CRMs are essential.

They help your reps manage pipeline, track opportunities, and stay on top of customers and contacts. No debate there.

But when it comes to helping RevOps and revenue leaders steer the business, CRM reporting falls short — especially as complexity grows.

We believe data should help GTM teams do two things really well:

1. Predict outcomes — are we going to hit the number?

2. Improve outcomes — what’s off, and what should we fix first?

If your go-to-market is founder-led and relatively simple, your CRM might be enough.

But once you add multiple reps, channels, or segments, CRM reporting starts to break down.

Here’s why:

1. CRM Forecasting Isn’t Enough to Predict with Confidence

Most CRMs let you assign simple stage-based close probabilities and build a roll-up view.

But forecasting well takes more than stage-based probabilities.

What’s missing:

• Adjusting for deal-level risk signals

• Rep or team historical performance

• Multivariate regressions to determine the impact and weight of various factors

CRM forecasts stop short of deeper, signal-based forecasting.

Worse, they don’t flag when you’re off pace or explain why.

2. CRM Reporting Doesn’t Help You Diagnose What’s Off — Or Why

First, there’s no context

You’ll see “Win Rate = 23%”

But without context, that’s meaningless.

Is it on track with plan? Better than last quarter? Underperforming compared to peers?

CRMs don’t connect KPIs to the three anchors that matter:

• Plan
• Prior performance
• Peer benchmarks

Without that, every metric is just a number.

Second, target inputs are too rigid

You might be able to set quarterly or monthly targets — but:

• No daily pacing

• No team-specific conversion assumptions

• No product- or segment-specific ASP tracking

So even if your Q1 opp target is 70, it takes a minute to know on January 15 if creating 10 means you’re on track or falling behind. Maybe that’s fine if you have just one channel, but when tracking multiple channels and sub-channels, it’s tough to avoid missing something.

Third, there’s no trend surfacing

CRMs don’t proactively show that opp conversion has dropped or that ASP is softening. You have to go looking for it — and know what to look for.

Finally, no peer benchmarking

You can’t see how reps are performing relative to one another at each stage of the funnel — or where someone’s falling behind their peer set.

Diagnosis without benchmarks is like coaching in the dark.

3. CRM Dashboards Don’t Help You Prioritize

Let’s say you do find ten red KPIs.

Now what?

CRM dashboards don’t tell you which gap matters most — or what each one is costing you.

That means GTM leaders end up guessing, reacting, or trying to fix everything at once. And without knowing revenue impact, there’s no clear way to focus time, resources, or coaching where it’ll make a difference.

You don’t need more red tiles.

You need a system that tells you:

“Fix this conversion rate drop first — it’s worth –$847K this quarter.”

What You Need: A Revenue Navigation Platform

CRMs are critical — but they weren’t built for diagnosis, prioritization, or strategic steering.

A Revenue Navigation platform adds what CRM reporting leaves out:

• KPI context across plan, history, and peers

• Daily pacing by channel, team, and subsegment

• Quantified revenue impact for every gap

• Proactive trend surfacing and root cause analysis

Because your CRM tells you what happened.

We tell you why, what will happen, and what to do next.

Want to see what your CRM isn’t telling you?

Book a demo here.