Its objective is therefore to “report” and then analyze data in order to facilitate operational decision-making within the company.
It allows you to measure, among other things:
the individual performances of the members of the sales america cell phone number list team (Jean-Pierre and the others) over a given period, in a defined geographical area, on certain types of customers or products, etc.
the organization's overall business performance against set objectives.
business activity (meetings, calls, clients visited, etc.)
the key figures: margin, turnover...
An essential element of sales force management, commercial reporting remains an essential tool for sales management, which monitors the activity of different business streams (today we speak of RevOps in English for Revenue Operations , also including the marketing team).
Far from being a surveillance tool (even if Jean-Pierre thought so…), sales reporting allows you to guide the weekly, monthly or quarterly activity of each salesperson by giving them the right indicators to evaluate their performance and benchmark against a market or other internal salespeople.
“Well that’s normal Jean-Pierre, you make 3 visits/day on average (compared to 5 for the team), that’s not how you’re going to make your quotas this month”
Finally, as far as possible, “Keep it stupid simple” (KISS) says the Anglo-Saxon acronym. It is therefore imperative to simplify and give meaning to commercial reporting so that it is adopted by the teams and does not become restrictive.
The goal, as you have understood, is for commercial reporting to create value and be a reliable monitoring and forecasting tool for all of your organization's operational teams.
When to set up commercial reporting?
Sales reporting helps you structure your sales process and identify flaws and adjustments needed to improve it.
It must therefore be implemented as soon as possible in your organization and remain agile and scalable.
Just because you chose X metrics doesn't mean they are definitive. Just because you've established weekly reports doesn't mean the frequency shouldn't change if it's necessary and relevant.
Yes, even if Maryse at the ADV tells you that she has always done it like that.
How to set up commercial reporting?
Jean-Pierre is not an Excel ace. He has not been interested in TCD and other macros for a long time or no longer. He wants to sell and be as close as possible to his customers, while saving as many resources as possible. JP is the king of efficiency.
This is good, it is much easier today to set up commercial reporting than it was 20 years ago. No more excuses, hundreds of “Data Visualization” and BI (Business Intelligence) tools (see below) exist and first and foremost those provided by your CRM.
However, Jean-Pierre and Alain, his N+1, have experienced (or still experience) the painful end-of-month hours waiting for the extraction controlled by the IT department and the CFO. An extraction that is not always up to date and that mobilizes several people on low-value tasks (interrogating a database via “the grinder”…) and which will be the subject of endless discussions late at night: so-and-so has not paid, so-and-so has not been visited, or X and Y have not ordered this month… What a waste of time!
Whereas with the right tools and/or a correctly informed and continuously updated CRM, generating commercial reporting reports becomes child's play (tables, graphs, dynamic infographics, evolving curves, etc.