How to generate sales activity reports

So, the groundwork is done. Your sales team is fully motivated, trained and eager to enter the fray, sales wise. That's great, however, how will you know how well they are doing? How will you identify the over, under and non achievers? The answer is to have sales activity reports so you can an effective measurement tool for your team. To generate these sales activity reports you will have to consider the following points.

Firstly, do you use a CRM package that has the capability of report generation? ACT, Salespoint, Selligent and others have a back function that allows for customised reporting. This means you can set the criteria you require and simply run the report whenever you need it. To have such CRM packages does require some investment however.

It is quite simple to create your own reports using Microsoft Excel or similar database software. It is quite likely that you will already have a spreadsheet capability within whatever office software you use, which means it is a far cheaper option for the construction of your sales activity reporting.

Whichever method you use, you need to identify what criteria is important to you for measurement purposes. You also need to ascertain how often you need such reports to run and what timescales you wish them to reflect.

Taking a telesales person for instance, you may wish to know how many dials they complete per day, how much talk time they achive, how many contracts/quotes they send out and how many sales they make per day.

The first thing you need to do is provide each telesales person with a daily KPI that is a minimum performance bench mark. Otherwise you have nothing to compare their activity with.

Provide each telesales person with a daily report sheet for self completion. On this sheet provide fields for the criteria you require. You should also type at the bottom of the sheet the KPI required for a days performance as a reminder. Emphasise that the KPI is a 'minimum' and not a target to be reached.

It may be that some information may be able to be sourced from automated systems, such as dials, talk time etc. and this can flow back to you on a daily basis via telephone system reporting. However, have the telesales person still complete dials etc. as well as this gives you a fair honesty check.

All you have to do then is to create your spreadsheet with a page for each day, listing each telesales person and the fields from their daily activity sheet. Once you have done this, add columns for additional information and calculation. By doing this you can show % success against KPI for each person and can also work out individual conversion rates for activity against sales.

If you use Microsoft Excel or similar, it is very easy to copy the basic spreadsheet to a new page for each day without transferring the daily data. It is also easy to create a new page as a monthly summation too.

As your data builds, you will soon be able to see a picture of your sales team and how each person within that team performs. This will be very useful if used in conjunction with 1 to 1 interviews and performance appraisal meetings. It will also help you to reward those that perform well and use these people as an example to those that are not performing as well.

Using sales activity reports should be a daily/monthly function of a good Sales Manager, as without such, how can you manage your Sales Team. It need not take up too much of your day once you have made this operation into part of your routine. And as you can see generation of sales activity reports need not seem a difficult thing to do.