In sales an easy sale is extremely hard to come by. Statistics say only 2% of first meetings turn into an instant sale, 98% of leads need to be followed up by nurturing them through your sales process.
If your client base is small, all you would need to keep track of vital activities is a spreadsheet, weekly meetings and some discipline. Your pipeline and sales team will eventually grow and at a time of growth, it’s very easy to loose overview of this crucial process. This is why any business needs a system of sales reporting.
If done the right way, sales reporting will let managers analyse performance, identify issues and take action to help their business sell more and faster. SET reporting will provide the kind of insight that’s desperately needed elsewhere in any business, feeding into forecasting, budgeting and resourcing.
Sales reports are no question, invaluable. Real time sales reports come in a variety of exciting forms. Here are 3 types of reports that are easy to create and no business should be without.
A report in which you can forget conversion rates. This report is all about the number of activities done in the last working day with prospects and new leads. It’s essential and very important to know how many calls and emails your team is making and sending each day. This way you can monitor the sales team’s performance and identify any inefficiencies. This will ensure that you and your team are doing the daily activities needed to be successful.
Your weekly sales report will reflect on your daily sales report and reveal any immediate trends that need to be addressed and help you address them before business is lost. Having good reports allows you to easily see and show anyone in the business what’s happening which also allows you to have direct and data focused conversations with your team in sales meetings. Sitting down and sharing a weekly report with your team has many positive effects. It encourages a little healthy competition, it gives everyone a chance to speak up and share their thoughts on what’s going well, what isn’t and what can be improved and very importantly it forces individuals to be accountable for their own performance.
A monthly report isn’t about immediate action. The issues it could potentially unearth have probably already had their effect on your business. However, it does provide a vital overview of long term trends and is a report that will help you understand the status of your sales funnel, your conversion rate and your overall performance. As months pass and these reports stack up these insights are only going to get deeper. They will be working in the background slowly building up your sales performance and highlighting any seasonal trends.
How do you put a sales report together?
The best sales reports use metrics which let you know how deals are progressing. Here are some areas you will absolutely want to measure,
Number of leads in your pipeline. This is the total number of opportunities in all stages of the pipeline which include initial conversations, pitches, proposals and closed deals. You will want to know how many are at which stage and how long they have been there.
Value of your pipeline. Almost every opportunity is worth a different amount. Even if you have to estimate, its worth putting a value on every opportunity. This will help build an accurate revenue forecast and shape your business strategy.
Sales activities. Quite simply, calls made, emails sent, meetings booked and deals closed.
Close rate. This is how many opportunities come from each lead generated or fed into the sales ream. A fantastic, quick measure of your sales strategy’s overall performance.
Sales cycle. This is how long it takes an opportunity to travel through the sales pipeline. A short lead time is a very strong indicator of an efficient sales process.
What tools do you need to build a sales report?
As a company grows working from a spreadsheet will get complicated very quickly. Creating insightful timely reports is so much easier with purpose built tools. This is where SET would become an invaluable asset to your business. SET combines detailed reporting with an easy-to-use dashboard. SET will empower your team and make them feel in control of their targets while giving you the tools to manage your sales pipeline.
While data and reporting is important to keep tabs on your team and sales process it is also just the starting point of conversations and personal development with your professional sales employees. Daily, weekly, monthly and together, these vital sales reports cover the full spectrum of sales performance. When used wisely they will not only help you tweak your sales process to perfection, they will almost certainly help your business to growth quicker than could ever imagine.
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