What is a CRM report?
A CRM report is a tool that consolidates data from multiple sources (e.g., Salesforce, HubSpot, Microsoft Dynamics) to track and display key performance indicators (KPIs) (e.g., lead conversion rate, customer retention, sales pipeline), enabling teams to monitor customer interactions and relationships and create presentations for stakeholders and executives.
CRM reports are typically built using flexible tools like Google Looker Studio, Power BI, Google Sheets, or platform-specific solutions to enable high customization and integration of multiple data sources.
What to include in a CRM report?
An actionable CRM report balances context and specificity based on the audience (executives, managers, and analysts) and their use cases.
Executive CRM reports
Executive reports for CEOs, COOs, and clients show CRM's bottom-line impact. Reviewed weekly, monthly, or quarterly, they include:
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) analysis: by segment, using historical data and predictive analytics.
- Sales performance analysis: revenue, win rates, and sales cycle length.
- Cohort analysis: retention, expansion, and CLV by customer cohort (sign-up period, acquisition channel).
- Add text for additional context to translate metrics for non-technical audiences. Present in slide decks and simplified Looker Studio reports.
CRM manager reports
Manager reports have cross-channel views with drill-downs to see performance by client, region, team member, sales stage, and customer segment. They help align teams, define tactics, and include:
- Cross-channel reporting: overall customer engagement, product, client, or region reporting across channels.
- Goal tracking: compare current performance vs objectives.
- Audits for prioritization and spotting issues
- Competitive analysis for market positioning and strategy mapping.
- Customer feedback and satisfaction analysis
Operational CRM reports
Operational reports for analysts and sales managers have granular, customizable KPIs to solve technical issues. Monitored hourly, daily, or weekly, they cover:
- Lead management: lead source, status, and conversion rates.
- Customer support: ticket resolution time, customer satisfaction scores.
- Sales pipeline: deal stages, forecast accuracy, and bottlenecks.
- Account management: upsell/cross-sell opportunities, account health scores.
Operational CRM reports are highly customized, built in flexible tools like Google Sheets or Looker Studio to enable data cleaning, blending, annotations, and integrating multiple sources.
How to build a CRM report?
To build a CRM report, connect your data sources, choose a template on Looker Studio or Sheets, build your queries by selecting metrics and dimensions, choose charts to visualize your data, customize the report, design and share via link, PDF or email.
Here’s the breakdown:
Connect data sources
Define and connect the data sources to bring to your report. Common sources are Salesforce and HubSpot for CRM data, Google Analytics for web analytics, and email platforms for communication data.
To connect your data sources, go to portermetrics.com, choose the data sources to bring to your report.
You can follow these tutorials on connecting your data:
Choose a template
Choose from dozens of CRM report templates in Google Sheets or Looker Studio, designed for use cases like lead tracking, sales performance, customer retention, and support metrics.
Learn to copy Looker Studio templates.
While templates are the starting point. Make them specific for your business or agency. Map your specific metrics, especially custom conversions, CRM contact data, GA4 events, and all the fields and metrics that you define as "conversions" and "revenue".
Depending on your reporting tool—Google Sheets or Google Looker Studio, pick any of the dozens of templates created by our team and customers to solve your CRM reporting use cases, such as lead tracking, sales performance, customer retention, and support metrics.
Select metrics, dimensions, and charts
Once your report template is downloaded, you may 1)modify it or 2) create a blank page to build it from scratch. Whatever the case, setting up a query always follows these steps:
- Select the data source and the account connected to it
- Choose metrics (e.g. Leads, revenue, conversion rate, etc.).
- Choose breakdowns to segment your data (e.g. by date, sales rep, customer segment, etc.)
You can follow these tutorials on adding data to your reports
Design
To make your CRM reports truly white-label you can add logos, colors, fonts, and styling to mirror your brand.
Follow these tutorials to design your CRM reports:
Share
Share your CRM reports via links, PDF, schedule emails, and control permissions.
KPIs to include in a CRM report?
CRM reports should include a mix of customer acquisition, engagement, retention, efficiency, effectiveness, revenue, and cost metrics and KPIs to fully understand the performance of customer relationship management towards business goals. They include:
Customer acquisition KPIs measure the process of gaining new customers:
- Lead metrics: number of leads, lead conversion rate, lead source effectiveness
- Engagement metrics: customer interactions, response times, satisfaction scores
- Retention metrics: churn rate, repeat purchase rate, customer loyalty
Efficiency KPIs compare your CRM outputs to the cost, including:
- Acquisition: cost per lead (CPL)
- Engagement: cost per interaction
- Retention: cost per retained customer
Effectiveness KPIs compare the input with the output from one stage to another
- Acquisition: lead-to-customer conversion rate
- Engagement: interaction rate, satisfaction improvement
- Retention: retention rate
Sales and cost KPIs show the bottom-line impact of your CRM performance:
- Sales: revenue, upsell/cross-sell success
- Cost: CRM software costs, operational expenses
- Efficiency: ROI, customer acquisition cost (CAC)
- Effectiveness: average deal size, customer lifetime value (CLV)
To analyze these CRM KPIs, segment them by:
- Channel: email, phone, in-person
- Time: Hourly, daily, weekly, monthly
- Sales stage: lead, opportunity, closed deal
- Business: client, branch, region
- Customer segment: industry, size, location
- Content: communication type, feedback, support tickets
