Analyzing customer complaints in crucial for customer service & sales teams. It helps them increase customer loyalty and fix quality issues. To that end, here’s a mockup:
Note: Drill down reports are not shown, details are hidden to maintain confidentiality and numbers are made up.
Business Goal:
Need a daily report delivered in sales team’s inbox that shows Sales Team’s Bookings vs Quota for current & next month.
Brief Description:
Ability to see Bookings vs Quota in near real-time is a key to effectively manage performance for any sales team. Before the project, analyst(s) would have to manually put together this report and since the report took more than a day to put together they couldn’t afford to run it daily and so they delivered this report bi-weekly/monthly basis to the sales team. After the project, the process was automated and the sales team received an email with a report on a daily basis and this helped them see Bookings vs Quota in near real-time. As a famous saying goes “if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it” (by Peter Drucker) – in this case, the report helped them measure their actual numbers against their goals and helping them improve their sales numbers which directly hits their top-line!
Tools used: SharePoint report subscription, SQL server analysis services, SQL Server Integration services, SQL server reporting services & Excel.
Mockup:
Note: Drill down reports are not shown and the numbers are made up.
Summary:
In this post, we will discuss about a common metric used by Sales & Marketing teams called “leads”.
Description:
In simple terms,
Leads = number of individuals (or companies) that have expressed an interest in your goods or services.
why do we want to measure this?
For a business to grow, it’s important that the sales & marketing department work to make sure that there is a growing interest in company’s goods or services. It’s important to track this metric to make sure that it’s a positive upward trend!
Word of caution: It’s important to also note that this metric on its own can be misleading. It might be a good idea to also track “conversion ratios” (converting leads or potential customers into actual customers) to make sure that high-quality leads are being generated.
where can you get this data?
Depending on the channel that you use to capture potential customer’s information & the technology maturity of the company, it varies. I’ve seen CRM systems used to report “leads” data and I’ve also seen manual excel files that are used to generate leads report.
Are there any sub-categories?
Yes, it’s usually subdivided into 1) Marketing Qualified Leads and 2) Sales Marketing Leads.
usually, Marketing Qualified lead (MQL) is someone who has shown interest in your product or service but you don’t know if they fulfill your qualifications to buy your products or services. out of all MQL’s, those leads that qualify your criteria and are identified are someone who is ready to buy your products or services becomes your Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) and sales department get’s ready to engage with these leads to make them an actual customer.
Conclusion:
In this post, we saw a high level overview of a business metric used in marketing and sales called “leads”. As mentioned earlier, don’t report on just “leads” – it can be misleading for marketing & sales executives since upward trend in number of leads doesn’t necessarily result in increased sales unless the quality of new leads is same or better. Marketing and sales executives would really appreciate any context (example: conversions) that you can provide to their “leads” report. I hope that helps!