Sales Process Breakdowns: Misinformed Reports Lead to Missed Opportunities

This is the final installment in a series on three common breakdowns in the expansion stage sales process. You can check out the introduction to the series here and read the first installment on part one and part two.

A lot of expansion stage companies struggle to get their sales reports right, filling them with faulty data or failing to include the information that really matters.

Let’s say you go for a hike in some remote national park.

It’s a 10-mile round trip journey with enough twists, turns, and forked paths to make Robert Frost giddy. You begin the trek, feel your way through the brush, and reach the halfway point, where it’s time to turn around and find your way back to the beginning.

But you didn’t mark your path. And you don’t have a map. And you can’t remember any landmarks that might guide you back – largely because you were too focused on the end goal, rather than the road that led you there.

So now you’re lost, and you have no way of repeating the five-mile path you just traversed.

Sound familiar?

For a lot of expansion stage companies, that analogy is akin to the reporting stage of their sales process.

Great reporting should provide a roadmap for success, indicating things like what made a prospect aware of your solution in the first place, the number of voicemails that a salesperson left before actually getting through to a prospect, and what tactics were effective in turning opportunities into actual sales.

Tracking that data (i.e. the path on your deep woods hike) is a critical step in creating reports that ultimately better inform your overall sales process. Reporting should tell you what does – and doesn’t – work, and identify the things you can do to increase your probability for prolonged sales success.

Yet, too many expansion stage sales processes ignore it. Or, that reporting is filled with holes and guesses. And that’s where the breakdowns occur.

The whole point of reporting is to improve a sales process, not to improve how hard your sales force is working.
At the end of the day, your team’s hard work will be obvious; you don’t need data to prove that. Sales reports, however, validate assumptions and give you raw data that can help you make objective improvements to steps within the sales process.

So what should your reports include?

Reporting worthwhile data starts with having a well thought-out checklist that collects relevant information at each stage of the sales process. For example, you should keep tabs on things like:

• Market Awareness: If a suspect or prospect was aware of your solution or understood it before first contact with them, it should be documented. If they’d never heard of your business, it also needs to be checked off and included in a report. Both pieces of information will help you gauge the company’s overall market awareness and inform future marketing decisions.
• Voicemails and Conversations: As soon as a salesperson or lead generation rep initiates contact with a suspect or prospect, they need to document every call, voicemail, and conversation. If that data is included in a final report, it should give you an idea of how many calls it takes to get through to a buyer.

There are several other things you should track, but that should give you an idea. If you have any other suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments section.

To close this post out, I’ll borrow a line from Donna Fenn in an Inc.com article about common sales mistakes: “Every time you make a sale, it’s an opportunity to make another one down the road.” But that comes with a caveat: If your sales process is buttoned up.

The three breakdowns I’ve discussed over the past couple of weeks are not independent maladies. They’re symptoms of a more serious disease. And if you’re not focused on treating it, you aren’t going to have much luck retracing the successful path that led you to where you are now.