To be a successful manager you need to gain the ability to lead your sales team to close deals. How can you do this? It’s not just about motivation or working nonstop, what you need is a good sales management report. It is important for every successful manager to understand the importance of this sales report.
What is sales management?
If you want to gain an understanding of sales management reports, you need to first understand sales management. It is the ability or process, where you strategize ways to make your sales force grow strong. You can also help them develop good sales skills, that they can apply to their work and surpass their sales targets.
As a manager, you always want to ensure the success of your business. But, you may find it difficult trying to pinpoint what or who is boosting your sales figures. That is where a sales report comes in.
What is a sales management report?
A sales management report is the process of being able to track and analyze sales, to know where the success, or lack thereof, lies and, then, finding ways to improve. Managing a sales team is not as easy as easy as it sounds. Parts of being an effective manager is knowing points where to do touch-ups, how long it takes to close deals and knowing the exact process your team follows.
It is also important to be certain which areas of sales benefit you, and then find ways to keep that growing as time passes. This will help you to know what your team needs to focus on, quantity and quality that needs to be delivered and how you can expand the business further. Your reports can also help you beat your competition.
Additionally, it will help you to figure out how to reach your sales targets effectively. You can also avoid performance conflicts. For example, one agent brings in more clients with a less number of leads assigned. But, another salesperson beings in fewer clients with more leads. Get to the roots of these problems with reports.
What should you report on and how to do it?
There are indicators that could be used to tell you how your sales are performing and if you are reaching your target. These indicators are known as sales metrics. Your sales management report should be filled with metrics that are essential for your company’s growth. There are certain important metrics that are always important for all sales managers. Some of them include:
Deal size:
This is probably one of the most obvious touch points of your reports. You need to know how big of a sale your team is making. This will help you understand what your audience is like and you could position your product accordingly.
Leads in the pipeline:
Know how many deals are in your pipeline and how close they are to closing. This will help you build accurate sales forecasts, as well as set targets for your team.
Conversion rate:
This tells you how quickly deals are closing for the effort you are putting in. You can also figure out the average time it takes to convert, right from capture to closure. Once, you start tracking this on a regular basis you will start building a better sales process.
Importance of sales management reports
Even though you are an expert at closing deals, there’s always an important reason for your sales management report. It helps these representatives to harness knowledge about the product and make customized plans on helping clients to reach their goals when using your products. Managers can benefit a lot from a good management reporting system. But it is important to understand what constitutes a good management reporting system because not all reporting systems are created equally. It should be timely, easy to access, clear and concise. If these criteria are met, then, the reporting system would be beneficial to the manager. Here are some benefits managers gain with a good reporting system
- A good reporting system creates better interaction between the management and employees. With good communication between them, they would be able to identify problems and solve them quickly and easily.
- A good sales reporting system is accurate and timely and comes with improved productivity. It not only helps decrease any friction among team members, it also helps promote cooperation across the department. Automated reporting system can save employees a lot of time that could be spent with paperwork. The team would be more productive and be able to handle problems on their activity list.
- Managers see an increase in cost efficiency. Reports help you to reduce costs and increase revenue. This is because with more information, managers are fully equipped to adapt to an ever-changing business environment.
- Reports also improve decision making and overall efficiency. That means that instead of relying on experience and making wild guesses, managers have hard data at hand. Decisions that are driven by data always tend to give better results.
- Sales management reports also enable sales teams to be more customer-centric. They are able to easily handle any concerns their customers may have. They have all information of the client at hand, enabling quicker resolutions to their issues.
Problems/solutions faced without a good management report system
Undefined goals
Problems: Without a good management reporting system, managers face poorly defined goals. The managers and team members won’t know what to expect when goals or objectives not clearly defined. This might also indirectly lead to chaos and confusion.
Solution: With a good reporting system, the team members would be able to realize their sales targets and hold a meeting to know how to get clearer goals.
Conflicts between team members
Problems: A team is made up of two or more persons. These persons have different personalities and characters. They may have a different approach to dealing with problems, so this makes it challenging to deal with and, as a result, may cause disagreements that tend to have a negative effect on the working environment
Solution: Bearing in mind the difference in skills and personality between team members could help you tackle this problem, try creating a positive work environment. A good sales management system would be able to enable team members to identify problems and solve them.
A sales management reporting system only helps you to understand the goals and needs of your business better. Looking for one that can help you get deep insights into how your business functions? Give LeadSquared a try.
