All the sales managers working in an environment where there are a lot of products, customers, orders, opportunities and more involved are flooded with reports.
One interesting thing we suggest our clients is to identify one or more unnecessary reports and eliminate them.
- Your report is an Excel file on the network that requires 1 hour of work to keep up to date and doesn’t seem to have been updated in 6 months: MOVE IT in a directory with limited access.
- Your report is available through a menu in your management system or your intranet: DELETE the menu entry.
More reports ≠ more good decisions
For more than 10 years, we have been analyzing hundreds, even thousands of sales, marketing and planning reports in many enterprises.
In almost all enterprises, many unused reports are kept and/or distributed to people who do not understand their purposes.
Flooded by reports: consequences:
- Confusion: many team members don’t understand what is expected of them or what to do with the information they are provided.
- Alignment issues: managers spend valuable time debating over numbers’ authenticity and pertinence instead of working and discussing more important issues together.
- Loss of time and gains: when you flood your representatives with reports, you are not helping them, you make them waste time.
Place 15 sales reports in front of a representative: he will close his laptop without looking at them, go on the road and meet clients.
Place 3 simple, useful reports that will help him target opportunities and he will use them to improve his sales.
Where to start?
Do not embark on an endless review of all your reports and a redefinition of your performance indicators today.
Follow a simple recipe:
- Find a useless report, delete it (or hide it 🙂 )…
- Wait a month…
- Repeat…
Spring is coming, it is time for a cleanup.
Less distractions, more results
If you delete a report you think useless but was in fact useful, your team will let you know.
You will have learned that they base their decisions on a tool you deemed useless or inadequate.
If you delete a report that really was useless and no one mentions it to you:
You will have contributed to the cleanup of your processes and promoted alignment
In both cases, you will have learned a lot about your team and processes while devoting very little time to do so.
Which report have you deleted today?
If you delete a report, share your results with me. I would be happy to learn about your experience and read your comments on the matter.
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