Among the many things that terrific sales managers do, is embracing the great value of detailed sales reports.

Reports with a lot of insightful “meat” in them can help sales representatives understand more clearly how your target market can make the best of your products/service. Robust sales reports also can help reps create a detailed plan for each of their prospects. After all, prospects buy your products/services to solve problems and a good plan as to how your offerings can do that is just one reason why potential clients even reach out to sales representatives at all.

The more fluent they are in the language of sales reports, the more successful your reps will be.

As detailed and chock full of great information a sales report can be, if your sales pros can’t read and analyze its data they’re at a great disadvantage. Instead, sales reps who can easily read and decipher sales data will intimately understand their prospects’ true needs. Which ultimately will lead in more sales.

Yet sales reports are only good if sales pros use them.

We know this intuitively, of course, yet 46% of salespeople still don’t use any type of sales technology that tracks lead and customer data. Without reliable data, sales managers simply can’t effectively analyze either team performance or areas that could use improvement.

MagHub’s 5 essential sales reports and how publishers can use them.

MagHub, a cloud-based software ERP designed specifically for publishers, provides several sales reports that can help publishers’ ad and subscription sales representatives achieve and even exceed their goals.

Sales Rep Goal Metrics

Sales analysis reports found in our sales management module show how well your sales pros are doing compared to their service- and even per-issue goals per month. What’s more, you and your reps can breakdown their goals right down to the issue level or you can decide to look at an aggregate service goals report at the category level. (Note: you will have to set rep goals in order to use this report.)

Forecast Detail Report

Our forecast detail report shows sales and partnership proposals, opportunities and even pending line items. This lets you see confidence levels, activities and opportunities your sales team members have tied to their activities. Most importantly, this report helps you track your lead/sales pipeline, helping you make sure all of your sales people are working on their activities.

Consolidated Sales Report

Need to look at all of your line items sales? This report has you covered. You can create a report that includes financial data in the report’s summary. After all, revenue and the costs associated with earning that revenue has a huge impact on the financial health of your publishing enterprise.

In addition, you can find all the products your company has purchased over a range of time that you specify.

Campaign Activity Report

Sales rarely happen without marketing efforts, and the campaign activity report shows how any mail merge and/or drip campaigns have been performing based on sales campaigns (the more successful the marketing campaigns, the more sales result). What’s more, these reports show how current campaigns are doing compared to past campaigns.

This report should be used when you want to track how many contacts have opened the emails and how many clicked on the links to your offers.  You’re also able to see how many sales activities your representatives are recording to the contacts.

Lead Status Report

How are those leads doing? This report will tell you as it shows you your leads as well as their status. One feature of this report that we admit we truly find valuable: you can set up lead statuses with different durations so that you know that your sales reps are keeping in contact with their leads within a proper interval. (Or not!)

Then, once a lead makes a purchase, their status is marked as Sold! Which means the contact is no longer considered an active lead (and your sales and marketing team members can move into retention mode with this now-client).

Focus on the ad sales reports that matter.

Sales managers tend to have to-do lists miles long. The MagHub reports mentioned above are the ones that truly matter.

Learn more about how the MagHub ERP/CRM can help you and your sales team easily understand how sales are doing.