How many times have you wanted your sales teams to just make more calls thinking that is the best way to increasing sales?  Organizations that fail to deliver real-time intelligence to their sales team fail to maximize their efforts and hence get hung up on “making more calls” as the solution.

While most sales managers and owners love reports that measure their sales team’s activities in order to forecast sales, they may be missing opportunities by not focusing on reports that provide necessary information that would allow them to create a better strategy to begin with. Their current strategies and tactics are based upon dated information that could be months old and hence are often useless to make a difference quickly.

So if what gets measured gets managed, what information should you be measuring and delivering real-time to your sales team to be more agile in the field to increase sales?

• Sales of customers by demographic segments
• Profitability of customers by demographic segments
• Sources of new leads by demographic segments
• Dollars in each stage of the funnel
• Conversion rates for each stage of the funnel
• Average value of each opportunity in each stage of the funnel
• Achievement % to budgeted sales and profitability
• Market share % and industry trends
• Distribution by product line and products by demographic segments
• Customer attrition rates
• Customer satisfaction rates
• Production forecasts
• Delivery and project completion progress

Now more than ever, sales managers need to provide their teams with more timely insight and detailed sales analytics that can deliver a competitive advantage to their sales team, allow better forecasting by the sales manager, and increase sales for the company much faster than they would be able to if they were only tracking activities.