What Are CRM Analytics: The Simple Guide for Small Businesses

CRMs collect customer data and take it to a whole new level, which makes them super efficient for small businesses. However, the systems still require an in-depth understanding of marketing analytics in order to be used effectively. This article attempts to break down what CRM Analytics is all about and how you can integrate these insights into your business.

CRM Analytics is used to measure the effectiveness of marketing, sales, and customer service. They can also be used to predict future events. This article will provide an overview of CRM analytics and how they work.

The processing and analysis of data inside customer relationship management (CRM) systems are referred to as CRM analytics. It provides useful, data-driven insights into various aspects of a business, such as sales performance, revenue forecasts, and customer service, allowing small business owners to make informed decisions, better understand customer behavior, and increase customer satisfaction and retention rates, as well as spot potential business opportunities.

This article delves further into how small firms might benefit from CRM analytics. You’ll also discover which analytics tools are essential for monitoring sales, service, and marketing initiatives.

CRM Analytics Benefits & Uses

CRM analytics gives users insights that they wouldn’t be able to get by looking at raw data alone. Analytics-generated metrics assist firms in improving sales forecasting and removing the guesswork from opportunity discovery, which might include determining where the majority of leads originate from or which communication channels are most successful.

CRM analytics, when compiled into useful reports, assist salespeople in increasing productivity in the following areas:

• Lead conversion rate: This metric displays the total number or percentage of leads that resulted in real purchases, allowing users to precisely forecast revenue.
• High-ticket opportunities: Identifies which hot leads are most likely to convert into opportunities, allowing salespeople to focus on them.
• Sales pipelines: This allows customers to identify phases in their pipeline where prospects have been trapped in order to determine if a lead requires more attention or is a sign of poor conversion potential.
• Customer touchpoints: Allows users to see which of their communication channels, such as webforms, websites, social media, email, and phone queries, create the most leads.
• Performance of sales agents: Determines which sales agents complete the most transactions and which sectors they perform best in so that they may be allocated duties that match their talents and maximize their profitability.
• Top and least active customers: This allows users to identify their top customers based on the income they generate, enabling them to choose which ones to keep as well as which ones are inactive and may need more nurturing.
• Top and worst-performing items: This allows users to identify which products and services generate the most money, assisting sales agents in their recommendations to new clients.

Who Should Use CRM Analytics?

CRM analytics technologies can extract and analyze a wide range of data types. Some of the users who gain the most from it, as well as why are listed below.

• Owners of small to medium-sized firms; may maintain track of their overall company health or discover which elements of their operations need more attention. This is equally true for sole proprietors or small company owners.
• Sales reps: Sales representatives may track their progress toward objectives and targets, and organize their follow-up actions accordingly.
• Managers of sales teams: Managers of sales teams may evaluate their whole team and monitor the success of their sales agents.
• Finance experts, such as chief financial officers (CFOs), accountants, bookkeepers, and other members of the finance team, may provide useful reports that demonstrate financial health and performance.

Lead & Deal Conversion Tracking Tools

Lead conversion monitoring in Zoho CRM displays which sales agents produced, contacted, and converted leads, as well as the team’s overall effort. (Photo courtesy of Zoho)

Features of Lead Source Analysis

These features show consumers which of the channels they’re using provide the greatest results when it comes to generating leads, giving them an indication of which channels they should spend more money on in terms of marketing or advertising. Their website, social media advertisements, physical events, and Google ads might all be potential lead sources.

Zendesk has a lead source analysis function. (Image courtesy of Zendesk)

Tools for Tracking Sales Agent Performance

The sales agent individual performance report from Bitrix24 allows sales team managers to correctly analyze their team using actual facts. (Image credit: YouTube)

Reports on Forecasts

Based on how leads are converting, deals and opportunities coming in, and revenue being generated, sales Reports on Forecasts provide users with intelligent and data-based figures on how their business will perform in a certain amount of time. This allows users to plan ahead to ensure that their business stays on track.

Salesforce’s powerful sales forecasting dashboard displays many facets of a company’s operations, such as win percentage by salesperson and top sectors served. (Image courtesy of Salesforce)

Tools for Tracking Sales After They’ve Been Sold

Enables users to nurture existing customer relationships and give more value to the services or products that they purchase, and even personalize their customer experience. Tools for Tracking Sales After They’ve Been Sold can help identify top customers and spenders, products or services these customers usually purchase, and communication channels that they usually use.

What Should CRM Analytics Track?

Users should monitor two types of customer relationship engagement activities to get the most out of CRM analytics: Pre-Sale Participation and Engagement after the sale. The former tracks interactions that happen before a sale, such as follow-up calls and product demonstrations, while the latter tracks activities that happen after the sale, such as revenue reports and project progress.

Pre-Sale Participation

Measuring Pre-Sale Participation activities help users become better at closing deals because it gives them a way of identifying the activities that resonated with their prospects the most. This includes measuring sales interactions and marketing campaign effectiveness.

When assessing CRM analytics, there are numerous presales activities to consider:

• Prospecting: This allows customers to evaluate their sales team’s ability to find new prospects and fill the front end of the funnel by tracking things like prospecting calls, new leads obtained, and cold emails sent over time.
• New possibilities: Because the number of new prospects contributed determines the health of a sales pipeline, a CRM should monitor related actions such as the number of calls made and the number of proposals submitted, opened, acted on, and finished.
• Product demonstrations: This allows users to track the number of product demos given by each sales rep as well as the overall number of product demos that result in sales in order to establish future team objectives.
• Meetings and phone calls: Meaningful one-on-one customer contacts with sales professionals typically result in closed transactions. Businesses must keep track of activities such as the number and duration of phone conversations, the frequency of in-person or online meetings, and post-meeting engagement, such as the number of free trial sign-ups.

Engagement after the sale

Monitoring post-sales trends are critical for increasing client retention, and it entails tracking interactions and activities that occur after the transaction. These duties include monitoring billing trends, the amount and kinds of customer care contacts, and project progress.

There is a wide variety of Engagement after-sale activities worth tracking, including the following:

• Billing patterns provide useful information, such as whether a consumer is more likely to cancel or maintain a product or service depending on payment history.
• Customers that produce a large number of service tickets may be at danger of having their goods and purchases canceled. Businesses must keep track of how many tickets a client files with their service department in order to take preventative actions to reduce customer turnover.
• Project management: Keeping track of overall project status and milestone activity status helps sales teams to take action and keep project status and timetables on track.
• Cross-sells and upsells: Keeping track of cross-sells and upsells allows salespeople to design campaigns depending on customer behavior.

The Best Analytics Features in CRMs

Many CRM vendors provide analytics tools, which range from lead conversion analysis and sales income estimates to agent performance tracking and customer touchpoint monitoring. We’ve included our top three recommendations below, along with why we believe they’re great at analytics.

Zoho CRM

Zoho CRM has some of the most powerful analytics tools on the market, covering everything from pre-sales to post-sales. It allows users to precisely see sales information, allowing them to make data-driven decisions.

Users may use this CRM to monitor progress toward specified targets, find high-quality leads that can generate more revenue, evaluate sales funnels, and calculate advertising and marketing ROI (ROI). Zoho CRM also contains capabilities for analyzing consumer activity, such as identifying top consumers and spenders, the most purchased items, and the most engaged with channels.

The Zoho dashboard displays a breakdown of customers’ client industries, lead generating progress, and top-performing sales agents. (Photo courtesy of Zoho)

From lead generation to completing sales, users can examine your complete funnel process. (Photo courtesy of Zoho)

Users may monitor their daily progress in completing sales, which gives them a sense of repeating patterns and when the most deals are done. (Photo courtesy of Zoho)

Pipedrive

Pipedrive helps sales teams handle data by presenting it in easy-to-understand reports and interactive dashboards, allowing them to spot successful trends and bottlenecks. Its analytical capabilities assist customers in analyzing transactions to determine how many prospects their salespeople win or lose and why, as well as forecasting revenues to estimate turnover increase.

Pipedrive’s activity reporting allows users to monitor bespoke sales activities like emails, calls, and events to discover which ones are most effective in reaching out to consumers and to repeat successful patterns.

The dashboard in Pipedrive displays a glimpse of all essential data in the system, such as deals launched by sales agents, monthly task status, average deal time, and the average amount of won deals. (Image courtesy of Pipedrive)

Users may monitor their monthly success in completing agreements and see how it compares to the goals they and their team established for themselves. (Image courtesy of Pipedrive)

Users may monitor their monthly success in completing agreements and see how it compares to the goals they and their team established for themselves. (Image courtesy of Pipedrive)

Freshsales

Users may assess team performance across locations and territories with Freshsales’ visual reports. Its analytical reports provide customers insight into numerous aspects of their company, such as identifying sources that contribute to the growth and monitoring the interactions of their contacts—attributing every touchpoint to a conversion.

Sales teams may also use data reports to track transactions over time to see how they convert and assess sales trends, as well as analyze win and loss rates to improve their strategy.

Freshsales gives customers a breakdown of the outcomes of all lead actions over the course of a month, as well as the owners of those activities and their win rates, as well as an overview of how many leads are in each pipeline stage. (Image courtesy of Freshsales)

It may look at the number of emails sent by salespeople, scheduled activities, the state of current tasks, and the call log level. (Image courtesy of Freshsales)

Conclusion

CRM analytics systems provide sophisticated processing capabilities, ensuring that your company data is processed meaningfully and properly, enabling you to acquire accurate insights into business performance. CRMs save time by enabling you to process and produce data automatically using point-and-click or drag-and-drop features, letting you concentrate on utilizing the data to grow sales and nurture great customer connections rather than manually going through it.

Zoho CRM is a good alternative for small organizations when it comes to CRM analytics reporting. Its broad array of sophisticated customer relationship management capabilities, as well as its rich reporting features, making it a desirable and cheap alternative for measuring the success of your sales force and overall company health.