How to structure and further motivate the sales team – people who have direct influence over the number of customers your company can get? Business intelligence tools are the key, with personalized Power BI reporting, you can help your team members structure their work processes according to their strengths, quickly analyze strong and weak points in the sales flow and track KPI performance in real time.
Regarding company’s profitability, the department that is the closest to being directly responsible for making profit is usually the sales team. By being at such a forward position, sales team members are always to blame for organization’s poor performance and are to be rewarded first if the sales are going well.
The sales’ team performance, indeed, has a direct impact on the results, which is why their performance is closely monitored.
Why use Power BI for sales team performance reporting?
- Sales team overview
- Sales performance metrics
- Sales pipeline analysis
- Sales team activity analysis
- Sales team member analysis
The issue with implementing Power BI reporting
Nevertheless, these crucial employees often dislike being monitored or evaluated based on their effectiveness. Even CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system implementations typically face internal resistance due to their analytical capabilities. Once you start gathering customer relationship data in a centralized location, the next significant challenge is integrating this data into sales processes and using it effectively for decision-making.
Without the active and proper use of accurate data, the sales team struggles to input the information correctly, causing customer relationship systems to degrade as incorrect data is entered. As a consequence, during the brief five-minute daily or weekly sales meetings, the sales team often seeks answers from incorrect data to respond to management’s questions, resulting in many of these meetings devolving into an hour of demotivation filled with excuses and accusations.
The solution to the problem
The solution to such an issue is to set-up transparent sales processes with agreed accountability and fixed KPI system. When the process is clear and responsibilities are shared among each sales team member, everyone knows what they are responsible for and how these responsibilities are measured. The process is called the Sales Factory.
When implementing sales factory concept, we recommend to divide responsibilities among sales team based on strongest personal skills.
Sharing responsibilities within the Sales team
For example, if some team members are good at analysis, handling large amount of data and not too fond of communication with customers, they could be responsible for lead generation. Generated leads can be passed to active sales team members, who have strong verbal communication skills. They, in turn, can handle contacting regarding new opportunities to customers.
- Contact with a customer is made and the customer got interested in new idea, this opportunity can be taken by highly experienced sales members who have answers to all specific customer questions.
- After deal is closed, all the following activities before signing the contract with customers, can be handled by sales team members with strong interrelationship skills. Such a flow system allows you to use the best personal qualities of your workers and ensure the consistency of the sales process.
After such extremely effective system is arranged, it is super important to fine tune it and ensure that every part of the flow performs as planned. This is the biggest challenge for sales manager and the best tool that he can get for effective control and upgrade of such a flow is automated sales performance KPI dashboard.
Why choose Power BI reporting?
With such a dashboard, weak points of the sales flow can be detected in a few minutes and during real 5 min. meetings. Effective decisions can be made on sales flow processes quicker and more accurate than before.
This measurement system at the same time ensures the right data to be entered, since it is based on conversion ratio from one flow process to another. Some sales processes are based on salespeople actions and other on their results, therefore when action KPIs will be green, but result KPIs will not be fulfilled for a longer time it will be obvious who is not acting at the moment.
With the help of Power BI these dashboards are fully automatic and collect data from many different sources, therefore it is eligible to implement it in companies that use different CRM, ERP and other systems. Here, you can find Power BI data reporting compares to Dynamics 365 CRM reporting.
Conclusion
In summary, utilizing Power BI for sales team performance reporting offers an effective way to visualize sales data, identify improvement areas, and create customized dashboards. To ensure successful implementation, it’s important to establish clear processes and key performance indicators (KPIs). This increases trust of the employees and encourages engagement in decisions and planning, which in turn betters sales strategies and promotes continuous improvement.