Nutshell. Salesforce. SAP. These are becoming common terms inside many businesses today. These are customer relationships management systems, or CRMs, and they are the backbone for creating a data-driven sales organization.

CRM systems are not just for large companies. There are many off-the-shelf products that are designed specifically for small organizations to provide insight into revenue, pipelines, customer buying patterns and more.

In this issue of Promotional Consultant Today, we share these six important reports that you can get from a CRM.

1. Profitability Reports. Profitability reports show you where your money is coming from. By mining your customer database for purchase history and customer buying habits, you can determine which customers make the biggest contribution to your revenue, are the most loyal and have the highest potential to buy from you again.

2. Sales Cycle Reports. As sales and marketing manage the buying process across various touchpoints and channels, it's important to know how different variables affect the sales cycle. Sales cycle reports can depict the average cycle duration (from lead capture to close) across different lead sources, and drill down to smaller metrics such as average response time.

3. Pipeline Reports. These reports show how your leads are progressing or regressing through the decision process, and what opportunities are pending. This helps marketers set quotas for their campaigns and helps salespeople prioritize their development tactics based on opportunity stage.

4. Sales Forecast Reports. Once you have a clear picture of your pipeline, you can use your current leads and opportunities—as well as past sales trends—to project future revenue. Most teams run sales forecast reports on a monthly or quarterly basis, and use the projections to set goals for each department.

5. Sales Conversion Reports. Sales conversion reports tell you what percentage of leads convert into won deals or sales within a defined date range. Most CRMs break this down by lead source. For example, the report might show that 12 percent of email leads converted last month, compared to only five percent of paid media leads. Depending on your platform, you may also have visibility into the earlier stages of conversion, such as MQL (marketing qualified lead) to SQL (sales qualified lead), and SQL to SAL (sales accepted lead).

6. Goal Progress Reports. Goal progress reports measure how campaigns are performing against their preset goals. For sales, a progress report might track total revenue and deals won for the current fiscal period. For marketing, it might be the number of MQLs delivered or total revenue per source. Goal progress reports serve as a reference point for campaign effectiveness without requiring a deep dive into pipeline and channel metrics (most of the time, goal reports can even be embedded into your dashboard). This keeps team members on the same page and helps decision-makers know when to shift gears.

CRM reports make basic business intelligence accessible to companies of every size. They can be easy to interpret and easy to use for any business of any size.

Source: Aleksandr Peterson is a technology analyst at TechnologyAdvice. He covers marketing automation, CRMs, project management, human resources, and other emerging business technology. Connect with him on LinkedIn.