Analysis and Reporting

Analysis and Reporting

What a company needs for its sales reporting will often depend on what stage of growth a company is in. If your company is in its earliest stages, you may be managing reporting with excel sheets or an even simpler method of tracking and reporting—it might be a sheet of paper with the number of calls you made today. Or a whiteboarded list of the deals you're working to close.

At this stage, using a simple tool like Close that comes with out-of-the-box reporting for sales activities and opportunities will make a big difference for your team. Our reports are easy to use, understand, and they generate actionable insights.

However, as you scale your business, you may in the process of getting more sophisticated as a sales organization, and you want your reporting to reflect that.

Where most companies go wrong is that they start generating super-complicated reports around this time. Their curiosity and desire for sophistication get the better of them and they start building a massive, complicated sales reporting system. It's best to step back at this point and consider your goals when it comes to reporting. How do you want this reporting to influence your sales decisions moving forward? If you find certain information about your sales cycle for instance, how will that change how you ask your reps to perform their job? Do other teams at your company own certain metrics that you need to be able to answer your questions?

Once you have a goal around reporting and you've considered what other teams' data will help you, then it can be time to look for an additional reporting tool that can grab your Close data and mingle it with other company to give greater insights.

Common reporting asks are:

Dashboards: These custom-made reports combine different KPIs and reports to provide a comprehensive, high-level view of business performance for specific audiences. Dashboards may include data from various data sources and are also usually fairly static.

Alerts : These conditional reports are triggered when data falls outside of expected ranges or some other pre-defined criteria is met. Once people are notified of what happened, they can take appropriate action as necessary.

Close has several answers for these type of custom reports. We have a few native integrations where with a few clicks, Close data can be flowing into a platform that offer up insights. You can also use our third party partner, Zapier, to create alert automation within Close or connect with additional reporting resources.

Check out this section to learn more, but always keeping in mind that sales reporting should stay simple. Focus on the metrics that really matter.