For more than a decade we have been helping clients get better information from their software packages. The focus is often, and correctly so, on making sure that the correct data gets entered into the system in a timely fashion. While this is a crucial piece of the puzzle, today I’d like to spend a few minutes telling you about another area of the system that often has room for improvement. The reports themselves!
I’m guessing that you probably have some type of sales reports for your sales team? Does it look like this:
Sally Salesperson
| Customer | Sales Amount |
| Customer A | $8,000 |
| Customer B | $2,000 |
| Etc… | … |
| Totals for Sally: | $10,000 |
I have seen this report at least a hundred times now and it’s not wrong in any way but here’s a few ideas about how you could make it even better. Let’s say Sally’s total sales for the month was $10,000. Is that good or bad? It depends on what goals or quotas have been set for Sally. Obviously if her goal was $25,000 then she has quite a bit of work to do next month to get back on track. Include that quota or budget figure right at the top of the report to make sure it’s clear to the team.
So now that we’ve added a quota to this sales report and your sales team now knows instantly where they stand. What else can we do to help them? Adding some additional data to the report can help decide what actions the sales team will take first each month. For example, if we took our report above and added columns for Current Period Prior Year, YTD Current Year, and YTD Prior Year the sales person will be able to see opportunities that might be out there.
Finally let’s change the sorting on the report. Is your report sorted by customer number or name? Let’s add one additional column which is the variance of sales from Prior YTD to Current YTD and sort the report in descending order. If Customer B generated sales of $50,00 YTD for the prior year but hasn’t come close to that this year Sally might make this her first phone call.
| Customer | YTD Sales | Quota | LYTD Sales |
| Customer B | $2,000 | $15,000 | $50,000 |
| Customer A | $8,000 | $10,000 | $8,000 |
| Etc… | … | … | … |
| Totals for Sally: | $10,000 | $25,000 | $58,000 |
I encourage you to apply this type of thinking to all of your current reports as there may be very small things you can do to make very big improvements.
