Teamwork makes dreams work, but only when you know that all the team’s efforts are aligned and are directed towards achieving a common goal.
You can easily turn a Gmail inbox into a simple CRM, but it can’t emulate all the features a real CRM system offers. Without a CRM system in place, it’s incredibly difficult to find out where your team members are at that moment and what each of them is doing.
Sales team activity report in a CRM is the best way to make sure you can keep tabs on employees and regularly assess their performance. Don’t let a single email sent or received, note made, or demo hosted fall through the cracks.
In this article, we look at what a sales team activity report is, why your business needs to create one, and how to create an insightful, actionable sales activity report in a CRM.
What is a sales activity report?
A sales team activity report is a control and audit tool that allows managers to keep track of the activities such as emails, email campaigns, demos, on-site meetings, and calls, completed by the sales team at a given period of time. Sales leaders use activity reports to monitor team productivity, build forecasts, and motivate the team.
Why bother with sales activity reports?
Just like any other type of report, user activity reports help to structure business workflows, assess performance, and track progress in relation to set goals. However, there are a couple of report-specific benefits that are intrinsic to the user activity report. Here’s why you need to create user activity reports...
To make sure your team is productive
Back in 2020, the coronavirus pandemic sent the business world remote. A year and a half later, working from your living room in your pyjamas became the new, convenient normal. Even though global lockdowns are coming to an end, the WFH format is here to stay and bring some changes to the managerial process.
A user activity report is a great way for managers to keep an eye on their subordinates and make sure they’re doing their job, instead of binging Netflix during working hours - all without inducing the ‘Big Brother is watching you’ effect.
To keep the sales manager in control
Remote teams' work is based primarily on independence, lack of bureaucracy and mutual trust between the company's C-Suite and other employees. However, you need to be careful not to tip the balance towards chaos. There still needs to be a certain degree of control on the managers’ side.
Moreover, user activity reports reflect on the tasks team members carry out throughout the reported period. A clear understanding of what each team member is busy with at the moment provides managers with an ability to better coordinate workflows within the team and assign tasks more efficiently.
Sales pipeline metrics every C-level need to track
To track progress and analyse employees’ performance
Not only does the user activity report allow managers to see what their team members are doing but it also helps to understand how good they are at doing it. Thanks to the continuity of user activity reporting, managers can measure their team’s productivity. These reports help them compare their team and individual employees’ performance against goals and performance in the previous periods.
To coach employees
An activity report gives the sales manager an understanding of the bottlenecks and weak points in the process, team, or individual sales rep activities.
Example. If a sales rep sent 2000 emails, yet none of them achieved the goal of adding a lead to the sales pipeline, the sales manager needs to revise the content sent to prospects. Activity reports also help managers understand what hinders a sales team and identify the areas that require improvement.
To understand the efficiency of team members’ activities
Employees can perform several activities, but not all of them are equally efficient. A user activity report highlights how different activities impact the sales outcomes and contribute towards achieving business goals. This helps managers to identify both the strong and weak spots of their business strategy and focus on the processes that generate the best results.
To measure the level of CRM adoption
The activity report shows how confident and consistent your teams are with using the CRM solution. Gaps in data can be a sign of low CRM adoption. You might need more training into how they use and understand the system. They might need to head over to the NetHunt blog and read all the CRM-related bits and bobs over there to know just how easy it is.
To calculate commission rates for employees
If your employee remuneration model involves financial motivators such as bonuses, you need to make sure that you have sufficient data to base your calculations against. A user activity report allows managers to see whether or not their employees meet the quotas and qualify for a bonus in any given period of time.
How to build an insightful sales activity report
The Rules
- Your reports must be analytical. It’s not enough to simply collect loads of data and call it a day. You need to process it, spot patterns, and identify trends.
- Your reports must be consistent. You need to produce reports every week, month, or quarter to be able to see changes that occur within your teams.
- Your reports must be standardised. You can’t compare elephants with berries, can you? You need to report on a set of metrics over a set period of time.
- Your reports must be visualised and well-communicated. You need to be able to convey findings to stakeholders in the most straightforward, easy-to-understand way.
Metrics to track in a sales team activity report
The format of a user activity report isn’t set in stone. Every company is entitled to define its own array of metrics relevant to specific business workflows and focus on them. Here are some of the most common metrics to include in your user activity report...
Email campaigns sent
The number of email campaigns each of your employees sends reflects how active they are with email outreach.
Emails sent / emails received
These two metrics don’t provide much insight on their own, so they should only be looked into in tandem. The number of emails sent and received reflects on the quality of communication with prospects/ leads/ customers. If these two numbers are roughly the same, you can assume that email outreach gets opened and spurs conversations.
Beware. This metric doesn’t say anything about the connotation of those conversations - they can be both positive and negative. To understand the impact these emails have on your sales process, you need to pair it with the next metric.
Calendar events, calls, and demos
Calls and demos booked by employees in the corporate calendar are examples of conversions; indicative of meaningful, positive conversations between sales reps and prospects. These metrics also indicate that you target the proper audience and hit their pain points as the deals move to the next stage of the sales funnel.
CRM notes
Calls and demos booked by employees in the corporate calendar are examples of conversions; indicative of meaningful, positive conversations between sales reps and prospects. These metrics also indicate that you target the proper audience and hit their pain points as the deals move to the next stage of the sales funnel.
George Rowlands
Things to consider when building a sales activity report
Make comparisons, not assumptions
To make data-driven conclusions, you need to contextualise your report. This means identifying changes between your team’s current activity and their activity in a previous period. The easiest way to do that is to present the percentage difference between two different periods. Here’s a NetHunt CRM activity comparison report...
Seasons change
During the high season, you can expect results to be significantly better than during the drought, and you need to take that into account.
Example. If you compare your August and May sales team activity reports, you’re likely to see that in August the sales rep sent way fewer emails than they did in May. Yet it doesn’t necessarily mean that they just wasted their time. August is often a dead season for many B2B businesses, so it could be that instead of reaching out to prospects via email, the sales rep focused on backstage activities such as updating content for cold outreach or follow-up email templates.
Segmentation by team and by person
You need to be able to see both your teams’ collective performance and performance breakdown by the individual. It shows the contribution of every team member to team quotas and can also serve as a basis for a team leaderboard. Moreover, it also helps to determine the number of bonuses each team member should receive based on their activity.
How to build a team activity report in NetHunt CRM
The best way to ensure you consistently produce high-quality user activity reports is to delegate the process to your CRM system. Here’s how you can create an insightful user activity report in NetHunt CRM.
1. Go to the Reports section on the left sidebar and create your first report...
2. Choose a folder you want to draw the stats from and select the sales team members you wish to include in the report (certain sales reps or all of them)...
3. Select the time period you want to compare the activity with (e.g. previous week or this week)...
4. Access the report alongside a comparison of the two periods.
You can also check out the average performance of your team and see the total amount of activities.
Reporting is easy when you have a reliable tool to do the hard work for you. With NetHunt CRM, you can leverage all the benefits of sales team activity reporting without having to go through the difficulties of creating a report yourself.
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