how much you can spend on other expenses or investments.
• Shows your team activities: In-depth breakdowns help you evaluate how sales reps spend their time and which specific activities are most crucial to sales production.
• Enables businesses to optimize resources: Through a comparative analysis of various lead sources and campaigns, you can determine which methods and channels for producing leads are worth your team’s time and resources.
• Offers insights and advice on how to improve processes: Some of the more advanced platforms have CRM artificial intelligence features that not only analyze but interpret data for you. This can tell you how to improve your operation and performance based on those data-driven results.
• Improves customer satisfaction and retention: Customer analytics show their likes, dislikes, experience preferences, and why they prefer your brand, helping improve a customer’s satisfaction with your business.

Bottom Line

CRM analytics let sales teams see the full picture of their sales operation and performance by interpreting the high volume of data collected in their CRM. When done successfully, CRM business intelligence can help improve conversion rates, resource allocation, and customer retention—yielding higher revenue and profits. While most CRMs offer this feature, certain products stand out for feature sophistication, ease of use, and budget-friendliness.