Reviewing sales performance versus targets is a crucial part of tracking your progress towards business goals. It keeps you, and your team aligned, on top priorities. And ensures any risks and opportunities that require attention are addressed frequently.
Each new week is an opportunity to accomplish something that can take your business to even higher heights. However, the challenge can be knowing what to do to get the most bang for your buck.
Understanding the impact different actions can have on performance, will improve your understanding of why the numbers have moved up (or down). And keep your actions for the week, and months, ahead aligned to your overall goals. Ensuring you’re creating action plans to address any challenges or blockers that come up. And identifying which actions enlarge or diminish your ability to achieve business goals.
Still not convinced you would benefit from reviewing sales performance weekly? Below I have listed 7 benefits of reviewing sales performance weekly, for a business of any size.
7 benefits of reviewing sales performance weekly
1. Maintaining flexibility
Reviewing sales performance weekly helps create a more agile (read as flexible) work environment. Giving you capacity to adjust tactics and double down on what’s working, to accelerate growth in one area. While opening up the door for testing new things in another area.
While a full agile framework is unlikely to suit every business. The test and learn principle of an agile framework can deliver many benefits. Informing the proposed test areas with insights from performance analysis, will help to prioritise the tests that are most aligned to your overall goals. And reduce the erratic feeling of jumping from one priority to another sporadically.
2. Tracking success
Reviewing sales performance, and other KPIs, weekly is a great way to track progress towards goals. Each week will present its own unique set of circumstances and being able to relate the changes in the numbers back to the actions you took in the prior week. Will make it possible to objectively access the success of the different activities. Perhaps there was a social campaign that drove a lot of traffic to site, but didn’t convert many buyers. Or perhaps a delivery of a product that had previously been out of stock drove a higher uplift in sales than forecast.
Correlating the impact, and influence, different activities have on the sales numbers. Enables you to identify what’s working and what’s not — which will help you make adjustments to upcoming plans so you can stay on track with your goals.
3. Reward and recognition
One of the best parts about reviewing sales performance weekly is the increased visibility of how the work being done is impacting performance metrics. It’s also a great way to make time to recognise and reward what has gone right – because we’re all already experts in being overly critical when things go wrong.
4. Clarifying ownership
We’re all aware that business does not always go to plan. And this can be caused by internal factors – things within our control. As well as external factors – things outside of our control. Reviewing sales performance weekly is an opportunity to sign post where the influence on performance is internal or external. So it can help inform planning for the week, month, quarter or year ahead.
Perhaps there was a snow storm in February that delayed deliveries. Which has a negative impact on getting orders out as well as inbounding new stock. Or perhaps your new product launched at just the right time and was bang on trend. Gaining a better understanding of the impact of external factors helps to clarify which actions can be replicated for the same effect. And wish happened just by chance.
The more informed actions can be to address the presented risk or opportunity. The more realistic the expectation of what they hope to achieve can be. So that you give yourself the best chance to stay on track with your goals.
5. Cross-pollination
Having a better pulse on your sales performance isn’t only helpful for your sales goals. It’s helpful for your other business goals as well. As you increase your understanding of what activities are having the biggest impact on performance. You’ll begin to see how they all play into the big picture, which helps build a more cohesive business strategy.
6. Improved time management
Checking in on sales performance regularly, ensures your action plan is prioritised to spend the majority of your time on tasks that will help you steadily progress towards your goals. Rather than attempting to complete a never ending to-do list that never feels like you’re making much progress.
7. Increased chances of hitting your targets
Reviewing sales performance weekly helps reinforce what you’re working towards and allows you to prioritise important tasks over urgent ones. Which helps increase your chances of achieving sales targets.
By making Monday your day for review. You’ll ensure you’re set up for the week with tasks that are focused on getting you progressively closer to your goal throughout the week.
Take a step towards increasing your chances of achieving your business goals by reviewing sales performance on a weekly basis. It will ensure you make time to recognise and celebrate all the small victories. Refocus on the things that are within your control. And identify what needs to be addressed to keep your progress on track.
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