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Businesses typically use sales call reports to track their sales team activity, and measure how successful the sales team is at moving prospects through the funnel. While this is not a bad thing per se, it’s just a fraction of all the benefits sales call reporting can bring to your organization.
For example, a good sales call report can help you identify competition and product trends, provide you with a better understanding of your users’ experience, and much more.
So, how can you transform your sales call reports from simple “call summaries” to action-packed insight reports? It all starts with the way you track and record the information on your calls.
And that’s where this guide comes in.
In this article, we will explain what should be included in a sales call report, how to write a great one, share some valuable reporting tips, and lastly, several ready-to-download templates that will help streamline your reporting process immediately.
Sales call reporting refers to the practice of gathering and documenting information about your lead and their needs during or after a sales call. This report summarizes the critical points you talked about with your prospect and enables you to determine whether the lead is cold or warm and how to proceed with them.
Sales call reporting should be an optimized process that doesn’t require sales reps to spend hours completing the report. On the other hand, it should contain all relevant information that you may need for future interaction with the prospect.
Related: 11 Successful Plays for Running Great Sales Calls
Writing sales call reports can drive business growth in multiple ways.
Every salesperson call report can help you improve your future sales training sessions in two ways.
First, you can extract particularly successful tactics that helped move the prospect down the sales pipeline and use them as examples for future trainees. Second, you can also use examples of what didn’t work to show your future sales reps what they should avoid when talking to leads.
Analyzing a sales rep call report can help you identify gaps and mistakes in messaging and workflow, so you can fine-tune it for future use.
If the sales calls are too long and don’t provide satisfactory results, the messaging may not be clear or compelling enough. Or, your sales reps may need more material to successfully answer all prospect questions. Having insight into the sales call flow will help you pinpoint exactly what you can improve.
Regular analysis of your team’s sales call reports can help you learn if any of your sales reps needs additional training or help to make their efforts more effective.
If you discover their weak points timely, you can address the issue before they lose too many prospects or become demotivated.
By tracking and analyzing your reps’ sales call reports, you will be able to notice repeating patterns and trends that can be useful for every department: sales, marketing, product development, etc.
Prospects may often talk about more than just your product or service, so they may mention your competitors, too: what they like or dislike about them. That can help you improve your product and offer your customers exactly what they need.
Sales call reporting can help you hold your sales team accountable in terms of the number and usefulness of the calls they make.
When your team knows you’ll be analyzing their sales call reports, they may be even more motivated to give their best in every call, especially if you incentivize them in multiple ways (bonuses and awards).
Sales call reports don’t need to be 10-page documents with every little detail of the call written down. The two main goals you want to achieve in sales call reporting is making them concrete and actionable. That means you don’t spend time writing down some high-level ideas you can’t really apply, but specific, practical takeaways you can implement in your strategy.
Make sure you write down all relevant information about the contact. You probably talk to many people during the day, so important details might get lost if you don’t document them.
Contact information should include the prospect’s name, company, and position within the company, as well as their phone number, if another person needs to take over and follow up.
You can also include other notes that can be relevant to that specific call. For example, if the person you talked to might receive a promotion soon and have a say in decision making.
Prep notes give you an insight into how your sales reps prepare for sales calls so you can provide them with additional advice if necessary.
Pre-call research on your prospect is essential for a successful call, so a sales call report should include a call outline–a plan–which helps the sales rep determine if they’re on the right track. Previous research about the potential client will help them build rapport and warm up their leads. Also, it’s necessary to state a type of call: discovery call, cold call, etc, and it’s goal, for example, to schedule another meeting with the prospect.
A call report should include technical details, such as time and date, call duration. These details can help in the analysis because they allow you to identify the best time to make calls to your prospects.
Call duration is a good indicator of your sales rep’s performance, especially if their calls tend to be long, but unproductive.
A call summary should include the key takeaways from the call. It doesn’t need to be a five-page document, but a few short paragraphs.
The key is to include all relevant information about how the call went, the main questions the prospect asked, and the problems they were looking to solve. Also, sales reps might want to write down the sales techniques that turned out to be the most effective during the call.
Finally, the report should include a note on whether the call goal was accomplished and what the primary result is. For example, the sales rep managed to close the deal.
Recording sales calls can be a great addition to a call summary, but only if the prospect agrees to be recorded.
A good sales call report should include an analysis of different call aspects that determine what steps you should take next.
For example, you can write down the following information:
The last part of the sales call report should include follow-up materials necessary for any next step. These materials can be simple notes on what the sales rep wants to talk about on the next call, or any content they’d like to send the prospect.
The material your salesperson prepares to follow up with can tell you a lot about how well they understood the potential customer and the sales process as a whole.
You can write a great sales call report by including the information we mentioned in the previous section. One page is usually enough, as this report doesn’t require introductions or executive summaries that other types of report usually include.
You may want to follow these steps when writing a sales call report.
Sales happen every day, and if you have an active sales team, they’re busy setting up appointments, making calls, creating and nurturing deals, and closing them to generate new revenue. It’s your job to monitor their performance and work with your team to improve it. To do that, you need up-to-the-minute information at your fingertips, including:
Now you can benefit from the experience of our sales experts, who have put together a great Databox template showing all the most important KPIs for your sales team’s performance. It’s simple to implement and start using as a standalone dashboard or in sales reports, and best of all, it’s free!
You can easily set it up in just a few clicks – no coding required.
To set up this Sales Manager KPIs Dashboard, follow these 3 simple steps:
Step 1: Get the template
Step 2: Connect your HubSpot account with Databox.
Step 3: Watch your dashboard populate in seconds.
Sales call reporting is a way to keep your sales pipeline updated and effective at all times. Let’s take a look at some of the best practices when it comes to creating sales call reports.
Sales tools and software like Salesforce or HubSpot CRM offer various automation options so you can save time and effort when creating sales call reports. Some software have the option of transcribing the call, so you can create call reports faster.
Related: 14 Ways to Leverage Sales Automation Tools to Close Deals Faster
Instead of waiting for your sales manager to ask for the report, create one right after your call. That way, you’ll be able to pick up all the details while they’re still fresh in your mind. Creating the report right away matters even more if you’re conducting several sales calls per day, and different conversations may get mixed up.
Reports aren’t only useful for the sales manager to track the reps’ performance, but also for the reps to recall the important information before they follow up with the prospect. Reviewing your summary and additional notes will help you remember where the prospect was in your funnel and prepare better for your next conversation.
A good sales call report allows you to understand the main takeaways and key insights at a glance. It shouldn’t be complicated and contain too many irrelevant details, especially if you’re a beginner.
The role of sales call reports is versatile, so one of the purposes it can serve is updating and improving your sales materials. Each call can be a helpful source of new information about your potential customers, competitors, and industry in general, which you can use for future reference.
You can only make the most out of your sales call reports if you address them with your team. Use weekly or monthly reporting meetings to go over the latest reports and identify their strong points and potential areas of improvement. It’s also a good idea to use these meetings to explain to your team why you want them to create these reports, so they don’t think it’s for control purposes only.
Finally, create a template that can be used across your sales team. This will save time both for those who write the report, and for those who read it. Moreover, a template will help you set up a standardized process for reporting, which comes in handy when one sales rep needs to cover for another.
Related: Sales Report Templates For Daily, Weekly Monthly, Quarterly and Yearly Statements (Sourced from 40+ Sales Pros)
Think a template would be helpful to track and report on sales calls more accurately and easily? Databox offers several sales dashboards for you to choose from.
In our HubSpot (Sales Activity) dashboard, you can monitor every stage of your sales funnel and track all important metrics in one place. With this instant snapshot of your sales reps’ activities and their goals, you can easily identify opportunities and leaks and improve overall performance.
By downloading this dashboard, you get to answer questions such as:
Available metrics:
With this simple HubSpot CRM (Sales Team Overview) dashboard, you can easily track your team’s productivity and performance. Use this dashboard to monitor close deals and closed won amount, see if your sales reps are meeting their targets and more.
If you need a separate dashboard for each of your sales representatives, our HubSpot CRM (Sales Rep Drilldown) dashboard is the right option for you.
This free template will provide you with a better insight into individual sales reps’ performance and progress toward goals.
With this comprehensive dashboard, you can monitor the responsiveness of your sales team to incoming calls. The CallRail Overview dashboard allows you to track where your calls come from, how many of them were received by your team, and how many of them your sales reps missed calls within a specific time range.
This dashboard answers your questions, such as:
A lot of information may get misplaced in your sales team’s fast-paced environment, where dozens of calls are made daily and there’s too much information to remember.
Without tracking and reporting on your sales calls, you’re wasting precious data that can help you improve more than your future sales meetings: your marketing efforts, customer support, and overall, business success.
It’s time you found out how fast and easy sales calls reporting can be–with Databox.
With our templates and automated dashboards, you can get started in seconds. All you need to do is connect your data and all your metrics will populate the dashboard automatically.
In our gallery, you’ll find several hundreds of marketing, sales, customer support, e-commerce, and other templates with the most relevant metrics and KPIs, that you can easily customize and adapt to your needs.
Start exploring our dashboard integrations, templates, and reporting options today. Sign up for a free trial and learn about all the amazing features Databox offers.
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Stefana Zarić is a freelance writer & content marketer. Other than writing for SaaS and fintech clients, she educates future writers who want to build a career in marketing. When not working, Stefana loves to read books, play with her kid, travel, and dance.
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