While your Sales Performance Management (SPM) system is calculating and monitoring the performance of your employees, it provides you with Dashboards and Reports to show that performance. With them, you can track employee progress, and see areas that need improvement as well as areas of success. But how can you build out these dashboards and reports to be the most effective for your organization’s needs? There are three objectives to shoot for when designing your dashboards and reports, each will help bring clarity to your business and efficacy to your sales team.
- Providing Actionable and Relevant Insights
Don’t build your dashboards and reports to simply track everything. Instead, home in on the areas of your business that concern or excite you. If you are looking at everything that is happening all at once, the information you are looking for may get lost in the white noise. Instead, focus on what is relevant to your business. Identify your goals for your sales team, and track that which shows growth and areas that need improvement. Ensure that the insights provided are actionable, that something can be done about them when found
Before you design your dashboards and reports, you must first ask yourself what it is you are hoping to see. Ask the questions that you need answers for. If your dashboards and reports are giving you data that is irrelevant to the future of your company, or data that cannot be effectively acted upon, then you need to re-design them.
2. Are Intuitive and Visually Appealing
Your team is going to use these dashboards and reports every day, so it is integral that you design with user experience in mind. It is best to adhere to the “5-second rule,” which is, that it should take 5 seconds to understand the visual you are looking at. Ensure that they are intuitive and easy to read so that your insights can be more easily gleaned from them.
You can design your dashboards and reports to tell a story and also reflect company branding. These dashboards and reports are the stories of your employees’ progress towards goals and they should reflect that
3. Provide Transparency for Your Team
Just as you should receive accurate and actionable insights into your employee progress, so should they. By having access to their own progress, they will be better able to improve. They should also provide accurate information on sales incentives and payments for your team. It is important that your salespeople know what they are working towards.
By doing this, you foster greater trust in your organization. Your team will know what they need to do to grow, and they are clear on incentives and offers for them. Clarity is the best policy with sales teams, and with this clarity they will worry less about their current standing or the status of their comp plans, and do more of what they do best, sell.
SPM solutions already bring efficiency, acuity, and transparency to your sales organization, but with dashboards and reports you can bring these aspects to greater heights. Ensuring that your dashboards and reports provide you with pertinent information, are easy to read and understand, and provide greater transparency into your organization, will lead to a more effective sales team.
To learn more about how to design your dashboards and reports to bring out the best in your SPM system, reach out to us.