Sales

What Should the Outbound Manager Share with the CEO?

February 17, 2011

Sample Weekly and Quarterly Report to the CEO and Executive Team

Your executive team needs to be made aware of your program’s progress. Why? Because they are funding it, and they need to make sure that you and your team are committed to the initiative and that it is successful. The report also will generate ideas that perhaps you overlooked and help you identify areas where you should be seeking out advice from your managers. Each week after your retrospective, send a report to your CEO/executive team.

Here is a sample report, which consists of the overall stats, what’s working well, what’s not working well, and the resolutions.

Calls (goal 250): Rep A – 318, Rep B – 336

Conversations (goal 50): Rep A – 61, Rep B – 45

Opportunities (goal 5): Rep A – 3, Rep B – 4 (Name the companies converted)

What’s Working Well:

  • Output and energy/enthusiasm from the business development reps remains high.
  • The managers continue to provide the team with requested data and they are very helpful during the week answering questions.
  • Managers are putting more resources toward the initiative starting next week to indentify the best market/necessary content for the business development reps to target and ultimately start generating more opportunities.
  • Rep B adapted well to the SEO/SEM segment and generated a promising opportunity in his second day of calling into the new list.
  • The leads on the current list are much easier to get in touch with – they are internal and answer their phones more than the last round of leads.
  • Rep A and Rep B have 12 scheduled calls for next week with interested prospects who couldn’t connect until after the holiday.

Impediments and Resolutions:

  • Opportunities remain low despite the high level of calls/conversations, and Rep A and Rep B are hearing about the same competitor over and over again (the market is saturated with companies using COMPETITOR’S NAME).
    • Our management team connected to discuss adding additional resources to the initiative. Essentially the new plan is to combine the market research project with the lead qualification effort, as the two are intrinsically linked.
  • Many of the leads that Rep A has connected with have requested to speak after the holiday – it is the end of the quarter, and people are also taking time off for vacation. In the follow-up e-mails that Rep A has sent out, she has received a lot of out-of-office responses.
    • Rep A and Rep B will need to continue to be aggressive with getting in touch with the appropriate people. With the 12 calls scheduled for next week, we will likely see a spike in opportunities created.

At the end of the quarter, look back at the previous three months and create a similar analysis as your weekly report for your CEO/executive team. Include additional data pertaining to the impact of the outbound prospecting team’s impact on the sale organization as a whole:

  • How many opportunities were created?
  • How many opportunities were rejected by the sales reps?
  • How many opportunities closed?
  • What revenues were generated from the opportunities that were passed along?

As the manager, you may be asked to present this data at a company presentation; therefore, your data, analysis, hypotheses, and your resolutions for the upcoming quarter should be crystal clear.

Next week, I’ll share a checklist to help guide business development reps to success.

Photo by: Mack Male