Building a strong outbound dashboard gives you a holistic view of your data. Learn which reports can help your team save time and make more informed decisions.
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In today's data-driven world, you can't afford to manage a sales team without regularly monitoring metrics and KPIs. In the past, that was a time-consuming task that took your focus away from making sales and placed it on manual data entry, searching for information, and creating your own reports. It also left a lot of room for human error. But today, with platforms like Outreach and Salesloft, you can create an outbound dashboard that stores all your data in one place, updates in real time, and generates reports automatically when you need them.
Not only can this save you time so you can focus on what matters, but it also ensures your reports are 100% accurate. Every minute of every day, you have access to all of your data in a centralized location, which means you can take a glance and see what your sales reps are doing and how your strategies and campaigns are performing. When something doesn't look right, you can step in and make an informed decision about how to fix it before it spirals out of control.
Take a look at some best practices to use when building your outbound dashboard, along with 10 essential reports to include so you can better track your team's performance, optimize your process, improve productivity, and, of course, close more sales.
How you build your outbound dashboard largely depends on how and who you want to use it. For example, you might want a dashboard that all of your sales reps can monitor and use to ensure they're reaching their personal goals. However, as a sales leader, you'll want a more comprehensive dashboard that tells you how your team is performing, shows you where you need to make strategy adjustments, and gives you an idea of customer sentiment.
Next, you'll want to choose which metrics are most important to your process so you can track them. What's important to a team that sells cars won't necessarily be important to a team that sells software. What's important to a small team of three or four people that works for a small business won't necessarily be important to a large team that works for a big corporation. Avoid overloading your dashboard with metrics that don't impact your business.
Make sure you're building your dashboard using the right tools and software. If you have a product that doesn't generate reports for you and requires you to pull up a spreadsheet every time you need insights, your technology is outdated. Consider a platform that integrates with your CRM and other sales tools on which you rely.
It's also important to choose a tool that is flexible enough to offer you a variety of options when you begin building your reports. There are numerous ways to compile your data into helpful reports, charts, and graphs, ranging from line charts that show month-to-month trends to waterfall charts that break down each individual rep's performance. Experiment and determine which ones are most useful for your team.
The metrics that align with the goals of one sales team may not matter at all to the next, so ultimately, it's up to you to decide which metrics you'll use your dashboard to track and which reports you'll want to generate. With that in mind, we've put together a list of 10 essential ideas that almost any sales team can use to improve their processes.
As a manager, you always want to stay on top of how much effort your reps are putting towards their work. A report on the number of outbound activities is a good basic indicator. It tells you how many calls they made and how many emails and social media messages they sent. While it focuses on volume and quantity over quality, it's a great place to start when you want to ensure your team or each individual rep is reaching their potential.
Conversion rate reports also help you understand the overall efficiency of your team or each individual sales rep through quantitative metrics. Basically, they show you how many prospects your reps turn into leads. It can also tell you how many leads they turn into customers. When these numbers are below expectations, it might indicate that you're going after the wrong leads or your sales pitch isn't effective enough. You can also determine if a specific rep isn't performing as well as the rest of the team and which ones are outperforming the others.
You might associate lead response time with inbound channels, but it's also a crucial outbound metric. Perhaps one of your sales reps sends an email to a lead. The lead responds, asking for a demo of your product. How long does it take your sales rep to follow up? The faster you respond, the more likely you are to engage the lead and eventually make a sale. If your sales rep takes hours or even days to respond, that person will likely look for a solution elsewhere or assume you have bad customer service and spread the word.
Lead response time reports can help you compare what your team is doing to common benchmarks across your industry. If your numbers are too high, you can focus on coaching your reps and creating new strategies.
As the name suggests, a sales meeting report shows you how many meetings you reps scheduled during a certain period of time. Not only does this help you set targets, but it can also help you determine if your team is meeting them. You can compare the number of meetings scheduled to the number of sales your team closed, which can help you learn whether or not your meetings are effective. That might be another indicator that you need to change strategies.
Many reports track deals that your team is in the process of closing, but a deals won and lost report tracks all of the results. It tells you how many leads turned into customers and how many didn't. You can use this report to monitor an individual rep's performance, or you can use it to determine if something your entire team is doing isn't working. If you're losing deals to your competition, it could be an indicator that your sales strategies aren't working. It could even indicate a problem with your product or service.
Sales cycle length reports tell you how long it takes a rep to close their average sale. This is another one that gives you an idea of how your team is performing, if your strategy is strong, and even how individual reps perform. These reports are often broken up by sales cycle stage, so you can determine if there's an area where your reps get hung up in the process.
A sales pipeline report takes you through the stages of the pipeline and gives you an idea of where your team is successful and where they're not. You'll see how many leads you have, where they are currently in the pipeline, and what you need to do to move them forward. You'll also see that some leads are on the verge of becoming customers and some are on the verge of disappearing. This can help you understand what actions your team must take to pull them back in or push them towards making a final decision.
When you want to know how efficient your sales strategies are, you can look at your customer acquisition cost (CAC) report. This shows you how much you're spending on sales strategies (and possibly marketing) vs. how many customers you're actually acquiring. Most general sales reports include your CAC because it's a good indicator of if and how you can improve your operations.
While your CAC tells you how much you're spending per customer, your average deal size tells you how much you're earning and how many deals you must close in order to meet your target. You can use this data to inform and encourage your reps to meet their individual quotas during a certain period of time. For example, if your target is $500,000 for the month and your average deal size is $10,000, you know your team must close 50 sales. You can also use it to monitor the impact of specific campaigns.
Customer churn, or the number of customers you lose during a period of time, isn't something you really want to think about, but this report is important. While you'll always lose a few customers here and there, if that number suddenly ramps up one month, you need to know why. Reasons could range from a competitor putting a better product on the market to a breakdown within your sales process. Asking for customer feedback can help you make improvements.
Setting up an outbound dashboard allows you to compile all of your important data into one central location and automate reports based on that data. Whether you're curious about an individual sales rep's performance or you want to see how well a particular campaign performed, you can generate these reports at any time and count on them to be accurate and reflect real-time information. It's a must for your outbound sales team.
