Whether you are a sales person, or a teleprospector generating leads, you should look to yourself as the CEO of your assigned accounts. Not in the astute view of a Steve Jobs type, but more so to the general notion that you need to “own” what’s provided to you. In fact, I would argue that because sales requires you to go deep in the trenches to uncover opportunity’s, you actually have a more detailed scope into target accounts than the actual CEO of the company you work for. Take ownership over your piece of the business and make sure you’re managing it correctly on a daily basis. Assuming you work within a CRM, here are 5 reports and list views you should create for yourself that will help ensure you have the proper oversight of your accounts:
Interested/Nurture Account View: Sales reps require access into their short-term and long-term sales pipeline at the drop of a dime, especially if you have weekly meetings to discuss accounts that could be turning over soon. My rule of thumb is – if (re)engagement is less than 2 months, I flag them as interested and anything over gets marked as Nurture. Everyone uses different statuses so try choosing ones that can segment the difference.
Dream Account Target View: Sometimes you may have one list view or many lists that amounts to thousands of contacts and hundreds of companies. To stay strategically focused, I believe it’s a good idea to create a smaller, more targeted list that only includes accounts that are seemingly ideal matches for your product/solution. Even if it’s simply delegated by company size, revenue, employee size, industry, etc. It’s more of a psyche related issue that I think makes people feel like they’re not prospecting blindly.
Activity Report: You need insight into how many emails and phone calls you are making each day and how the numbers for each relate. If you have 3 emails for every call you make and you’re low on your goal, then it’s clear that one solution would be to pick up the phone to even out that ratio. Sales is a numbers game, so it’s important to track the effort you put into uncovering opportunity’s.
Lead Feedback Report: One thing I’ve come to learn is that sales people do not update their CRM with feedback in regards to their Stage 1 scheduled calls or demo’s. It’s crucial to track both positive and negative feedback so you can identify trends and determine how to better qualify potential prospects. Create a simple report for yourself that tracks if the appointment occurred or if it needs to be rescheduled, details from the call and then what the next steps are.
Untouched Accounts View: It’s a good idea to know which accounts you have not yet touched and how many there are. Every person in sales that works the phones should make a personal goal to pull in at least a few new accounts into their call cycle each day. Also, if you can do mass email campaigns then it would be an ideal list to hit with an introductory or referral email since they haven’t been touched.
Oversight and insight into your accounts is critical for your success, so strive to become self sufficient within your CRM and in turn you will make it work for you.
