Sales Report – Let’s give them something to talk about!

I have spent much of my adult life sending out reports. Whether it was sport statistics to share with players and coaches, financial reports to share with lenders and business unit leaders or sales reports to share with sales management and leadership, reporting is something that I have really enjoyed doing throughout my career – because it makes a difference! Always, my goal is to create the right mix of reports that are either actionable or that are motivational, that tell a story and serve the needs of the business. The purpose of reporting is to give “them” (the audience), the RIGHT THING to talk about. I think, too often, time and energy is spent on creating reports that don’t drive the business in the right direction and then, to add insult to injury, time and energy is spent discussing these off-point reports.

As a sales operations/sales execution professional, I have broken down sales reporting into three areas: Sales Team Compliance, Sales Strategy Execution and Sales Team Recognition.

Sales Team Compliance creates actionable reports on sales team activity, pipeline and discounting. Activity reports look at each salesperson’s effort and how it compares against expectations. Whether you use data from your phone system or your CRM tool, this report is essential to the business. Pipeline reports are based on the activity. How often is your sales team discovering and opening a sales opportunity? Once these opportunities are created, are they stalling in a certain sales stage? How many end up in a “lost-sale” status? Are they closing prospects in their pipeline or are deals falling into their laps? Discounting reports show if your “best” salespeople may also be your highest discounters. If so, you could be rewarding sales folks for the wrong behavior. If you aren’t looking at discounting, stop reading and request this report from your sales ops or finance team. These three areas of reporting can tell you how hard your sales team is working and how efficient and effective their efforts are in producing results.

Sales Strategy Execution is an actionable report and should be focused on elements that support your sales strategy. Examples of these reports would answer questions like: “How often are your best customers being seen by your sales team?” (You can’t get a good answer to that question if you have failed on driving activity from your reporting described in the paragraph above.) “Are they selling to the right clients?” “Is your sales team selling all of the products in their bag?” “What products do each salesperson need continued education on in order to have a preferred product mix?” “How is each salesperson doing on your sales campaign?” “Is the campaign creating opportunities?” “Is there a lack of effort or education and did the campaign miss its mark?”

Sales Team Recognition reports can be as helpful in driving behavior as your compensation plan is at driving behavior and is FAR LESS expensive. The purpose of these reports is to motivate your sales folks to perform. I like to create monthly, quarterly and annual sales “stack ranking” reports on hitting quota. This certainly motivates the top third to stay on top and for them to improve their place in that group. It also motivates the bottom third of your sales team to get out from under the magnifying glass. These reports should always be timely and distributed on a regular cadence.   In addition to these sales result reports, I like to keep track of yearly measures and sales records like: most months at quota, most consecutive months at quota, highest month as a percent of quota, … This data is good to track and can be used as needed to drive behavior. It also is handy to have during your annual sales meeting in order to recognize your folks.

As you consider your reporting, you should ensure that each report has a purpose and should be valued by the sales organization and the business (when they stop asking for a report, you should stop spending time pulling and analyzing the data). Reports should either be actionable or motivational and should help make a difference in the sales team’s performance. If they are not, toss them – don’t become a victim of “becoming real good at reporting bad results”.

Let’s give them something to talk about! Create and distribute your reports, provide some analysis and follow-up to make sure that users understand what actions are expected.

By:

Jim Williams, M.B.A.
Total Innovation Group Inc., Associate

and

Sam O’Rear, M.A.
Total Innovation Group Inc., Senior Partner

Published by TIGI