Sales reports and forecasts are vital to sales management. Without them, management cannot be effective, and sales targets cannot be accurately forecast or set.

Here are 4 basic steps to create effective and accurate reports:

1. Data must be accurate

A sales report or forecast is only going to be as accurate and reliable as the data which is used to create it. That means that anyone entering sales data­­ – sales reps, inside reps, sales assistants or any other users – ­­must enter accurate data. This includes revenue figures, time frames, quantities, and any other data that would be pertinent to a report or forecast for your company.

Many companies are quite strict about accurate data entry and enforce penalties for their neglect. There is a very good reason for this: the company’s projected future is at stake. Research companies like McKinsey have demonstrated that the highest performing sales organizations are rigorous with their sales process and capturing accurate data.

2. Data must be accessible

Once accurate sales data has been entered, it must be easily accessible for the purpose of creating a report or forecast. In worst cases, this would mean that someone putting together the report can manually access it and retrieve it. Best case (and today probably the only case, if a company is going to operate at the speed of success) is that the report or forecast creation tool can instantly access data.

3. Rapid Report and Forecast Creation

It is highly advisable that sales management always be furnished with tools that empower the rapid creation of reports and forecasts. Anything less brings the risk of being inaccurate as well as taking too much time.

4. The Right CRM Solution

Today’s leading-­edge CRM solution will allow for data input to be as accurate as possible, as well as providing reporting and forecasting solutions that are visual, intuitive, and fast.

At Pipeliner, we provide the most robust reporting engine of any CRM on the market. With our reporting capabilities, you can

• Instantly generate dynamic reports from almost any view in Pipeliner
• Power panel allows reporting on multiple data sets
• Save and/or share profile reports
• Plus there is dedicated reports section!

Our Reports Section Includes:

• Standard Reports
• Advanced Reports
• Dashboards
• Forecast Reports

Plus we have made it really convenient and easy:

• Create, Copy & Share Reports
• Reports are instantly & dynamically updated
• Easily export reports
• Whatever you need to report on, you can!

CRM Functionality

In our last article in this series, we discussed the most important factor when deciding on a CRM solution: the technology being used. Now, let’s take up the next in importance, which is functionality.

CRM Features

Just as a note, there is no standard set of terminology for CRM features, like for example you find in the auto industry. When you’re shopping for an SUV, a sunroof is a sunroof and will be referred to that way by every manufacturer. With CRM, there are a few features that have the same names from developer to developer, but with others, features are given “unique” names and it gets more confusing. It’s made even more confusing with new vendors coming on the market and renaming everything. Comparing features side-by-side becomes increasingly difficult.

That said, there are some core features that are necessary. But then it comes down to individual evaluation—not every feature is important. Let’s take a look at another commonly used application, Microsoft Excel. Excel has dozens of features—but how many of them actually get used? It is estimated that most Excel users (not power users) commonly use between 5 percent on the low end, and 30 percent on the high end, of available features.

Critical CRM Features For Your Company

It comes down to this: what are the core CRM features that are critical to your company, that fall under the category of vital functionality? We can come back to “the right tool for the right job” as discussed in previous articles. You could cut down a tree with an ax, but a chainsaw will be far more efficient, and much faster.

To answer that question, you need to look to the specifics of your own processes. If you aren’t familiar with those—or worse, if you haven’t fully worked them out—you’re really flying blind. The importance of CRM features will be based on the various parts of your processes.

Pipeliner is the only CRM solution that allows you to totally visualize multiple processes in multiple ways. We allow you not only to create different processes for, let’s say, different divisions of the company or different product lines, but there are several different views of these processes. Process steps can be divided into mandatory activities for completion of steps. You can examine and analyze lost and past deals, within processes, with the Archive feature. You can even map relationships within prospect companies with our Org Chart and Buying Center.

To compliment our visualization, our extremely flexible reporting system allows you to create management reports easily and on the fly.

Workflow

As time goes on, processes become increasingly automated. Any CRM application you consider should be able to take into account the many applications and data flows you have within your company.

In line with this, at Pipeliner we have created what we call the Automation Hub. The Automation Hub allows you to link Pipeliner with other applications, so that the data flow through various processes is seamless.

Manageability

Another crucial aspect of functionality is the manageability of the system.

With traditional CRM systems, at least one CRM administrator or outside expert is required for CRM implementation and management. With larger companies that have thousands of employees, more than one full-time administrator can be required. Training of an administrator is costly and can take months. Training of users can take weeks or months as well.

Pipeliner makes it possible for a user or manager to learn the system in 5 hours, as compared with weeks or months of other CRM applications. This means you’re no longer depending on full-time CRM experts and administrators—anyone can learn it. You can bring someone new in, and in 2 days they know what to do and can be independent. There is no longer the worry that you’ll lose a highly trained CRM administrator who is demanding a higher salary or will leave you in a lurch because anyone can learn it. Users, managers or administrators can even learn the system online through our learning system.

How much money can be saved? For a larger company, it could be well over $600,000 in 3 years. The total cost of ownership for an administrator can be well over $100,000 per year. If you need two of them, that’s over $200,000. In 3 years, that’s $600,000. I say “well over” because there are additional expenses such as insurance, healthcare, workspace including computers, and 401K.

I believe that the evolution of the Cloud had a similar intention. In the old days before the Cloud, a system administrator ran a company’s computers, and executives never knew quite what the sysadmin was doing. An executive could walk into the sys admin’s office, look at their screen, and see nothing but a bunch of incomprehensible command lines. System administrators could, and usually did, constantly demand the latest (and most expensive) hardware. “We need a faster server! We need more storage! We need to upgrade the routers, and need faster ethernet!” You basically had to trust what they were saying, as they practically held your computer system for ransom.

But today data centers, server rooms, cooling systems, failover systems, backup systems—all these, on a local level, are things of the past. Now you can just pay a monthly bill to a Cloud service (Amazon Web Services, in our case) and everything is taken care of. It’s very similar to the ease and convenience we have created for Pipeliner CRM.

Crucial Questions

As you can see, functionality has a significant impact on your CRM solution decision. Here are some important questions you should ask any vendor of any CRM solution you are considering:

1. Can you easily compare your company’s processes with your potential CRM solution features, and see a fit? In other words, will the potential CRM application directly address and run your company’s specific processes?
2. Will your potential CRM solution show your processes visually?
3. Can you run multiple processes in your potential CRM?
4. Within your potential CRM application, can you break down your processes into specific activities that need to be accomplished for a particular process step to be considered done?
5. How easy and flexible is your potential CRM’s reporting system?
6. Does your potential CRM application have the capacity to integrate with other applications to create seamless data flows through various applications?
7. Can your potential CRM system be administered by anyone, with brief training?
8. Can users be easily trained on the system (for example in hours or days instead of weeks or months)?

Make sure you take all aspects of functionality into account as part of your CRM decision-making process.

We’ll be taking up the remaining important criteria as we move through this series of articles. Stay with us!

There is a beautiful classical piece of music—Moldau by Czech composer Bedrich Smetana—which describes a spring that begins in the mountains, becomes a brook, a stream, a creek, a river and then reaches the ocean.

In the business world, we want a perfect, precise flow of data. It begins with one data point, and moving forward gathers to it more and more data and specifications. In the end, we only want to know what kind of impact this data has.

How we arrive at such a perfect data flow has everything to do with processes and integration. In the digital world, everything is geared around processes. Because we are interconnected, processes are correlated very strongly with integrations—primarily because there is no longer one single process for any company. For example, with something so seemingly simple as a bank transaction, there are multiple processes, often involving multiple applications: verifying your account, recording the transaction’s destination, verifying the destination account, confirming that your account has enough funds to make the transaction, and then, finally, sending the money.

Simplicity

For automation, it should all begin with relatively simple processes. We all want to have Superman processes (you might remember putting on the costume and attempting to fly off the garage roof), but experience teaches us very quickly that we can’t gain such things overnight. An over-ambitious view might be of someone sitting alone in an office, and the prospect that calls in is automatically routed to the support center, the support request is automatically routed to support personnel, a support person automatically routes the ticket to a salesperson to upsell, an invoice is automatically generated for the additional product or service…this can definitely go to the extreme.

It makes no sense to begin with super-complex processes. Attempts to do so often cause projects to go astray or wind up nowhere. You should begin somewhere simple that yet has an immediate impact, one that users can feel in a positive way.

An Amazon Example

Of course, one person who was for years judged as unrealistic and who built a company that operated deep in the red for many years ended up creating a nearly perfect series of processes and today is the richest man in the world: Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon. In my opinion, he is a process genius.

Jeff Bezos’ amazing operation affects my household each and every day. I have an automatic order for fresh food, including 4 gallons of milk and 10 bottles of Pellegrino mineral water per week. It just automatically shows up at my door. If we had to go to the store and carry those every single week, that’s about 30 – 40 pounds per trip, about 50 trips and a couple of hundred pounds per year. When you consider that we can automatically order these items, this boils down to useless activity. There are many more important things we could be doing.

The Amazon processes work extremely well, and they’re part of a process engine. We have the “master of processes” before us, and Mr. Bezos, in creating his world empire, is eliminating one business after another. I’m not saying such creation is good or bad…but you have to admit, he has done an incredible job.

Process Comes First

What do processes and integration have to do with us—the little mice up against the elephant?

First, you must define a sales process, for the simple reason that you cannot automate a process that you haven’t defined. Our product, Pipeliner CRM, makes it possible to create more than one sales process because many companies today have several: for example a pre-sales process, a post-sales process, and a customer success process. We call these processes “pipelines.” Seeing this multi-process trend taking shape in the business world, we created multi-pipeline functionality several years ago, and the whole CRM industry has followed us.

I was one of the first to point out that the envisioning of a sales process as a “sales funnel” doesn’t work because you’re visualizing something that is gravity-oriented instead of process oriented. Leads don’t go in at the top with resulting closed deals “falling out” the bottom. Leads are guided along and become opportunities, which then go through the process, stage by stage, and become closed deals. Our Pipeliner View provides such a process visualization.

Again, you must fully define these processes before you automate them.

Integration

It might be important, before automation takes place, that you perform some kind of integration. You might have a system in place that enriches data (such as we discussed in our last article) that you want to integrate into your CRM. A prospect signs up for a trial, and at that moment you want to enrich the data. Who is this person? What’s their position in their company? What else might be known about them? Once the data is enriched, the person becomes an actual lead. They then become qualified, become an opportunity, and move to the next stage.

Process and integration go together. In actuality, you’re flowing data through the process. Automation is just figuring out at which point data needs to be a) enriched, b) corrected, or c) should generate some task or activity.

What to Automate?

The first automated activity might be to at least initially qualify the prospect—can they buy? Do they have a valid credit card? There might even be more involved ways to qualify a B2B lead that can be automated, such as a process that looks up a prospect company’s Dun and Bradstreet rating. So it can be seen that automation in a CRM system, especially for salespeople, is definitely more focused in the leads section of the sales process.

Then it becomes a question of figuring out which steps or stages of the process that can be automated.

The degree of automation might be dependent on the product or service that you are selling. There are products for which it would be very difficult to fully automate a sales process—for example, if you are selling Rolls-Royce turbine engines to different aircraft manufacturers. There are a number of stages in such a sales process that you couldn’t automate because there is more than one team member on the buyer’s side that must sign off on the purchase—there is enough interaction that automation is near-impossible. Perhaps there are specs and other things that could be automated, but automating the process itself is unrealistic.

Transactional Sales

In most B2C settings you can totally automate the sales process. The user clicks on something, or performs some action, and is automatically routed into the next stage. This leads to a bit of a law about processes: the more granularly you have defined your processes, the more you can automate. The more you automate, the faster and more efficiently you’ll be able to scale.

It does make much more sense to automate B2C sales. When you’re selling consumer products and goods such as hair-care and foods, as with Amazon, the process can be totally automated, for no human action is required.

Automating CRM

Automating CRM, as with the automation of processes, comes back to the type of transaction. In the case of Pipeliner, for example, our product is geared to more complex B2B sales, and it doesn’t make sense to fully automate CRM. There are many processes underneath the primary process, though, that we can automate—for example, lead tracking, trial setup, demonstration, imparting of knowledge or enriching the experience. But though the actual sales process, in which the salesperson must interact with numerous different people at the buyer end, automation would be more inhibitive than helpful.

What is needed in a CRM in such situations is that information about the opportunity or deal in progress is immediately available. Managers, owners, salespeople and other team members should have fast and accurate access to data, as they do in Pipeliner.

The enormous benefit of the digital era is that all information can be digitalized—you can follow up any aspect of a sale and find out all about it. This means conversations, notes, documents, interactions, meetings, demonstrations, or any other components. These can all be optimized, and in some cases automated—for example, in some cases information could be automatically obtained.

Flow and Coordination of Data

With the number of tools out there and the amount of data that must flow from one tool to another, integration becomes increasingly important.

In the end, it should all be invisible, and data should just flow from one point to the next—just like the spring to stream to river to ocean in Smetana’s beautiful composition.