CRM Reporting: The 7 Metrics That Actually Matter (And the Ones You Can Ignore)

Your CRM can probably generate 50 different reports. Dashboards with graphs, charts, tables, and numbers that look impressive in a management meeting. The question is: how many of those reports actually change a decision you make?

For most businesses, the answer is two or three — at best. The rest is noise. Pretty graphs that nobody acts on. Vanity metrics that make things look busy without revealing whether the business is healthy.

Here are the seven CRM metrics that genuinely matter, why they matter, and how to set them up so they’re useful rather than decorative.

1. Conversion Rate by Pipeline Stage

What it tells you: Where deals die in your process.

You need to know the percentage of deals that move from each stage to the next. Not just your overall win rate — the stage-by-stage conversion.

Example for a trades business:

Stage	Deals Entering	Moving to Next	Conversion
Enquiry	100	72	72%
Site Visit Booked	72	65	90%
Quote Sent	65	28	43%
Quote Accepted	28	26	93%
Job Completed	26	25	96%

This immediately tells you the problem is between “Quote Sent” and “Quote Accepted”. You’re losing 57% of deals at that stage. That’s where to focus — not on getting more enquiries, but on improving your quoting or follow-up process.

2. Average Deal Velocity

What it tells you: How long it takes to close business, and whether it’s getting faster or slower.

Deal velocity is the average number of days from first contact to closed deal. Track it overall and by deal size, customer type, and source.

Why it matters: if your average deal takes 23 days to close but deals from referrals close in 11 days while website leads take 38 days, you know where to invest your energy. If velocity is trending upward (deals taking longer), something in your process is slowing down — maybe follow-ups are slipping, or your quoting is getting bottlenecked.

How to set it up: Most CRMs can calculate this automatically if you track the date a deal enters the pipeline and the date it closes. Create a report that shows average days-to-close by month, and watch the trend.

3. Pipeline Coverage Ratio

What it tells you: Whether you have enough deals in progress to hit your targets.

The formula: total value of open deals divided by your revenue target for the period. Healthy pipeline coverage is typically 3:1 to 4:1, meaning you need three to four dollars in pipeline for every dollar of target.

Why that ratio? Because not every deal closes. If your win rate is 30%, you need roughly $333,000 in pipeline to close $100,000. If your win rate is 50%, you need $200,000.

The real value: Pipeline coverage gives you early warning. If it’s February and your Q2 pipeline coverage is 1.5:1, you know in advance that you’ll likely miss target unless you generate more opportunities now. That’s actionable intelligence — not a surprise in June.

4. Revenue by Source

What it tells you: Where your profitable work actually comes from.

Track how every deal enters your pipeline — referral, website, Google Ads, trade show, repeat customer, cold outreach — and how much revenue each source generates.

Most businesses discover something surprising: the source that generates the most leads isn’t the source that generates the most revenue. You might get 200 website leads per quarter but only close $40,000 from them, while 15 referrals generate $180,000.

The second layer: Track cost per acquisition by source. If Google Ads costs you $8,000/month and generates $25,000 in closed work, that’s a 3:1 return. If referrals cost you nothing but a thank-you call and generate $60,000/month, the ROI comparison is obvious.

How to set it up: Add a “Source” field to your deal records and make it mandatory. Keep the options simple — 5 to 8 categories, not 30. If the source is hard to identify (customer found you through Google but also got a referral from a mate), pick the primary source and be consistent.

5. Stale Deal Tracking

What it tells you: Which deals are dying silently.

A stale deal is one that hasn’t had any activity — call, email, meeting, update — for longer than your average sales cycle. If your typical deal closes in 20 days and a deal has been sitting at “Quote Sent” for 35 days with no activity, it’s almost certainly dead. But nobody has marked it as lost, so it sits in your pipeline inflating your numbers.

Stale deals are the single biggest cause of inaccurate forecasting. Your pipeline says you have $600,000 in open deals, but $180,000 of that is stale — deals that are effectively lost but nobody has cleaned up. You’re making decisions based on a $600,000 pipeline when the real number is $420,000.

How to set it up: Create a report or view that flags deals with no activity in the last 14 days (adjust based on your sales cycle). Review it weekly. Force a decision: either take action on the deal or mark it as lost. No deal should sit untouched for more than two sales cycles.

6. Customer Lifetime Value

What it tells you: How much a customer is actually worth over the full relationship.

A new customer might place a $15,000 first order. But if they reorder quarterly for five years, they’re worth $300,000. That changes everything about how you acquire and serve them.

Track total revenue per customer over time. Identify your top 20% of customers by lifetime value. You’ll likely find that 80% of your revenue comes from 20% of your customers — and you should be protecting those relationships accordingly.

The practical application: If your average customer lifetime value is $85,000, spending $2,000 to acquire a new one is a no-brainer. If lifetime value is $8,000, that same $2,000 acquisition cost is borderline. You can’t make this decision without the data.

7. Activity-to-Outcome Ratios

What it tells you: What your team actually needs to do to hit targets.

Track the relationship between activities (calls, emails, meetings, site visits) and outcomes (deals created, quotes sent, deals won). Over time, you’ll see patterns:

• It takes an average of 3 calls to book a site visit
• 80% of site visits result in a quote being sent
• Deals with a follow-up within 48 hours of quoting close at 2x the rate of those without

These ratios become your playbook. If a sales rep needs to close $100K this quarter and your data shows that requires roughly 8 won deals, 22 quotes, 28 site visits, and 85 calls — they know exactly what their weekly activity should look like.

How to set it up: Log activities consistently (this is non-negotiable — the data is only useful if it’s complete). Run a monthly report that correlates activities with closed revenue. After three to six months, you’ll have enough data to see reliable patterns.

What You Can Safely Ignore

Not everything your CRM can measure is worth measuring. Skip these unless you have a specific reason:

• Total contacts in the database — quantity means nothing without quality
• Email open rates — unreliable due to privacy features and mail clients pre-loading images
• Number of deals created — meaningless without conversion data
• Activity counts without outcome tracking — 200 calls means nothing if none convert
• Dashboard widgets that look impressive but don’t answer a question — if nobody changes behaviour based on the metric, remove it

The Reporting Reality Check

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most CRM reporting failures aren’t about the reports — they’re about the data. If your team isn’t logging activities consistently, if deal values aren’t accurate, if pipeline stages aren’t updated in real time, then every report built on that data is fiction.

Fix data quality first. Get your team entering accurate information consistently (which often means simplifying the CRM — fewer fields, faster input, visible benefit to the person entering data). Then build reports on the clean data.

Start With Three

If you’re currently drowning in CRM reports (or ignoring them all), start with three: conversion by pipeline stage, pipeline coverage ratio, and stale deal tracking. These three alone will tell you where deals are dying, whether you have enough pipeline to hit targets, and which deals are inflating your numbers.

Once those are clean and being reviewed weekly, add revenue by source and customer lifetime value. The activity ratios and deal velocity can follow once your team is consistently logging data.

Seven metrics. That’s all you need to understand whether your business is healthy, where the problems are, and what to do about them. Everything else is decoration.