Ditch the Whiteboard and Get Yourself a Virtual Sales War Room

At the beginning of every quarter, your sales whiteboard in the office is freshly erased and full of possibilities. The whiteboard is where we all keep tally–where winners are applauded, sales stragglers are quietly noted, and the quarter begins to take shape. It’s where we gather to discuss the latest developments and what needs to happen during the week to stay on track or pick up the pace.

Towards the end of the quarter is when things really heat up. Sales managers go to their war room every day to update the whiteboard with their team’s totals and assess different scenarios to see whether the team will hit their number.

Although it’s motivating for salespeople–who are innately competitive–to have a physical reminder of what we’re all in the game for, whiteboards are just scoreboards for everyone who puts up points. It tells you where you are now versus what you can do to really make a difference.

Don’t kid yourself. This approach is limiting your revenue potential. How does an office whiteboard serve a largely remote sales workforce or team members who are traveling? Is your whiteboard even accurate or up-to-date? Has the cleaning crew ever erased everything on your board? (I bet that’s happened more than a few times.) How does a whiteboard change behaviors or refocus priorities in the right direction? More importantly, how can you glean intelligence from it?

One thing is for sure. You can’t “data science” a whiteboard.

There are four things that sales leaders typically do on whiteboards to track their progress and make critical end of quarter decisions. What you may not realize is that a cloud-based virtual Sales War Room can do all of that infinitely better, providing unprecedented just-in-time insights that puts control of the quarter into sales leaders fingertips. Just like whiteboards, it provides a visual representation of the quarter, but with a powerful analytical engine behind it — all in real-time.

1. Forecasting — In a cloud-based world, forecasting is automated and always up-to-date–for everyone on the team, including remote sales reps.
2. Daily dashboard — Always know the top deals to focus on with a daily dashboard and view pending deals that are most critical to making your quarter.
3. What-if Scenarios — Generate different scenarios to quickly understand which paths have less risk and more reward. Plus, you can save them, copy them, share them, and modify them anytime.
4. Real-time Collaboration — Receive alerts and key insights on the go and instantly share them with your sales reps and the executive team.

Aviso Sales War Room

With the Aviso Sales War Room, sales leaders have access anytime, anywhere to a digital command center that can track real-time progress to goals for every business segment and region and run multiple scenarios and contingencies early in the quarter. It allows distributed teams to work collaboratively in powerful new ways.

You don’t have to wait until the beginning of a new quarter to erase your whiteboard. On Monday mornings, bring your coffee cups to a conference room and everyone can walk through the War Room together.

Originally published at www.aviso.com on February 18, 2016.