In business, it’s never really enough that you get to do the different sales functions. It’s not even enough that you have trained your sales agents to be effective in selling and upselling. You should have a clear idea where you stand—how your campaign is going, how much profit you have gained from your marketing efforts and how much have been contributed by each of your customers, or how your enterprise is doing in the sales front.
Usually, you make use of the good-old Excel software, which has been very effective in generating reports. However, with CRM and sales force automation tools, you can also automate sales reporting.
Why You Need to Do So
There are a lot of reasons why you may consider automating the generation of reports for your business. To give you a few, you can read the following:
1. They will be less time spent on record keeping and more time in closing deals. Perhaps some data of your sales reports are derived from the information that your sales agents. So just imagine if they need to record every bit of information for at least 3 minutes. When one of them can make 45 calls every day, a sales agent is basically spending 135 minutes of it filling out records when he or she can just proceed to make more calls and close more deals.
2. They can just fill out forms. Sales force automation may also introduce the use of e-forms, which can basically help everyone save time. For instance, you may have an e-sales order form. All you need to do is to fill out all pertinent information in the template. That’s how simple it can get. The same thing can be said on sales reports, which can actually take minutes to hours if you are going to do them manually.
3. You don’t need to print out information. You can keep the reports in the Intranet, or the internal portal that can be accessed by you, managers and supervisors, and your sales agents. This way, information can become handy whenever needed. When you want to print the reports, it will be only to provide yourself a hard copy, but that will no longer be necessary. What’s more, you don’t only get to save time, but you can also minimize the use of certain office supplies, thereby also reducing the costs of utilities of your business.
4. Important data and reports are accessible anytime. Since your sales agents are your front liners, you want to provide them as much information as possible to better serve your customers. By generating automated reports, they will have to cut down their waiting time when it comes to paper-based prospect list, sales support data, and inventory information. They just need to open your reports that could be stored in the database to answer specific questions and issues of your leads.
Most of all, automated reports promote transparency, and when sales agents know the impact of their work to your enterprise, they will feel more cooperative and motivated to excel in their performance.
