5 reports every Sales Manager needs

For Sales Managers, knowledge is power. In a world of information overload, it can be difficult to identify what data is of value and what can help your team to meet targets.

Keeping a track of won deals is one thing but understanding and predicting the factors that are affecting your team's performance is crucial in meeting your goals. Visibility of performance across sales reps, product lines and customer accounts, is crucial to gaining control over your sales processes that will help you to identify more opportunities and win more deals. Below are 5 reports every Sales Manager needs.

Leakage

Identifying the leakage of sales across customers and products gives Sales Managers the best information to drive prospect marketing and customer retention campaigns. Understanding which product is decreasing in popularity allows you to create targeted marketing campaigns, offer discounts and deals to boost orders. Without knowing the fluctuations in buying behaviours, it's difficult to know where to begin when pushing your product messaging. It's also a great indicator of what products you should be purchasing to ensure money is well spent.

Similarly, understanding leakage on customers' spend is important for Account Managers to increase customer order values. Your team can be proactive and use the information to inform their visits and conversations.

In OGL Software's sales intelligence module you can drill down to view leakage reports on units, profits, costs and margins on products and customers. This is a great report that you can arm your sales teams with so they can actively keep track of potential opportunities.

Variance

A full variance report is a great tool for Sales Managers to have because it gives a full report on a product or customer performance across all indicators in one place. Seeing the data from every angle (across units, profits, margins etc) helps to inform your decisions when devising your strategy. For example, you may find a customer is buying more of one product than last year, but you're having to sell them at a lower margin than before, this could be cause for concern.

Opportunities

For analysing trends and informing marketing, it's important to know the opportunities and behaviours of a sector or industry. OGL Software allows you to tag' or attribute customers with particular categories which enables you to report on the behaviours and opportunities within that sector. This can inform your prospect campaigns with timely, targeted marketing based on product benefits, seasonal discounts and competitor offers.

The OGL Software actioning and monitoring reports highlights how your customers are performing against others in their industry, drilling down to exactly what products they're not buying compared to others. This can also be achieved with cross-sale reports too. Cross-sale reports allow you to identify which customers buy a particular item (for example hand soap) but don't buy another relevant item that you stock (like soap dispensers). These insights help to create a better picture of your customers' behaviours and give you the tools to ask the questions you need to improve results.

Targets

Without the visibility of performance against targets and KPI's, it can be difficult to do your job as a Sales Manager. With senior managers or board members wanting answers, target and KPI reports give you the control to feedback on real results and make improvements where necessary.

Dashboards

Whilst not actually a report', creating a dashboard that includes mini snapshots of all our key reports ensure you have the top-level overview you need to be proactive. Building dashboards can be overwhelming at first, and it's difficult to know where to begin. Building the 4 key reports above on your dashboard is the beginning and will give you the quick snapshot you need to monitor performance. But we recommend creating multiple dashboards that meet specific needs such as: forecasting, sales reps, KPI's and sales opportunities and giving access to the key departments that will also need access to these like sales reps, marketing or your executive team.