From a sales perspective, what CRM reports are most important to evaluate?

Sales Numbers are a direct result of Selling Activity.

How are you spending your time? Dials, or face-to-face customer/prospect connections per hour/day/week. Set some goals and measure your activity based against your goals.

Are you calling on the right customers/prospects? You need to profile your customer database so that you are calling on the right type of customer that fits your profile of a perfect customer. (It's also imperative that you call on the correct people within the organizations you are calling on. Sorry, I'm not sure what report SF.com has for this one.)

Follow up! Perhaps the best report you can run is the report that tells you WHAT you recently committed to, WHO you committed it to, and WHEN a follow up is required. You will close more sales if you keep your follow up's in order, and if you simply follow through on what you promise.

One last thought, pre-call-planning is probably one of the most overlooked tools in a sales persons tool belt. People remember and like those who remember them, so look through your past notes from previous sales calls with your customer or prospect prior to making the call. This is not a trick or a gimmick but simply a professional courtesy to bring up items of interest from your previous notes in past conversations. This will impress your customers/prospects, as well as let them know that you are interested in their success, not just in closing another deal.

Best of success to you!

Great question you asked.

One of the consistent breakdowns I see in the sales process is missing out on deals that are more than 30 days out for follow up. Make sure you have your tasks set up to call on those opportunities as they come up. Many times you will talk with a prospect and they have interest, but the timing isn't there - that is out of your control, but your follow up is. Having those queued up for you to reach back out to them on time will build your pipeline more effectively, and identify more deals in your territory.

Keep good records of your calls. Once you start talking to a high number of people they all blend together, so make sure you are able to pull up a record or account and have a good outline of your last (or multiple) conversations with them.

It's also good to look at reports of who is hitting your site if you have that available. You may have spoken to a prospect not long ago and then see them on your site a lot, that is a call to action for you to reach out and see what they might be working on.

Lastly, track your opportunities and why you win/lose deals. If you see deals fall off around the same stage in the process, look at what is going on at that time and what is happening that may be causing the deal to breakdown.

All the best to you in the future!

What gets measured, get's improved. So begin with that in mind. What do you want to impact? In general, these are results like:
* Number of deals closed
* Ratio of won to lost deals
* Value of deals
* Margin / profitability of deals
* Shorter deal lifecycle

Those give you a starting point for your metrics. Depending on your sales model, there may be other KPIs along the way to measure including:
* Time in each stage of the deal
* Number of calls made per day
* Number of appointments per call
* Adoption of sales tracking (CRM) system
* Close rate per deal stage
* Predicted versus actual value of deal