Your Crummy Sales Reports Are Costing You a Bundle

14 May 2014

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Sales management considers performance reporting essential, and sales managers are often the loudest constituents served by sales operations departments. But our recent research suggests that salespeople, not their managers, may be a more important “customer” for performance reporting.

Our study’s 85 participating business-to-business firms rated the amount of time their salespeople and sales managers spend in reporting-related activities, such as looking for performance data, verifying reported results, interpreting report data, and developing action plans based on reported results. Perhaps unsurprisingly, sales forces as a whole spend too much time looking for reports and verifying data, and too little time analyzing report results and planning.

These activities correlate with firm performance in ways sure to get management’s attention. Time spent “verifying the accuracy of reported data” for example: firms with salespeople who spend “the right amount of time” verifying reports out-performed – by 13% (in revenue goal achievement) – firms where salespeople spent “too much time” verifying data. A similar trend holds for firms where the same is true of sales managers, though with a smaller delta in firm performance (a 5-6% differential in firm sales goal achievement). The chart included here is a preview from our upcoming research report, “Sales Performance Reporting – Emerging Priorities for Management,” publishing later this month. The research was underwritten by Tableau Software.

The results show what great salespeople already know: time spent tracking down data is selling time lost. For sales organizations, there’s only one conclusion: without accurate performance reports, achieving the sales goal won’t be easy – or likely.

 

Correlating Data Accuracy with Firm Performance


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