How is your business doing? Are things going well and sales are coming in? Is your star salesperson performing equally well every month? Can you say with certainty that expanding into that new area has improved your figures more than you could have hoped for?
Or are you just aware that sales are coming in…and that’s all you know?
Reporting for Duty
In order to grow your business, you need to know where you are starting from. You need to know the day-to-day changes, and how every person on your team is performing. The problem for many businesses is that they don’t run in exactly the same way as any other business, and this presents a problem when using a prebuilt reporting system.
The information you need to make sure your business runs successfully needs to be relevant directly to your business, and not be overcomplicated. So how can you get an overview of your business without any unwanted extras?
The Business Dashboard
With LeadSquared, you can build your own unique dashboard to show the information that only you need to see. While it can seem like a great idea to have access to as much information as it is available, it’s much easier to understand if you can present that information in a way that is easy to digest.
With robust reports that provide all the information you could ever possibly need, LeadSquared allows you to put together a custom dashboard to show the information you want to see – your Business Dashboard is as unique as your business.
By adding Dashlets to your custom dashboard, you can link to the reports you need to get the very best from your business.
What’s Monitored?
Everything that you need to successfully run your business. This includes sales revenue, the number of sales made, sales history, and sales forecasts.
In addition to this, the progress of each lead through your sales pipeline is tracked. This enables reports to be filtered in multiple ways, including “lead sources” – this shows you where each lead came from. If you’ve been spending money on adverts on two platforms, but only one platform is bringing you sales, you know you need to change your strategy – and now you have the figures to back that decision up.
This plethora of information will also help to identify other areas that need improvement. You can find out who your best salesperson is, and also your least well-performing salesperson. You can compare this to other metrics too, and you might find that the salesperson who is underperforming is actually excelling for the geographical region they are in – without the information these reports can provide, reacting purely on the total sales figures could have become a costly business mistake.
As well as all this information that is directly linked to sales, you can also see how your marketing process is performing. You might run email campaigns and use autoresponders, or perhaps you have a number of landing pages that you drive customers to.
You can find out how every lead reacts and responds to these marketing strategies, helping you improve and adapt what you do in relation to your own market, and not some dreamed-up concept of what your market should be.
Filtered for Clarity
Each report you can see within your Business Dashboard can be filtered to present you the most relevant information. For example, you can filter results by date ranges and individual salespeople. This will show you how each salesperson performed during that particular timeframe and allows you to see how this performance has changed over time.
You can also filter by locations and lead sources. This may help you to discover if different sources perform better or worse based on the geographical location of the lead.
The Sales Pipeline report, which tracks the process of taking leads and turning them into paying customers, is directly related to the actions your sales team take. Every time a salesperson makes a call sends an email, or does anything to progress the lead towards closing a deal, it is recorded and included in the reports.
From this, you can find the roadblocks that are preventing leads turning into customers. Maybe one salesperson struggles at a certain stage of the sales process, or perhaps leads from a particular source never convert at all – you can take the action needed to make sure you get the best from your sales team and make the most effective use of their time.
Taking a Helicopter View
A jet plane will get you from one place to another very quickly, but you don’t have time to look around and understand what is happening. Jet pilots have to be highly trained and laser-focused just to make sure they don’t crash and burn on their first flight.
You might want your business to be a jet plane – and that’s a great thing to aspire to – but if you make a single mistake, you’ll crash and burn, and you won’t even know why.
A helicopter can also be difficult to control but has the ability to hover above a situation to assess it. The view from a helicopter makes everything clearer as you gain an overview of what is going on below and can make adjustments. With a jet, everything flies by in a blur. With a helicopter, you can make sense of your surroundings.
Your custom Business Dashboard with LeadSquared allows you to take an overall view of your business, and then focus on particular areas that may need attention. You’ll easily see where you have been and where you are heading to and can make course adjustments along the way to ensure you arrive at your destination in one piece.
If you don’t track and monitor elements of your business, marketing, and sales processes, you’re putting the whole operation a risk as if you were an untrained jet pilot. Taking control of your business and knowing everything you can about it puts you in the perfect position to land every deal safely and propel yourself into the future in safety.
