What is CRM Analytics?

CRM analytics are functions of CRM-based software that process the existing information in the system and provide insights for future sales and business decisions.

For example, CRM analytics can: 

  • Help salespeople prioritize prospects based on the engagement and connect with those who are most interested
  • Alert salespeople about at-risk deals for course correction and provide visibility into high-value deals
  • Give a visual representation of key metrics by aggregating them into meaningful reports for sales leaders and managers

Why Do You Need CRM Analytics?

CRM analytics is vital for businesses of all sizes, especially if you are a growing organization with a lot of leads flowing in. When you have to deal with so many prospects and customers at once, it can be difficult to understand where each prospect or customer is in the sales funnel. You lose visibility into opportunities, lack context in conversations, and could miss potential high-value deals.

CRM analytics tools collect and track interactions with prospects and analyze their behavior in your product and website. It interprets this information and complies actionable tips or reports. This helps recognize where you need to invest your time, money, and resources.

The growing information in your CRM software allows CRM analytics to analyze customer data and provide you with the information necessary for better customer acquisition and retention strategies.

 

Aditya Mangudkar, an Account Manager at Schindler gives his take on how CRM analytics serves him:

“Different market segments have different buying behavior of respective customers. Although the recipe remains the same, the method varies.

On gathered data from different market zones, CRM analytics forms a strategic plan to reach the company's target client base in a minimum time frame and in a very effective manner.

Thus reaching out to customers in a structured manner helps sales to drive the business aptly in lieu of a haphazard manner.”

What Can You Measure With CRM Analytics?

CRM analytics enables you to maximize the effectiveness of sales by providing visibility into: 

Quality of your leads

Based on your prospects’ engagement, AI-based lead scoring prioritizes and segments them into those most and least likely to close a deal.

Quality of the sales emails

Measures the performance of your emails for each email sequence and tweaks them until you create the perfect outreach for your audience.

Quality of the sales calls

Track successful customer engagement with activities such as the number and length of sales calls versus the meetings procured.

Quality of sales and support

Measure the frequency of issues raised by customers and the time taken to resolve those. Know which customers are likely to churn and focus on winning them back.

New opportunities versus won deals

Measure the effectiveness of your sales strategy with reports that show the trend of the incoming opportunities versus the exact number of won deals.

Sales performance

Measure the performance of your sales team with factors such as their outreach performance, the number of demos conducted, the number of deals won, etc.

Challenges of CRM Analytics

A major challenge with CRM analytics software is being able to integrate it with an existing business ecosystem. It cannot be effectively utilized if not tied to your marketing automation or helpdesk tool. 

Adding to this, the accuracy of insights from the CRM analytics tools highly depends on: 

Most CRMs clutter the UI with unnecessary features and manual data entry. This not just leads to a drop in the adoption rate but data quality also goes for a toss. For a comprehensive CRM overview, it's important to understand the balance between features and simplicity.

Freshsales (formerly Freshworks CRM) is built keeping the end-users—the salespeople—in mind. With a clean and straightforward user interface, 92% of our users find it easy to use. The CRM also comes with a built-in phone and easily integrates with its native software for helpdesk, marketing automation, and live chat.

The easy-to-use interface, higher adoption rate, and automated data entry give you hygienic data with which you get accurate reports to identify opportunities and forecast better.

  • User adoption
  • Clean data entry by salespeople
  • The capability of the CRM analytics software

Effective sales organizations are 87% more likely to be consistent users of CRM software. So while the need for CRM is indispensable, the knack lies in getting your salespeople to use it regularly. 

 

“CRM analytics can be a very powerful tool, as [is] every analytics, but it depends on the correctness data your salespeople fill in. It helps me shape that picture and recognize the gaps and best practices as well. But you have to learn and organize the data sales persons fill in order to get the right insights.”

-Nikola Isailović, Co-founder at The Best Practice and Blockchain247

Benefits of a Good CRM Analytics Software

Forecast Accurate Revenue

CRM analytics software forecasts the sales cycle for all your deals. It gives you the

  • Win/loss probability for deals at every stage of your pipeline
  • An estimated close date for ongoing deals
  • Estimated revenue based on the deals in your pipeline

AI-powered CRM analytics software such as Freshsales show deals in different colored and sized bubbles—bigger the bubble, higher the deal value. This visually communicates which deals to focus on. It gives you a birds-eye view of the pipeline and helps strategize and forecast revenue more accurately.

Deals bubble view Deals bubble view


Create Segments Effortlessly

Segment your leads based on the product, geography, size, zip codes, etc. Set predefined rules to automatically assign prospects to salespeople based on this segmentation.

For example, prospects signing up for a particular product from Arizona are assigned to salespeople who take care of that region and product.

Based on these segments, you can easily analyze which regions and sectors we are getting the most sign-ups from.

A CRM data analytics tool also segments prospects based on their interest in your product and ranks them based on their engagement with your salespeople. Now, your salespeople will get the most appropriate prospects to engage with and know whom to focus on.

Territory Segmentation Territory Segmentation

Prioritize the Right Deals

CRM analytics also help your salespeople achieve their goals by

  • Giving them a summary of the prospects’ website activity to understand the features they are most interested in
  • Analyzing their outbound efforts and showing the actual metrics to help understand areas of improvement
  • Automating most of the manual data entry processes and allowing them to concentrate on what they do best: selling

Freshsales analyzes and learns from historical sales data and activities to give deal insights by auto assigning tags—“Likely to close”, “Trending”, “At-risk”, and “Gone cold”.

Based on these tags, it recommends actions. This allows your salespeople to prioritize, manage, and close deals faster.

deal insights deal insights

Stay on Top of Sales Performance

With insights into your campaign performance, deals lost by reason, phone calls, sales team performance, and more, you will know what works best for you and the areas that need improvement. 

Being able to quickly see how campaigns or salespeople are doing enables you to make data-driven decisions and grow sales. CRM analytics tools give you sales reports to identify

  • Top-performing salespeople
  • Number of email and phone calls for your outreach
  • Deals created versus the deals expected to close
  • Forecasted versus Achieved goals

And more!

Sales reports Sales reports