The 5 Analytics Reports Every Startup Must Have

Startups usually begin the same way: the founders have a brilliant idea for a new product that the market truly needs, and they decide to build a business. The founders hire a team of talented engineers, who build an amazing product that could truly revolutionize the marketplace. The company gets a few early adopters of the newly built product, but then the real challenge begins.

How do you accelerate the growth from here?

For a high-tech startup, the “Field of Dreams” method of sales and marketing simply doesn’t work. If you build a product, customers unfortunately won’t immediately come to you with money in hand. Startups must build a sales and marketing machine with the same precision and focus that goes into building the product itself.

That’s why every startup needs a data-driven approach to the many steps in the customer acquisition process. Startup leaders should understand lead acquisition, pipeline growth, sales conversion rates, and much more.

Here are the 5 analytics reports that every growing startup must use to track sales and marketing as you scale. Luckily for you, we offer a number of these reports completely for free.

1. Lead Trajectory

You’ve hired a team of marketers to get the word out about your new product, but how do you know when your marketing efforts are effective? This powerful report shows not only lead growth over time, but it also segments by lead source.

 

As you are fine tuning your Go-To-Market plan and finessing your product-market fit, it’s really important to track the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. Which events or offers spike lead creation? Once you understand this, you can send out those offers and attend those events again. However, it’s important to collect this data over time. You’ll quickly realize that some sources of leads convert to Closed-Won deals at a much higher rate than others. If you know some of the leads are just noise, you can identify it and fine tune your messaging to make sure you’re collecting good leads, not just leads.

2. Pipeline History

The whole point of acquiring new leads is to convert them into sales opportunities and grow your overall sales pipeline. While a CRM like Salesforce does a good job of showing the amount of total pipeline you have open today, it can’t show you whether your pipeline is growing or shrinking over time.

 

This report shows the growth trajectory of your entire sales pipeline month over month. Ideally, your pipeline should be heading up and to the right, or else you risk running out of opportunities to work in the coming months. Pipeline growth over time is the first indication that sales is accelerating in a positive direction.

3. Sales Funnel

Now that you have built up some pipeline, the next step is to evaluate when and where you lose deals during the sales process. Some opportunities will be disqualified and others will be lost as deals move from the top to the bottom of the funnel. The key here is to improve the overall conversion rates as opportunities move closer to becoming deals.

 

This report shows you the entire sales team’s conversion rates as deals move through the funnel. You can pinpoint your team’s weak points specifically. Here you can see that the team struggles to move opportunities from Present Solution to Technical Fit. This is where you should focus your energies. Offer coaching and training for the sales team to improve their skills in this specific area, and hopefully you can see an improvement in that conversion rate, leading to more Closed-Won deals.

4. Sales Forecast

Now that you know your team’s win rate for each stage of the sales funnel, you can bring a data-driven approach to your entire sales forecast. Look at the total value in each stage of the funnel today and weight it by those win rates. Using this formula, you’ll come up with a much more accurate forecast.

 

This forecast takes into account all of that data automatically. For example, if half of your opps that request a trial later buy from you, this report takes the value of opportunities in the trial, divides it by two and that’s your overall your forecast.

5. Sales Leaderboard

Now that you have the key analytics reports under control, it’s time to make some noise! A huge driver of sales success is competition. Recognizing big wins will motivate your team, and push them to work harder every day.

 

This is why a sales leaderboard should be at the center of every startup’s sales team. The leaderboard lights up and blasts music every time one of your reps closes a deal. The leaderboard also keeps track of which reps are the top-sellers, and recognizes their achievements. With a leaderboard, you can foster healthy competition across the sales team and celebrate every win.

Other Useful Reports:

There are many other reports that you should be looking at including:

With the right toolkit of sales reports, every new tech startup can find success.

P.S. It’s not a free report, but InsightSquared offers a free consult of your sales team. Did you build it the right way? Click below and we’ll analyze it for you.