Written by MICHAEL MORRIS 04/30/2021

Measuring the performance of your sales people is commonplace for sales managers. During setup calls over the years I have had a plethora of sales managers show me how they are managing the performance of their sales team. More often than not, it is a round about way of doing it.

Most of the time sales managers use excel spreadsheets, and add custom formulas to their reports. The largest complaint I hear is that nobody can change anything on the spreadsheet or the entire report stops working. What the sales manager needs to do is request a change to the spreadsheet from their IT manager or developer.

In this article I will explain the ways you can easily report on sales agent performance with your CRM system. I will provide three reports that are easy to implement in any CRM, and are vital to any sales department, regardless of the industry of your business.

Sales Pipeline Report By Sales Agent



Sales Agent Pipeline Report

The sales pipeline report refers to an Opportunity report that shows how many deals are in each stage of the sales pipeline.

The sales pipeline will show sales managers how many deals and the total dollar amount of all deals within each stage of the sales cycle. You can also drill down on this type of report, to see each individual deal within a specific stage of the sales cycle.

When you run this report for each sales person, you can get a broad view of how each sales person is doing. If the report shows none or a very small number of deals in the pre-closing stages of the sales cycle, then you would know that your sales person has nothing close to closing in their pipeline.

Opportunity Probability Report



Opportunity Probability Report

An Opportunity probability report refers to a report that shows all of the deals that have a certain probability or higher of closing.

In the Opportunities module of your CRM system, there is a probability field, that your sales people update as they work on selling a deal. This field is key to having visibility in the deals that have a high probability of closing in the near future.

The probability field is normally a required field in the Opportunities module because of it's significance in regard to sales tracking.

With this report a sales manager can quickly see which deals have the highest chance of closing, and by looking at the expected close date field they will also know how soon these deals are expected to close.

Sales Agent Talk Time Report



Sales Agent Talk Time Report

A talk time report refers to the total amount of time each sales person actually speaks with prospects and customers.

A talk time report is a great way to measure sales agent performance. Especially if you believe some of your sales agents are trying to artificially beef up their call volume by making calls and hanging up after a few seconds. This seems to happen more than you would think when sales departments have call volume quotas.

The great thing about a talk time report is that your sales agents cannot artificially pad their number of calls, because the amount of talk time only starts tracking once the other party of the call actually answers the call. It doesn't start when the call is ringing, but when the other party actually answers the call.

The talk time report is the best way to validate the calling success of a sales agent. It is much more effective than viewing a standard call volume report.

Final Thoughts

Being a sales manager in the year 2021 is a difficult job, and the best way to run a successful sales department is by taking advantage of the advances in sales technology. This includes the ease in which your CRM system allows you to run reports and visualize the results with charts and graphs.

There are an endless number of performance reports you can run to track your sales people, but the three reports I discuss above are a good starting point.

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