Consider Your Shadow Reporting

During a thoroughly enoyable meeting with a chap that ran a salesteam of eight about their reporting needs as a company, the issue of Shadow Reporting arose.  I was exploring more knowledge of what makes crm installs collapse so dramatically.  In this case, they’d tried Salesforce, Maximiser & Netsuite.  There was little success to show for each endeavour.

I threw in the possibility that they’d yet to measure up because they weren’t geared around capturing what the individual reps wanted to track, and instead were too focused on management policing attributes.  I suggested that those who didn’t appear to engage with their crm were probably keeping their own records locally, hidden from view.  If you could create a way for that knowledge to be captured openly in a way that wasn’t Big Brother, then activity intel would naturally be recorded from it whilst providing genuine usefulness for the rep.

It turned out that the reps were indeed doing just this, as various documents had been publicly discussed.  How much better off would every sales team and the reps within it be, if their Shadow Reports were actually the only reporting required?