Many B2B companies look to improve conversions from lead to revenue and increase the productivity of their direct sales arm.  Here are 4 reports that can be run immediately in your CRM that can impact conversion positively without having to invest more money in new marketing programs.

• Lead disposition reports:  when this report is run, it gives an overall status of how marketing is doing with handling of leads to and through the inside sales function.  Symptoms of problems in this area are a large pool of ‘open’ leads with no disposition.  what this means is inside sales is not taking action on these, which is cause for root cause analysis as marketing is producing a great quantity with no quality conversions.

• Opportunity reports – look at the ‘closed opportunity’ status pick list (if there is one).  If there are choices that speak to ‘not qualified’ ask yourself or your team, why is it that they were promoted to an opportunity prior to being not qualified?  Within opportunities, look at aging reports, the number of days on average a deal sits in any one cycle.  Because an arthimetic mean is provided, give careful study to the outliers of deals that have sat in queue for a very long time.

• Funnel metric reports – do an analysis by either lead and/or opportunity (sales accepted opportunity) to study the entire shape of the ‘funnel’.  Is it indeed a funnel or is it a snowman (heavy bottom) or inverted funnel (due to deals getting clogged up in legal review).  Against the backdrop of aging reports, funnel metric reports can be very helpful for sales and for marketing to determine what sales enablement strategy need to be put in place.

• Duplication reports – do some basic analysis in/around fields within the record structure of your CRM – account duplications, lead duplications, and contact duplications.  Salesforce administrators sometimes overlook plugins that can prevent these duplications from happening – consequently, poor performing outbound campaign performance is symptomatic of the cause of poor data hygiene practices.  Poor campaigns = poor conversion.

What reports have you found helpful?