I was recently sitting with a client who was trying to understand why he should go out and spend extra money and invest additional time to have us or someone else take care of his sales reporting needs. This company has been around for over 10 years, they are, for the most part, what I would consider a great company and their financials are very solid. However, they have always had an inventory problem. It seems that they have difficulty having enough inventory during their busy season, and when they are slow they have tons of product just sitting around on the shelf. I asked the owner what he has done to fix this. The answer basically came down to: “I do what my gut tells me to do.” I asked him how long he has been doing that. Answer: he’s always done it. I asked him what it’s cost him over the years. He squirmed a bit at that question but he felt it was legitimately something that costs him $15,000 a year conservatively. It seemed to me that he had given up and just accepted that this was “part of doing business.”

I asked him how he ran his forecasting reports and if they were accurate. Could he show me what was in his pipeline 30-60-90 days in the future? Was there a better way to measure what his demand for product was? Could we fix this inventory problem with some reports or was he really “OK” with losing $15,000 a year for the rest of his life?

Luckily this company has been using a contact management system to keep track of their sales activities for the past decade. The sales reps on their own have actually done a pretty good job of tracking sales opportunities inside the software. They had never ran reports out of the system though. Just for fun, we decided to run some of the canned or out-of-the-box reports to see if they could shed any light on what was going to happen in the next quarter. To the owner’s surprise he was able to see details on a sale in the final stages that he did not have enough inventory to cover. In the past, he had really only asked for dollar amounts from his sales department. I think the light bulb went one. He realized he could accurately track the progression of his sales leads through their pipeline process. I was quick to point out that the pipeline will never be 100% accurate, but what if we could reduce his $15,000 a year headache down to $5,000 a year? Would it be worth spending a little bit of time and money if we could show him how to do that?

We ended up creating a few custom reports so that he could track things to his liking. It turned out it only took a few hours to modify the reports that were already included with his software to do what he wanted. We then spent a few hours training his sales team to adjust the way they were entering opportunity information and within 8 weeks his inventory headache was reduced significantly.

What stories do you have to share? We would love to hear how a report or dashboard has changed the way you do business.