Sales reports provide useful insight into sales performance, sales efficiency, and sales reps’ productivity over a specific period. With those insights, you can make informed decisions to boost sales revenue and grow your business further.
In this article, we’ll explain more about the benefits of a sales report and how you can create it effectively.
What Is a Sales Report?
A sales report is a documentation of sales progress for a pre-defined timeframe, for example, daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly.
Think of a sales report as a detailed overview of your sales team’s activities, the health of your sales pipeline, and sales forecast. The more accurate data you have, the better insights into trends and potential areas of improvement you’ll get.
Sales reports are traditionally created in Excel or Google Sheets. But more businesses have moved to CRM tools or sales platforms to automate creating sales reports (more on this later).
Benefits of Sales Reports
As said earlier, a sales report reveals how you can improve your sales performance and grow your business. It gives powers not just to managers but also to individual salespersons.
The following are five typical types of sales reports and their benefits:
1. Daily Sales Report
A daily sales report displays daily sales data such as the number of closed deals, lost deals, qualified leads, scheduled appointments, opportunities, emails sent, calls made, lead response time, and more. It focuses more on the process rather than the outcome.
2. Weekly Sales Report
A weekly sales report aims to track sales performance every week. Similar to a daily sales report, when creating a weekly report, you may want to consider metrics like the number of calls made, sales volume by channel, closed deals, lost deals, opportunities, qualified leads, etc.
3. Monthly Sales Report
A monthly sales report is meant for tracking sales operations and outcomes on a monthly basis.
Besides metrics that are covered in a daily or weekly report, a monthly sales report also includes long-term measurements like sales cycle length, conversion rates, average order value, average revenue per lead, month-on-month comparisons, and more.
4. Quarterly Sales Report
A quarterly sales report shows sales data in a three-month period. It provides information about sales pipeline, sales growth, customer acquisition cost, and other metrics included in a monthly sales report.
5. Yearly Sales Report
A yearly sales report or an annual sales report is annual documentation of sales performance and operations over a year. It presents what you’ve done, what you’ve achieved, and where you can do better. A yearly sales report is crucial for forecasting sales quota and goals as well as planning strategies for next year.
How to Write Sales Reports
Follow these steps to write a sales report:
Step 1: Know Your Audience
Think about who will read your report, who will use it, and what they expect to get from it. This way, you can ensure that you provide them with relevant data and present it in a way that they can understand and take action.
Step 2: Define the Purpose of the Sales Report
The purpose of a daily sales report is different from that of a monthly sales report. And an annual sales report should be more comprehensive than a quarterly report. Before creating it, be sure you determine why you need a specific sales report.
Step 3: Track and Collect the Right Data
Data is the core foundation of an effective sales report, so you should collect as much data as you can. That said, make sure you only gather data that is useful to the people who will read your report.
To collect data, look at your CRM, sales platform, and marketing tools. You may also want to survey or interview relevant stakeholders (e.g., your customers or sales reps) to better understand sales activities.
Step 4: Analyze and Present Sales Data
Once you collect enough data, the next step is analyzing it. Be sure to provide context behind any trend, increase, or decrease in sales. Additionally, offer recommendations on the next steps based on the insights you’ve gathered.
When presenting data, consider using visuals like graphs and charts to make your report more engaging. You should also highlight critical takeaways to direct people to where they should pay more attention to.
Step 5: Write a Summary of Your Sales Report
The last step is writing an executive summary that includes key data, findings, and recommendations in your sales report. Write it in a way that triggers people’s curiosity, motivates them to read your report thoroughly, and empowers them to take action.
Sales Report Templates
A CRM or sales tool typically provides reports and dashboards. But if you’re creating sales reports manually, you can check out free templates on Office 365 or Canva for inspiration.
How to Create Sales Reports With Revenue Grid
Revenue Grid makes it easy to compile data from multiple sources and create sales reports. It automatically tracks sales data, updates it in real-time, lets your sales team access it and makes changes effortlessly.
Take the Team Analytics tool as an example. Basically, Team Analytics gives you a clear picture of your team’s activities over a specific timeframe. Just visit the dashboard, and you can see clearly average meetings, calls, inbound emails, and outbound emails of each rep.
Team Analytics also includes the Team Forecast feature, which allows you to see the total amount of forecasted revenue per sales rep, track how much of sales target they need to achieve in the following months, and how much of it is unlikely to close.
If you’re using Revenue Grid’s Sales Sequences tool, you can also access granular performance and revenue attribution reports. With those reports, you can understand how each sequence is performing and where you should improve.
