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Date
7 October 2016
Author
Delphine Duclos
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As a sales director, you know that your CRM dashboards are not enough to optimize your sales management. It’s also important to note that if you want to leverage the immense amount of data in your CRM, you need to review reports.
The best reports to review will obviously be based on your sales team’s objectives.
Today, we will present 6 indispensable reports for any sales director.
Sales Director: Your Indispensable Salesforce Reports
Here are the six most useful reports for you, sales director. We will explain why each report is important and how to use them. However, since each Salesforce instance is different, we will not explain how to generate them.
1. Daily Sales Activity KPI Tracking
What is it?
This report documents daily performance around sales activities. It records all activities (calls made, emails sent, etc.) that your sales representatives performed the previous day.
Why is it important?
As a sales director, tracking daily behaviors around your sales team’s KPIs helps you understand if your sales representatives are spending time on the right activities. This report also allows you to delve deeper and display specific notes for each activity to see what each sales representative is doing for each opportunity and thus help them if necessary.
How to use it?
Review this report every morning and share the metrics with your sales representatives to help them track their real-time performance and progress towards their goals. It’s a good way to keep them motivated. Automate this report so that Salesforce sends it directly to your inbox.
2. Pending Opportunities
What is it?
This refers to prospects who were initially qualified either by marketing or by inside sales but have not yet been approved by your sales representatives.
Why is it important?
This report is a good way to measure the quality of leads passed to sales representatives.
How to use it?
Review this report daily to ensure that opportunities move correctly throughout the sales pipeline and don’t get stuck due to, for example, constant meeting postponements.
3. Account Activity Report
What is it?
This report details all activities that have occurred on an account.
Why is it important?
Sometimes, sales representatives tend to do too many things on an account, such as providing customer support or trying to upsell. By doing too much, they don’t do anything truly well.
How to use it?
Review this report twice a week to see if you need to train your sales representatives to focus on truly important activities.
4. Sales Pipeline Progress
What is it?
When an opportunity is opened, this report will show its progress through the different stages of the sales process.
Why is it important?
It is important to know which stage of the sales process slows down opportunities, or stops them completely. This shows you which part of your sales process needs improvement.
How to use it?
Review this report once a week to monitor bottlenecks in your sales process.
5. Closed-Lost Opportunities Report
What is it?
The Closed-Lost Opportunities report, as its name suggests, shows you the list of opportunities you have recently lost.
Why is it important?
Trying to understand why an opportunity didn’t convert into a sale is obviously important. Consider it as if your prospect was truly your ideal buyer and at what stage of the sales process the deal was lost so you can improve.
How to use it?
It all depends on your sales cycle. But between once a month and once a quarter is generally recommended.
6. Closed-Won Opportunities
What is it?
Similar to the Closed-Lost Opportunities, this report lives up to its name and shows you the list of deals you have recently signed.
Why is it important?
This report is a great tool for post-sale analysis because it can help you confirm, or complete, your ideal buyer’s profile. Take note of information such as company size, market segment, and product usage. You can also analyze the different stages of the sales cycle: what was the lead’s origin? What was the duration of each stage of the process?
How to use it?
Just like the Closed-Lost Opportunities report, this report depends on the length of your sales cycle. Monthly or quarterly makes sense for many teams.
Your role as a sales director requires you to have the best possible visibility into your sales organization to identify problems and thus improve your sales management. Using all these Salesforce reports will help you gain a comprehensive view of your sales cycle. This way, you can best help your sales team achieve its goals.
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Date
7 October 2016
Author
Delphine Duclos