Imagine being the sales manager of a large, or may a not-so-large team. A lot of effort goes into building this team. All the hiring and training that is involved! It would be really counterproductive if you did not know how they were performing. Which is why you should make a sales performance report your best friend.
More and more organizations are adopting performance reports. Mainly because it helps them understand what is happening with their business and where they are going wrong.
What is a Sales Performance Report?
As the name suggests, this report is meant to tell you how well your sales team is performing. This could be in terms of the revenue that they are bringing, or the deals each salesperson is closing or the tasks that they are completing.
Now, some people have qualms about tracking their sales agents. Mainly, because they feel like they are micromanaging them. But, these reports are not just about monitoring what your team is doing. It is also about knowing how well the process you designed is working, and if there is any room for improvement.
Benefits of a sales performance report
If you are still hesitating about keeping a regular track on your team’s performance, here are some tangible benefits that you can realize
Provides Real-time Updates
If you are a small firm with, say, 10 employees, and a lead inflow of not more than a 100 a month, then you can easily keep track of them with a nice excel sheet. But, what happens when the numbers increase? Asking your sales team to keep a manual track of their work borders on cruelty :)
But, if you have a CRM that can give you sales performance reports in real-time, it makes things easier for both you and your team. The bigger your organization gets, the more complex your sales process can get. The report can take your new processes into account and track the many activities that your agents perform. Having real-time reports helps you to keep a check on the health of your processes and take corrective measures if necessary.
Allows You to Set Realistic Goals
As the sales manager, one of your many roles is setting the goals for the team. If statistics are anything to go by, this very attribute, while it can be of great help to the team, can also be the bane of the team. Here is how.
Typically, we are forced to stretch ourselves further as we grow. This applies to the corporate world too. With more demands coming in, you are compelled to stretch your goals to accommodate more and more projects. Somewhere along the line, we tend to start making unrealistic goals that are impossible to accomplish no matter how hard we try.
At the end of the day, you would have successfully worn out your team members without achieving the impractical goals too. Well, that wouldn’t be the case with a good analytics system. Having a sales performance report gives you a clear picture of the length your team can go, helping create a more realistic goal that can be achieved with a little extra push.
Increases Productivity Among Team Members
It is not uncommon to have some of your team members at the bottom of the leaderboard. By keeping a sales performance report, you will be able to tell which sales rep is at the bottom and for how long they’ve been there. This will go a long way to help you quickly pinpoint what went wrong and when it went wrong, making it easier to fix a lag before it becomes a full-blown problem.
Also, displaying the sales performance report of the sales reps can really help to turn the heat up. It’s more like the highlighting technique used in sports. By posting their performance over a period of time, they get to know how others are doing. Of course, no one wants to be at the bottom of the leaderboard. Therefore, the pressure seems to go up and everyone is on their toe working tirelessly to push their numbers up. It may look like a negative pressure from a perspective, but it totally leads to a positive result – increased productivity.
Aids Informed Decisions
This has got to be the most important benefit of them all. Decision making in a firm is the lifeline of that firm. One wrong decision and the firm could come tumbling down. With a ton of decisions to make, it can get pretty scary. But it doesn’t have to be. With a good sales analytic system, you can make insightful decisions in real-time.
Is a product not selling well? You may need to position it better or make some enhancements to the product itself. Is an employee consistently underperforming? You may need to retrain him or maybe let him go. A daily, weekly, monthly or even quarterly performance report helps you take these decisions quickly.
Conclusion
The sales department is at the heart of the firm. The minute it stops working, your business can face serious repercussions. This is why it is critical to keep a tab on everything that happens in your sales team. How is their performance? Are they meeting with deadlines? How much have they accomplished so far? What challenges are they facing? These are just a few questions that a sales performance report tends to answer at a glance.
Even better, the LeadSquared Sales CRM provides you with an all-in-one analytic tool that contains all of the relevant reports that a firm needs to succeed. So, you have all you need on a single platform, making it easier to run the team and do other tasks too. It’s a double win for your business. Get started now!
