Why Sales Reporting Is Important

Let’s face it, sales reports suck because you just cannot get all the data that you need. When it comes to sales, there’s so much to look at outside of the top line of your P&L. Like anyone, sales leaders want to see increases in revenue but rarely get to see the performance metrics that are responsible for growth. They say, ‘you can’t manage what you can’t measure.’ So, what are you able to measure? Are you managing people or are you managing their performance?

Sales reports are important because they allow sales managers to gain valuable insights regarding effort and performance. Executives create revenue goals and targets and pass them down to sales managers who are then responsible for motivating their sales team to meet or exceed said goals. Sales managers then walk around the office asking their sales people to ‘enter the notes into the CRM’ and to ‘always be closing’. This is like a personal trainer telling their clients to ‘go to the gym more’ without being there to truly inspect effort. 

Sales managers that measure important performance metrics like phone calls, total talk time, text messages sent, emails sent, closing ratios, call dispositions…etc, are much more likely to successfully manage performance, not just manage their people. Armed with the right analytics, reports and statistics, sales managers are able to tweak sales performance metrics when they need to and in turn, manage overall sales results.

Although most CRM companies offer reporting features, they do not usually include reports that reflect the efforts of sales people accurately. This is mainly due to the fact that most CRM’s do not offer their own phone calling tools, text messaging tools or 2-way direct email sync. Sales managers are often left using the ‘trust system’, relying on SDR’s to tell them how many calls they made, how much time they spent with customers on the phone, how many text messages they sent and how many emails they composed. Furthermore, sales managers do not usually have access to sales funnels, visual pipelines and sales process assessments. 

The truth is that if your CRM doesn’t include its own communication tools, it’s going to be very difficult to provide your sales managers with the information they need to manage their team’s performance in real time – when it matters most. 

Rather than rely on shotty reports, trust systems and chicken scratch tally marks on a sheet of crinkled paper, we strongly encourage you to tour a real sales solution that provides management with the info they need in order to track what matters: the efforts that come before the results.