Essential CRM Reporting: The Most Valuable Data to Capture

With CRMs, the earlier you identify information you want to save, the more robust your CRM will be, and you’ll save time by avoiding retroactively updating your past records. In this article we will show you some essential CRM reporting features and data that you’ll want to start seeing assigned to the qualified leads your marketing team is generating.

This article will walk you through the CRM data points that matter most for marketing and sales teams alike. From lead source tracking to won/lost reasons and campaign performance insights, we’ll outline the essential CRM reporting metrics that help you close the loop between lead generation and revenue outcomes. If you’re serious about growth, it’s time to stop retrofitting data into your CRM and start building smarter from day one.

Essential CRM Reporting Metrics and Data

Information Generated by Marketing

Firstly, you’ll want to see the following information about any contact that’s generated by your marketing

• Lead Source
  It’s vital that you can point to any record in your CRM and know exactly where it came from
• Conversion Piece
  What was the conversion piece/lead magnet that the contact converted with
• Engagement Metrics
  How did they interact and behave with your website or marketing?
• Campaign Information
  If you can save more granular marketing data such as which campaign or ad it originated from, you’ll unlock much more in-depth marketing ROI reporting

Capturing CRM Information for Sales

For Sales, consider if you’re capturing all of this information in your CRM

• Marketing Qualification Criteria
  This will be the preliminary qualifiers you use to identify target market opportunities to speed up your prospecting efforts
• Won & Lost reason
  You’ll want to always record what lead to your sales outcome for future analysis
• Sales activity
  Keep your sales team efficient and accountable by funnelling all their activity through your CRM

Digital marketing platforms are making it easier to close the loop between sales and marketing, allowing you to optimise based on contacts that have actually become customers. For example, LinkedIn has a tool to link any CRM milestone back into LinkedIn Ads via Zapier.

Make The Most of Your CRM Data

Here is the data you’ll want to be making sure you’re storing about your customers in order to take advantage of this new marketing opportunity.

1. Account size
   Track this so you can segment your customers by how much revenue they represent
2. Furthest Deal Stage
   Identify how far leads have progressed through your sales process and decide which stages are worth optimising your campaigns over
3. Won reason
   Create a sophisticated marketing flywheel where you can tailor campaigns based on common won reasons, and then automatically feed matching won deals back into your ads to improve the performance even more.

Conclusion

Incorporating comprehensive data into your CRM from the start ensures a robust system and saves you time in the long run. Optimise efforts and create seamless integration by capturing essential marketing and sales information.

By being intentional and proactive about the information you capture, especially around lead source, campaign attribution, qualification criteria, and sales outcomes, you set your CRM up as more than just a contact repository. It becomes a strategic asset that fuels better reporting, sharper targeting, and more efficient synergies between marketing and sales.

As digital platforms continue to offer advanced integrations and automation capabilities, the quality of your CRM data becomes the key to unlocking meaningful insights and creating feedback loops that improve campaign performance over time. The earlier you embed these data habits into your processes, the more scalable and insightful your operations will become.

Invest in your CRM today and build a smarter, data-driven future for every campaign, sales conversation, and business decision to come.