When I speak with sales department leaders about reporting, I tend to hear one of the following statements: ‘We don’t get the reports we need.” or “We get a lot of sales reports, but not a lot of actionable information.”

First, I strongly believe that the 80/20 rule applies to department reporting. A sales manager is more effective relying on fewer reports that describe the most important department KPIs versus wading through a plethora of reports that track every possible stat. I also recommend that “exception reporting” is part of your 20%. It can help laser focus your analytical efforts.

An “exception report” is a type of report that automatically identifies and illustrates business activities or results that fall outside norms, averages or recent trends. They are typically created by a skilled analyst using defined business rules and conditional statements such as “if this, then do that”.

As Jonathan Wu mentioned in the Information Management article, “Harnessing the power of exception reporting”, “The greatest benefit that exception reporting provides is the ability to monitor transactions and events without direct human observation, thereby enabling individuals to focus their attention on other areas of their responsibility.”  Well said.

Exception reports are common in procurement, data cleansing and auditing functions, but less common in sales functions.

Here are some examples…..

It is very common to see department reporting represented with a list of employee names in the left most column and trend results in columns to the right. Managers scan the report and visually identify the employees with very good or very bad performance. This takes time and it is possible for a manager to miss important information, since the scan is manual.

An exception report could be set up to analyze the same department results, and only show the employees whose performance falls significantly outside of the means, averages or goals- for more than a specified number of weeks. The information that managers need, rises right to the top without the time and effort of the manual scan.

Exception reporting can also be used to help drive sales by identifying trends or changes in customer behavior. For example, if you sell SaaS (software as a service), you could identify customers who have a spike of increased login activity OR a significant drop in login activity. Either trend, should spark a contact with the customer.

Leading and Lagging Reporting

I have also observed that the majority of sales department reporting is “lagging”, looking back at results that have already happened. Managers and employees want more “leading” reporting, which can help impact results now- “real time” and influence future results.

Exception reporting can be a fantastic “real time” monitor. As opposed to relying on traditional, weekly paper reporting, businesses can create “exception triggers”, which are automatic notifications in the form of emails, texts or CRM records.

Going back to the SaaS example, instead of getting a report of all the customers whose usage decreased in the prior month, employees can receive triggers, based on defined business rules, and react immediately when usage decreases.  (For more information on this topic, refer to the Investopedia article: What are leading, lagging and coincident indicators? What are they for?)

Exception Reporting Built Into CRM

FYI…Some CRM applications have exception reporting built in, as an option for standard reporting. Others may have added exception reporting during a customization phase. Contact your system admin to learn more. You may also be interested in these online resources:

• Head to head comparison, Oracle CRM VS Salesforce in Reporting/Analytics
• Business analytics for Microsoft Dynamics CRM

How has your sales organization used exception reporting to enable sales leaders and employees? Please add your comments.