Sales performance reporting is incredibly important.
So naturally, you’ve probably spent hours creating PowerPoint presentations or writing sales reports. Then you invested even more hours trying to make those reports as eye-catching and engaging as possible.
All this effort even though you know everyone’s eyes will glaze over as soon as they open the doc.
That’s the conundrum. Sales performance reports are incredibly important and mind numbingly boring at the same time.
But the problem isn’t the reports themselves. The issue is presentation. If you want people to sit up and pay attention to your sales performance reports, not to mention remember the information long enough to act on it, you can’t just deliver a static document and call it a day.
There are better ways to present your sales reports. Ways that actually grab the attention of your sales reps and executive team. And the solution is simpler than you might think.
Why engaging reports matter
Why go through the trouble of making your sales performance reports more engaging? Is it really worth it?
The short answer is that engaging reports convert information into actionable insights and tools.
Poor communication in the workplace is costly. (To the tune of $26K in productivity losses per employee, per year.) You can’t afford this. You need people to take the information from your sales performance reports and actually do something with it. Quickly.
For this to happen, they need to understand what information is most important for them and what they need to do with that information.
For the sales team, this means using the info to adopt better sales strategies and tactics, integrate new tools into their processes, and stay ahead of shifts in the market and customer sentiment.
The executive team needs to understand all of the hard work you and the sales reps are doing. And if your report reveals any gaps, they need to be prepared to allocate more resources to close those gaps.
Your reports need to engage people in a way that helps them draw immediate insights, identify key actions, and then easily recall the information later for reference. PowerPoint presentations and text docs have their place. But they’re terrible at moving the needle when it comes to driving this type of awareness and action.
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Why most internal comms media fail for sales performance reporting
The trouble with PowerPoint presentations and text documents — in addition to being incredibly boring and hard to slog through — is that they tend to flatten all the information into appearing equally important.
There aren’t enough charts, graphs, or cartoons in the world to hold people’s attention all the way through a sales report document or PowerPoint presentation. Especially if it’s long.
It’s difficult to highlight important points in these traditional reporting formats because you can’t make bold text any bolder. Charts and graphs can only get so bright and colorful.
In short, both of these reporting formats are ways to ensure that important details get missed and information is forgotten. And that’s without even mentioning email overload and instant messaging fatigue.
Information loss and communications overload is terrible in any situation. But when you’re trying to get your sales teams to act on a big opportunity before it’s gone or prove to your boss that you’re crushing it, missed details can be devastating.
A better way to do sales performance reporting
There’s a better option for sales reporting and internal communication. One that top sales enablement managers are only now starting to discover.
It makes information ridiculously memorable and easy to process. It’s compatible with email and instant messaging. And it can save you from hours of repeating information that you already sent in your sales reports.
It’s video.
Short, polished videos that summarize the most actionable insights turn your sales reports into impact makers.
Video is simply the most engaging, accessible, and actionable way to present complex information. Here’s what that means at the practical level:
Video cuts through the noise
People’s inboxes are overflowing. Slack messages are flying all over the place. And Zoom calls are on the calendar in a separate app…somewhere.
Video stands out from all the clutter because it’s not part of it.
A video embedded in an email or a Slack video message breaks the pattern and makes people perk up. A video is also a welcome break from all the reading. (Because let’s face it, your team isn’t actually reading everything you send them.)
Additionally, research shows people remember much more information — as much as 95% of the message — when they see it in a video, compared to a text-based message.
Video is accessible
Turning your sales report into a short video also helps reduce overcommunication. (And by extension, miscommunication.)
Just the process of creating a video and choosing what goes into each scene naturally helps you distill the information into a collection of the most important points. If anyone needs access to the larger set of data, you can include a link at the end of your video.
Video is recyclable
Videos are also incredibly simple to recycle because they can be easily templated. Once you’ve created a video for one team — say, the sales team — it’s quick and easy to use that video as a scaffold to make a video for the executive team.
And you can use those same templates to repeat the process for next month’s report.
Video is actionable
Lastly, creating videos to supplement your traditional reports turns those reports into actionable resources.
Traditional reports are tough to use as references. It’s a pain to open a document or PowerPoint presentation, find the page or slide, then scroll through to read it. Conversely, it just takes just a few minutes to do a quick double click and watch a one-minute video that hits all the important points and sums up what to do next.
How to turn your sales performance report into a video
Of course, none of this means you have to burn all your paper reports and delete PowerPoint from your laptop. Those tools are still valuable. After all, they do a great job of packaging and delivering data. For example, some executive sales reports are incredibly long and information-dense. A PowerPoint presentation or text report is perfect for delivering deep dives into nitty-gritty details.
A complementary video simply brings all the important details to the surface and acts as a quick reference.
If you send a video ahead of your full report, people can watch it to get the major points and maybe use that as quick preparation for an upcoming meeting. If they need to dig deeper, your video can include a clickable call-to-action pointing them directly to the full report.
Not only have you grabbed people’s attention and given them the important information in a memorable format, but you can also use your clickable CTA to track how many people watched your video and how many accessed the full report.
Ultimately, video is your ace-in-the-hole for getting people to retain the information in your reports and — more importantly — do something with that information.
When it comes to driving results, written reports and PowerPoint presentations don’t even come close.
Make a sales report video in minutes with Biteable Teams
Video should be part of every sales enablement reporting strategy. It’s one of the most powerful internal communication tools available.
If you’re not using video for sales performance reporting, your efforts aren’t as effective as they could be. Unfortunately, most sales enablement managers don’t use video because they think creating videos is too difficult or time-consuming.
Biteable removes all the barriers to professional video creation with branded templates and an incredibly simple video maker that runs in your web browser. It’s the easiest way to make videos for all your sales enablement communication, without putting in extra hours at the office.