A critical topic Sales Managers mention to me during consulting engagements is performance measurement, or reporting.
“What’s my return on investment for this?”
“Can I forecast my deals by this particular type?”
“Which sales team/reps is performing the best?”
Apart from the questions above, sales teams experience numerous challenges to accomplish their objectives. In addition to the challenges of actually selling, sales managers need to construct appropriate reporting that links with their team’s metrics - with nuances for geography, industry concentration, and other factors. Sales teams also need a centralized location to view those reports depicting straightforward functionality to view rep/team productivity, forecasting, and closed deal analysis.
Sales Analytics was developed to identify reports quickly, adjust for your sales team’s nuances, and gauge your organization’s performance. This can be found under Analytics Tools and divides the reports into three distinct sections associated with sales teams - Coach Reps and Teams, Forecasts & Pipelines, and Sales Outcomes. In order to gain access to this functionality, you need a Sales Professional or Enterprise subscription.
The sections mentioned above split their reports, organized on the left hand size of the screen. The selections are designed to address the concerns your Sales Management / executives have. In addition to editing reports in-app, many of them can be edited within the custom report builder as well.
Additionally, apart from the basic filters highlighted on the right-hand side of the page, there are options to add more customized filters based on the primary data group that the report pulls property values from: contacts, deals, or engagements.
Even though this post will go into a few reports per section, each one could have a specific purpose to better your sales team’s overall performance. For more information on these and other reports, you can find an “About this report” tab on the right hand side on each report, where you will see a definition of the visualization we show, terminology used, and key tips.
Coach Reps and Teams
Coach Reps and Teams will measure your sales reps’/team’s productivity, down to the specific tasks within their process. The list of reports available, most of which are editable within the report builder, include:
- Activities
- Call outcomes
- Chats
- Deals created
- Lead response time
- Meeting outcomes
- Tasks completed
- Team activity timeline
- Time spent in deal stage
There’s a few reports that one should concentrate on using to gauge your reps/team’s productivity: “Lead Response Time” and “Call or Meeting Outcomes.”
Lead Response Time: This uses a default contact property of “Lead Response Time,” filtering against the “Owner Assigned Date” based on the Contact Owner property, to show how long it takes for that Contact Owner to reach out to someone after they are assigned to that lead. You can also group by the team if you want to see it on that level. All custom filters are based on contact properties.
This is useful for marketing qualified leads passed along to Sales, or contacts who fill out a contact us form and are assigned to a sales rep automatically. How quick are your reps to reach out? As noted in numerous studies, it’s imperative your sales team reaches out quickly once someone has been assigned, lest they end up going somewhere else for similar products and services.
Call/Meeting Outcomes: These are listed as two separate reports, but structured similarly. Call or Meeting Outcomes show the rate at which your sales reps have recorded calls and meetings, but also the outcomes of those activities. Both reports will have custom filters for activity properties.
You can view how many scheduled meetings were completed, or how many of the calls your reps made as voicemails vs. connected. There are also tabs for viewing those calls and meetings over time as an entire group - you can filter by the specific teams / reps as you need.
Using reports in this section can help you keep your sales reps accountable and focused in their efforts, and identify areas to coach them to produce more positive results.
Forecasts & Pipelines
Forecasts & Pipelines provide visualizations many sales executives need to plan out their quarter or year against the targets they are directed to hit. Executives will use these types of reports to work with their finance team on adding more headcount, or following up with managers on areas to strengthen the sales team’s performance.
Unlike in the Coach Reps and Teams section, many of these reports are not editable in the custom report builder. However, you will still have the ability to use filters in the Sales Analytics UI to specify for your business’ nuances.
- Deal change history
- Deal funnel
- Deal pipeline waterfall
- Deal push rate
- Historical snapshots
- Quota Attainment
- Weighted pipeline forecast
There are several reports in this section that would be useful not only to sales management, but members of operations teams to project incoming revenue. Three reports I will highlight are Deal Pipeline Waterfall, Historical Snapshots, and Quota Attainment.
Deal Pipeline Waterfall: The deal pipeline waterfall report comes from the waterfall chart that was utilized by McKinsey and Company on their client engagements, depicting the positive and negative actions towards a metric’s total (ex. revenue, gross margin, inventory). HubSpot’s deal pipeline waterfall report summarizes the changes within a particular deal pipeline(s) - distinguishing the positive and negative factors that went into a pipeline’s overall value between the beginning and end of a specified time period.
This report is extremely useful to executives wanting to get a high-level overview of the progress made in their pipeline. This also gives them the ability to plan further ahead knowing that a certain amount of revenue is being won, pushed further out for close, lost among other pathways, or others.
Historical Snapshots: This is a report you can use to examine what your deal pipeline value was at a certain point in time. This is great to compare your deal pipeline values and gauge what you are doing differently today.
Apart from specifying your date range, we will give you an indication of what the change amounted to at the start & end dates. If you end up using our manual forecast categories, we have a tab indicating deal pipeline values categorized by that property, and another tab for average deal size. Overall, the historical snapshot report gives a full picture when performing more extensive analysis of your sales team’s pipeline.
Quota Attainment: Quota attainment measures your reps or team’s progress against a particular revenue goal that has been set for them. To set those quotas, you would need to enter them into your settings. Once you’ve done that, the report will show two distinct values - the actual amount the rep/team has completed, and another value denoting the goal they are held against. The number at the top of the report will give you an immediate indication of how much everyone displayed on the chart achieved their goal or otherwise.
If you are looking for more nuanced analysis, there are additional tabs to view progress against quota over time (filtering for certain reps/teams), and comparison to depict what that performance was against multiple months side-by-side with those respective targets.
Members of your sales operations and finance teams could use these to plan for headcount. More importantly, this report becomes useful for the individual rep or team, being able to judge their own performance against their peers. Another place managers and reps can see this is our Forecast tool, where you can also submit forecast plans and have coaching sessions 1:1.
Sales Outcomes
Sales Outcomes will examine your deals after closure. As seen with the Coach Reps & Teams section, most of these reports can be edited in the report builder. Regardless, the filters are still available on the right hand side to specify for your business’ nuances, all based off of deal properties. The list of reports are below.
- Average deal size
- Deal loss reasons
- Deal revenue by source
- Deal velocity
- Deals won & lost
A few reports I would want to highlight here include Deal Loss Reasons and Deal Velocity.
Deal Loss Reasons: Deal Loss Reasons will show the reasons that your team lost a deal - using the property “Closed Lost Reason.” To make this incredibly valuable, change the property type of Closed Lost Reason from single-line text to an enumeration - single or multiple checkboxes - property. Organizing those common reasons will make this more valuable and easier to visualize later. You can view this by the rep, the team, or specific Closed Lost Reason. Additionally, this report shows another tab to show closed lost reasons over time as well.
Requiring Closed Lost Reason to be entered in your deal pipeline settings will ensure that this gets entered every single time, allowing for more readily available data for your sales management team to discuss with other teams.
Deal Velocity: Deal Velocity visualizes the answer to a common question asked by sales management: How long does it take for my deals to close? This depicts Closed Won and Closed Lost deals as well for a comparison, and has another tab to show deal velocity over time. You can view this by the rep, team, or the deal stage’s probability (determined in your deal pipeline settings).
This report can serve as a coaching metric for walking reps and teams through slow periods, analyzing areas of your sales process where you can eliminate friction. Moreover, this can also give your management team the ability to accurately predict how quickly revenue will flow into your organization.
Conclusion
Sales Analytics has a host of reports that can assist sales managers and executives in particular to appropriately gauge and measure your sales team’s performance. Moreover, it can serve as the building blocks for aligning sales with other teams in your organization - marketing, customer service, product, operations, finance, and others.
Though these templated reports offer a good overview of your team’s performance, that does not mean you cannot incorporate more customized reports for your liking. Combined with our new custom report builder, the visualization options offered can provide you with the infrastructure to operate a closed feedback loop.