10 Critical Sales Management Reports

Today's post is by Seema Haji, Director of Product Marketing at Birst. She is responsible for leading marketing direction and competitive positioning for Birst. Seema has 10 years of experience as a developer, evaluator, buyer and marketer in the Business Intelligence space from her tenure at Actuate Corporation, Yahoo! and Citibank. She has an MS in Computer Science from the University of Southern California. In addition to her passion for driving Birst's SaaS-based business analytics solution, she has a keen interest in sustainability management and eco-friendly living.

 

 

A lack of powerful analytics and good sales management reports are keeping many sales leaders from making the best decisions possible for their companies.  

SFA applications are the most widely deployed among all apps in CRM systems today. Birst commissioned a survey earlier this year on the state of Sales Force Automation business analytics. The results weren’t pretty – only 19% were satisfied with the analytics provided by their current Sales Force Automation (SFA) apps; and 86% of users experienced challenges with their apps.

The survey had other interesting results:

• 74% of SFA users require technical staff for in-depth analysis of their sales data,
• 68% use Excel as the primary tool to analyze their SFA data (more than any other tool), and
• 82% must augment the built-in SFA analytics with additional tools.

While sales managers love real-time visibility and confident sales forecasts, there is still an untapped gold mine sitting in SFA databases. This is where business analytics can help push your organization to the next level of effectiveness. Birst’s Salesforce Reporting and Analytics helps sales managers analyze critical SFA data to get a comprehensive view of the pipeline and change analytics so they can make better leadership decisions.

For example: using Birst, sales leaders can create a single, holistic view integrating their sales data with financial bookings, ERP data, and any other third party data – this allows them to compare committed and forecasted sales, plus see the overall cost of leads that converted to closed/won deals. Sales leaders can also use Birst to analyze what has changed in the pipeline, and compare those changes to the status of that same data last month/quarter/year. They can also find out if they have enough pipeline to meet targets and what might happen if deal sizes or close times change. Birst integrates with Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Oracle CRM (Siebel CRM) and other popular CRM applications.

There are currently 10 sales management reports that Salesforce.com is not able to produce that can dramatically impact how well sales managers understand what is happening with their pipeline and forecasts. You can learn more in this free white paper download.

Most sales leaders today base their sales strategies and decisions on dated information that can be months old. As a result, actions can often come too late to make a difference. Organizations that fail to deliver real-time, interactive diagnostic capabilities to their salespeople fail to maximize sales effectiveness.

Learn more -- download this free report today: 10 Critical Sales Management Reports that Salesforce.com Can’t Generate (and 10 Reasons to Care). 

 

Comments

[Bookkeeping Brisbane]

This made me realize that in order to be an effective sales manager, you must also possess a background in IT. I mean, having the knowledge of how to improve your database is crucial in the world of business.

[Chloe Handbags]

Organizations that fail to deliver real-time, interactive diagnostic capabilities to their salespeople fail to maximize sales effectiveness.