How to create a sales report
It isn’t easy keeping tabs on so many sales activities. Sales reports can help you assess team progress, track growth, and make more informed business decisions.
Are your sales reps on track to meet sales goals? What led to a bad quarter, and how can you fix it? Do you have enough prospects in your sales funnel?
Answering these questions without accurate data is impossible—this is where sales reports come in. They detail all sales activities and offer key insights, helping sales managers plan ahead and build sales strategies.
But the way sales leaders create their reports matters. Here’s how to ensure you collect the right data and present it in a meaningful, eye-catching, and impactful way.
What are sales reports?
Sales reports are documents that outline the sales operations of a business over a specific period of time. These reports usually include information on sales volume, leads, new accounts, and revenue. They help business leaders keep a finger on the pulse of sales activities and provide sales managers with insights into their sales reps’ performance.
How do you write a sales report?
Whether you’re creating your first or 10th sales report, writing an effective report that captures your sales activities can be challenging. But breaking the sales reporting process into five bite-sized steps will make the process easier. Here’s how to write a successful sales report that includes all the essential elements.
Determine the audience and purpose for the report
The first and most important step in creating a sales report is knowing who you’re creating it for and what they need to learn from the report. This will help you decide what data to include and how to shape your document.
“Include a lot of KPIs for your head of sales. For executives, [provide a] more succinct summary,” says Matt Nish, CEO of Bonsai.
Let’s say you’re presenting the monthly sales activity report to your boss, the head of sales. You’d want to showcase the sales team’s productivity and how that will connect to the larger revenue goals for the company.
Meanwhile, a sales report for the marketing team might be more focused on which sources attract inbound leads.
Select a specific time period
You don’t want to be looking at numbers from three years ago when all you need is data from last month. Choose a time period that suits your sales report’s purpose and audience.
There are various types of sales reports that can be set to different frequencies, helping sales leaders track success over time.
Daily sales report
A daily sales report details the activities of sales teams on a day-to-day basis. It tends to focus on sales performance metrics that relate to your sales process, such as the number of outbound calls, number of sales opportunities, or number of client conversations. This report typically doesn’t cover outcome metrics—such as average deal size—that are only meaningful over a longer period of time. Use daily sales reports to increase accountability and encourage productivity.
Weekly sales report
A weekly sales report tracks the performance of sales reps and the sales department as a whole over five business days. Weekly reports include metrics such as call/contact volume, lead response time, and the number of appointments set. These micro reports provide a way for managers to gauge progress before monthly reports come in.
Monthly sales report
A monthly sales report is a longer-term measurement of sales performance carried out every month. It offers a broader view of performance than other types of sales reports because it covers a wide enough range to measure complete sales cycles. Monthly sales reports track metrics such as the number of marketing qualified leads, number of meetings scheduled, and number of won deals.
Collect relevant data
How do you know what figures to track? Choose metrics that support the purpose of your report.
Say you want to highlight your rep productivity for the past 28 business days. When preparing your sales activity report, you’d only include data from the previous period. You’d also focus on important sales metrics such as calls made, emails sent, and meetings and sales presentations scheduled. Cut out fluff and unrelated numbers that don’t add to the substance of your report. This allows your audience to focus on what’s most important.
As a business experiences sales growth, it will become harder to track performance and keep tabs on the various metrics. Instead of continuing to rely on an Excel spreadsheet, use a sales CRM to collect, organize, and analyze sales data automatically. It will make your life a lot easier.
Explain the data
Once you’ve collected your metrics, it’s time to break down what the figures mean for the audience of your report. Uncover the insights that aren’t immediately obvious.
Say your sales department had a very good month and surpassed its forecasted sales. You could get excited and show off the numbers but also explain what factors (both internal and external) helped your team outperform the previous month. It could be that your team tried a new prospecting tactic or started using an effective CRM.
Always contextualize information in your sales reports so your audience can use the data to inform their decisions.
Make it eye-catching
A report with only numbers and text might fail to engage your audience. Visualize your data with charts, graphs, tables, and other infographics to make your sales report easier to digest.
Imagine you’re creating a forecasted sales by source report. Instead of overwhelming your audience with spreadsheets of numbers, you could use a table to show the total value of the deals for each source.
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