More than any other department, sales relies on tracking and measuring. Metrics are the heartbeat of a high-performing sales team. You may start with just the basic reporting available in your CRM, but to scale and to improve your team you will need specialized reporting as well. Your CRM will give you data on the sales cycle, lead age, win percentages in each stage, by rep, etc. However, it will also be important to track other data such as dials to connects, connects to appointments, etc.
From a management perspective, keep an eye on these metrics every day, but also set aside time to do meaningful deep dives into available data to consider trends, implications, strategies for improvement, etc. A monthly cadence to review metrics in more detail is a good place to start.
From this data, you will also probably need to prepare sales reports to your board, CEO, and other executive leadership. Ideally, the information can be pushed to them automatically via dashboards, but many companies still prepare a monthly presentation that includes snapshot data, challenges, wins, key initiatives, context on results, etc.
For transparency, and to create a culture of accountability, create a dashboard that is always visible to your team. This also helps foster friendly competition.
What’s displayed on your dashboard will be based on your culture and what’s important to you. If your team works in the same office, use a large whiteboard in the center of the sales floor to display these metrics (update them daily), or a large TV screen to show them in real-time. If your team is remote or distributed, consider sales tech that pushes this data to your entire team, or is available within one click on a sales platform. Here are some things to keep on the team dashboard:
Carefully consider what is on your dashboard—you want it to be the most important data. Everything on the dashboard should be there for a reason.
Great tools are available to bring this data together for you in visual, real-time reports that can be summarized for executive reports and displayed in real-time for team transparency.