Let Your Dashboards Drive Your Meetings
Friday, December 9, 2011 at 9:37AM I was talking to a sales manager the other day. She was complaining about not having access to the right information in her CRM. She told me that her team was very good at utilizing the application, so adoption wasn’t an issue. Further, they were a very effective sales team. It’s just that the meaningful data and reports she needed for analysis, and to pass on to her boss, weren’t always accessible.
I asked her about her own use of the CRM. She had some great dashboards and automated reports set up. The problem was that there wasn’t data in the application to populate those reports and dashboards. Then I asked her about her meetings with her team—both individually and as a group. Turns out that these meetings were all verbal. She never actually looked at the dashboards and reports WITH her team members. The result was that the sales reps were left guessing what information was critical to add to their accounts. My advice was to run her meetings FROM the CRM package.
Seems simple enough, but I’m often surprised at the number of clients I have who don’t share their reports or who don’t work collaboratively within their business systems. If, as a manager, you consistently reference dashboards or reports, be sure to share those with your teams and discuss the data that goes into those reports. Doing so will make it clear to your team what metrics you measure and consider important. Further, be sure your team understands the value of those reports and why their critical to the success of the business. With clear communication, you can then hold your team accountable for keeping information updated and current. You can even tie various types of compensation to your reports and dashboards as the system of record. It’s actually pretty simple.