A Wish List From Your Sales Team- Our Reporting Needs

Sophisticated information is available to us in a snap. We can look at our smart watch to check our blood pressure. We can use our smart phone to monitor glucose levels. We can even touch an app to see what the weather will be like for the next week. Can your sales team click a button to see their business summary?

Companies spend a lot of money on systems and the integration of those systems without considering the ease of information access. So, here’s the wish list from your sales team.

• Sales numbers should be live. Don’t make the team wait until month end close to get numbers. Little can be done when looking in the rearview mirror.

• Provide a dashboard that allows for a quick analysis. Charts are the best way to get a snapshot of the business.

• In those dashboard charts, show comparisons to prior year and prior month so trends can be quickly determined.

• Allow for easy filtering to dig into the numbers. System generated reports are static and only provide data at a point in time. Sales professionals need to be able to dig into the numbers to determine exactly what is going on with their accounts.

• In a lot of industries, customers buy products in units or cases and then the monthly reporting has a completely different metric for sales. We definitely understand the need for an equivalized unit to streamline reporting for Finance and Operations. However, your sales team needs all their reporting to be in the unit the customer purchases in.

• Don’t require your sales team to go to multiple systems to get the data they need. If you use a CRM tool, then load sales data into that tool. If you have multiple systems, utilize a tool like Power Bi to combine all data into one place for easy and accurate reporting.

So, when you start that integration project, make sure one of the discovery areas is sales reporting.