Sales Leadership with Jim Pancero

Could you be getting more value and insights from your sales team’s call reports?

October 15, 2021 Jim Pancero Season 2 Episode 8
Sales Leadership with Jim Pancero
Could you be getting more value and insights from your sales team’s call reports?
Show Notes Transcript

Most sales teams are utilizing some type of weekly call reporting to help your leadership team better understand what your reps have been doing…and plan to do in the future. How are you using your call reporting to help you become a stronger coach and leader of your team? Join me as I share how you can increase the quality of the information you receive from these reports…as well as use them to sell even more!

Hi, Jim Pancero, helping you become a stronger leader of your sales team. As the leader of your sales team, do you use call reports? They're very effective documents of reporting and having you understand behaviors of your sales reps in tracking their progress of what's happening within their territory.

Now, the traditional call reports are basically done at the end of the week. The sales rep keeps notes of what they've done for the week, prepares it in some kind of form either on paper or on computer, and then submit it to you as a manager saying, "This is what happened last week." Now, it's a really great way to summarize the week and for you to understand all that was accomplished and all that was done. The negative though is, it doesn't really reflect the salesperson's goal with that week. It only reflects the results, because it was only a history-focused document.

One of the ways we can make call reports have more impact is to make them from a history-focused document to turn them into a future-focused document. And a future-focused document is a sales rep just tells you what their plans are for the week. It's basically taking the same history call reports you have been using, you're just having your sales rep fill it out at the beginning of the week of what they plan to do for the next week. Who are they going to call on? What do they expect to accomplish? What are they going to try to do?

The best way this is done is then they only submit a copy of this at the beginning of the week showing you what their plans are for the week. Now, the benefit for you as a manager is if you see they're going to do something kind of dumb or they're missing an opportunity, you have a chance to impact it as a coach before they actually do that effort. If it was only a history-focused call report, you're going to be trying to clean up messes after they happen, and it's too late.

The idea is each week they submit for the week where they're going to be for the week, what their plan are, what they're expecting to do. And then at the end of the week, they just submit another copy of that same form saying, "Okay, what were the results?" We want 80% of their effort into planning their week out with these future-focused call reports and only 20% summarizing what happened to bring it up to speed of what actually occurred for the week. What appointments got missed? What appointments got canceled? What appointments took place? What surprises took place? But at least this way you can tell at the beginning of the week what the plans of the sales rep were, to the end results that they generated to see if they actually did this stuff on purpose or if it's really just happening to them.

See, the benefit of a future focus call report is we get to see what their plans are ahead of time and have an impact as a coach before they do it and to show exactly how much of what they did did they do on purpose and how much was basically just luck.

Now there's nothing wrong with selling based on luck, but it's sure not something we want to have a sales team planning as their major go-to solution. We need our sales reps thinking and planning more moves ahead. We need them planning out their week and being better organized. Look how many sales reps come in Monday morning and check their voicemails and check their emails. And that defines what they do for the week. They're completely reactive in how they're dealing in their territory.

We need people to be more proactive. One of the ways to do that is they have to tell you at the beginning of the week what their plans are and who they're going to be calling on so you can both have an impact as a coach and you can also understand that when you see the results they did accomplish at the end of the week, if they actually did it on purpose or if it really just happened to them.

What are you doing to get better insights at where your team is going? This is not a lot big work effort to just reverse these call reports from being history only to being a combination of a future-focused plus a summary, but it can give you much better control and much better impact as a coach and leader of your team.

I would love to know what you're doing with call reports and how they're working for you. Love to answer any questions. Thanks for checking out my podcast. I'm posting two new podcasts each week, all aimed at helping you and your team increase your selling competitive advantage.