A reporting strategy answers: who needs what data, when, in what format.
1. Identify audiences:
- Reps — their own pipeline, today's tasks, this week's activity.
- Managers — team pipeline, forecast, performance metrics, coaching opportunities.
- VPs / Directors — segment / region rollups, win rates, deal velocity, ramp metrics.
- Executives — total revenue, growth metrics, strategic KPIs.
- Marketing — lead quality, campaign ROI, conversion funnel.
- RevOps — operational metrics, data quality, process compliance.
2. Per-audience: what decisions are they making?
- Reps: which deal to work next? Where am I against quota?
- Managers: which deals are at risk? Who needs coaching?
- VPs: are we going to hit the quarter? Where are gaps?
- Execs: is the business healthy? What's the trend?
Reports answer decisions, not just "show data".
3. Per-audience: cadence?
- Reps: real-time / on-demand.
- Managers: daily glance + weekly deep-dive.
- VPs: weekly summary + monthly review.
- Execs: monthly + quarterly business review.
4. Format:
- Dashboards for at-a-glance — most users start here.
- Reports for drill-down — when dashboards prompt questions.
- Scheduled email — periodic summary delivered without user action.
- Notifications / Slack — real-time alerts on critical events.
5. Folder strategy:
- One folder per team. Sharing per role.
- "Production Reports" (vetted, approved) vs "Personal Reports" (drafts).
- Audit unfiled / orphaned reports.
6. Architecture decisions:
- Report Types — standard usually fine; Custom Report Types for cross-object views or with-or-without joins.
- Reporting Snapshots for historical trending (point-in-time captures).
- CRM Analytics for advanced analytics across very large data.
- External BI (Tableau, Power BI) for cross-system analytics.
7. KPIs:
Define a small set of company-level KPIs that everyone understands the same way:
- Pipeline coverage ratio.
- Win rate.
- Average deal size.
- Sales cycle length.
- Forecast accuracy.
Senior consultants resist the "more reports = better" instinct. Each report has maintenance cost. Build the 20 critical ones; archive the 200 that nobody uses.