The Reports tab is the hub for all your sales reporting and forecasting in Pipeline. In this section of the app, you can get a higher level of understanding of the most important sales metrics in your business.
With sales reporting and forecasting, you can analyze sales performance over time, understand the performance between deal owners and between different types of deals, and forecast sales for individuals, teams, and your company.
Default and Personal Reports
Reports in Pipeline, like other areas of the application, are highly customizable. But, to get you started, we have created a few pre-built default reports to help you analyze some common sales metrics. These default reports are:
- Deals won
- Win ratio: the number of won deals as a percentage of the total number of closed deals
- Won deals by source: Won deals report broken down by source
- Lost deals by loss reason: Lost deals report broken down by loss reason
- Deals by stage: All deals broken down by the stage
- Activity report: List view of activities
- Activity scoreboard: High-level overview of users' total activities and deals won and lost
You can navigate between reports using the left-side navigation. Reports are divided between personal and default reports for easy navigation and organization.
Reports Overview
Each report includes a chart that is the visual representation of the data you have applied to the report. The analysis table below the chart is optional but applies an additional layer of analysis and allows you to report on secondary grouping of information and analyze their contributions to the totals values. Adding an “owner” grouping to a won deals report, for example, would allow you to view the owner's contributions to the total by dollar value, total count, and average dollar value.
Creating new reports
There are two main ways to create reports, either by editing any of the default reports or creating a new personal report from a blank report.
Editing a default report or creating a new report from a blank report both start from the “edit report” button. If you choose to create a new report, the report editor modal will open automatically when you click ‘New Personal Report’ on the left-sidebar.
If you choose to edit a default report, you’ll want to click “edit report” in the upper right-hand corner of the report view.
The Report Editor is where you can customize the report to fit your needs. Let’s walk through each of the report editor options here in detail to help you create the most robust and powerful reports.
Segments
Segments are your datasets. They allow you to hone in on specific portions of your data to only report on what’s meaningful to you or to apply multiple segments to draw comparisons between different cohorts. Segments are created on the deals list view. If you need a refresher on how to create saved lists on your list views, this article is the best place to start. Creating saved list views is key to being able to effectively utilize the robust reporting mechanisms available.
If you are new to Pipeline and haven’t yet created any saved list views, that’s alright! We have added four system segments to help get you started and ensure you can always utilize the default reports that we have available. The default segments are:
- Won Deals
- Lost Deals
- Closed Deals
- All Deals
Saved lists are visible in the segment dropdown editor. You can apply up to three segments to your report.*
Creating your own segments is done from the deals listview. All of your saved lists will be available to use in the reports editor. For more information on creating saved list, please see this article in the knowledge base. Please note that on the deals list view, you can add any associated company, person, and customer system and custom fields to the report. Therefore, the reporting enhancements released in Q3 of 2022 now allows you to report on deals based on any criteria.
To apply segments, click into the “add new segment” field and either scroll or type in a search for the segment you wish to apply to the report.
Once you have added all of your segments, click “View Report” to see the data represented in the graph. The segments applied will appear at the top of the graph. The segment name and color coding will appear at the bottom of the graph. Please note, that if additional groupings are applied (discussed below) to the graph, the segment color coding will change.
*If your deal metric is “the ratio of segments”, you are limited to two segments to easily calculate the ratio.
Visual Analysis Options
Within the report editor, you have a number of options for ways to customize the way the data from your segments appears on the corresponding chart. We’ll review each of these options in detail here.
Deal Metric:
The deal metric dictates how the data is presented on the Y-Axis, the left-hand side of the chart. The options for the deal metric are:
- Sum of deal values: The total $ value
- Count: the number of deals
- Average of deal value: the mean dollar value
- Ratio of segments: value - segment 1 divided by segment 2 by $ value
- Ratio of segments: count - segment 1 divided by segment 2 by count
X-Axis
The x-axis editor allows you to customize the organization of the data on the X-Axis, the bottom line of the chart.
The system field options are:
- Added
- Updated
- Closed
- Expected to close
- Owner
- Source
- Status
- Stage
- Pipeline
- Loss Reason
You can also choose from custom fields that you have added to your account, such as “product line” or “industry.” Please note that you are only able to add picklist and dropdown fields to the x-axis at this time.
If choosing a date field, a date timeframe field will appear allowing you to dial in the time period you wish to see represented in the dataset. You can choose from default time periods such as the last 30 days, this month, last month, this quarter, etc. or apply a custom date range to the report. This date range will appear on the X-axis. If you choose a monthly time period, you will see the report divided into days. If you’ve chosen quarterly, the report will be displayed by weeks. Finally, yearly reports are displayed by months.
Chart Type
Next, you can customize the chart type. The options available for the chart types are:
- Line
- Bar
- Stacked Bar
When might you want to choose one chart type over another? Line graphs are a great way to track changes over time, they are useful for tracking won and loss deals over a specific time period. Bar charts and stacked bar charts are great for comparing data sets. The difference is that a stacked bar chart shows each of the datasets in one bar, divided by color, whereas a regular bar chart will assign each value its own bar, and comparisons in the values are made side by side. A stacked bar chart allows you to more easily visualize data sets when there are a large number of options on the x-axis.
Secondary Grouping Options
The secondary grouping options allow you to apply a secondary layer of reporting and analysis to the chart and also create a new reporting option below the chart showing contributions of certain cohorts towards the total values, including by dollar value, by count, and by average dollar value.
When you select the grouping you can choose from system fields and custom fields. The system fields available are:
- Owner
- Source
- Status
- Stage
- Pipeline
- Loss Reason
By selecting “disabled”, the analysis table will no longer appear on the report. The custom fields available for the analysis table are picklist, dropdown, and boolean custom fields. Text fields are not supported for analysis table reporting.
Once you have selected the grouping you wish to view on the report, you can update the grouping options. For example, if you select “owner” as the grouping, you can select which owners you wish to reflect on the report. This added filtering option is particularly helpful if you are wishing to draw comparisons across specific users or teams, or between specific product types or industries.
Additional Features on the Reports Tab
Saving a report
Saving a report is done from the main report screen. You’ll see a blue button in the upper right corner that says “Save Report.” If you are viewing a default report, you will only have the option to save the report as a new report. Default reports cannot be saved as the default. If you are viewing a personal report, you can either save the report to update the existing report or save the report as a new report, give the new report a name, and you’ll be able to access that new report in the future without adjusting the previous report you were viewing.
Rename a report
To rename a report, navigate to the report editor (Main report > Edit Report) and click into the report name field in the upper left corner. Change the report name and then choose “view report.” You’ll see the new name reflected on the main report view now. If you want the report to keep this name, you’ll want to follow the steps above the save the report.
Reports | Pipeline - 15 August 2022 - Watch Video
Deleting a personal report
You can only delete reports that you have created. Default reports cannot be deleted. You can delete a personal report from the main reports home page by navigating to the “Report Options” and choosing “delete report.”
Exporting a report
You can export an image of the report from the “Report Options” button and by choosing “export image”
Frequently Asked Questions
I'm only seeing certain custom fields available to show on the x-axis, why is that?
At this time, the x-axis only supports picklist and dropdown custom field types.
Does the Reporting tab appear differently to Start and Grow users?
No, there is no difference between reports available for Start and Grow users.
What data can my users see in the Reporting tab?
The visibility of data is based on user role (executive, manager and basic) and the visibility rules in your account. In short, if you can see the data in the Deals tab, then you can report on it. Basic users will only be able to report on deals that they own or that have been shared with them.
What happens to my user data if I make a user inactive?
Data for inactive users can still be reviewed. Like in list views, they will appear in the inactive users category when you compare different deal owners.
I have added a selection to the secondary grouping, but some values appear to be missing from my screen.
Our goal is for data to display so all information is readable, so a maximum of 10 columns will display through the app. If you wish to view larger data sets, you can export your data to manipulate as desired. Columns or categories that fall out of the 'top 10' in terms of the amount of data will appear grouped together as 'Other'.
For the lost deals by reason report, what if I do not have a lost reason specified to a deal?
Deals without a loss reason will appear as “Has no value.”
Where is the revenue report?
We decided to streamline the default reports on the left-side of the reports tab to ensure users could quickly and easily access the information that was mostly valuable to them. The revenue report has gone away for now. Don’t worry though, you can still recreate the report using secondary grouping filtering for revenue type.