How to Develop a Sales Report

Here’s how to develop a sales report that provides detailed information on your sales department’s performance.

• A sales report gives information on all of your company’s sales operations as well as suggestions for improvements.
• There are many sorts of sales report, each with different KPIs and periodicity.
• Numerous KPIs should be included in a sales report, along with textual justifications of how these data affect upcoming sales activities.
• This article is for small business owners who wish to learn how to create a sales report and establish a sales department.

An average small firm may devote up to 20% of its income to following up on leads. This number might be as high as 45% for younger businesses. It seems sense that you and your sales staff, managers, executives, or outside investors would want to regularly review your sales KPIs given the amount of money you are investing in sales. Sales reports have a role in this.

What is a sales report?

A document that lists a company’s sales operations is referred to as a sales report or a sales analysis report. This report normally contains data on sales volume, leads, new clients, earnings, and expenses for a specific time period. It may also evaluate this data at each stage of the sales process and provide performance data for your sales force (or any gaps therein).

These reports might be used to change your company’s sales strategy and other growth strategies. They can offer insights into successful sales methodologies, forecasts of upcoming sales data, comparisons of performance to prior times, and a deeper comprehension of client motives.

What are the different types of sales reports?

No two sales reports are identical in appearance. Certain sales report formats concentrate on various sales KPIs, requirements, or tactics. Some of the report kinds include:

Sales forecasts.

These reports forecast how many sales your team will generate over a specific time period. You can use them to prepare for potential company problems or predict seasonal slowdowns.

Sales funnel reports.

These reports demonstrate how near a lead is to making a purchase of your good or service. You can better understand how to nurture leads and eventually turn them into customers by using sales funnels. You may find flaws in your sales pipeline by comparing back-to-back sales funnel data.

Conversion reports.

These reports are similar to sales funnel reports in that they evaluate the progress of leads as they go through the funnel, but they focus on the leads’ conversion into customers rather than their current position. In a typical conversion tracking report, contacts, leads that were created and qualified, wins, and period-to-period change rates are all included.

Opportunity score reports.

The Einstein opportunity score serves as the foundation for opportunity score reporting. This artificial intelligence-generated measure assigns a score to each lead between one and 99, with a higher score indicating a better chance of a successful sale. These reports can be used to schedule how your team will split up their lead-pursuit time.

Upsell and cross-sell reports.

These reports include information on how many and how much merchandise was up- or cross-sold to clients. Your team may examine these reports to spot potential chances for upselling and cross-selling in the future or to mark particular goods and services as being particularly well suited for these types of sales strategies.

Sales call reports.

These sales reports deal with calls made to leads, prospects, and clients in an effort to boost purchases. You may learn more about the abilities of your leads and the performance of your salespeople through these reports.

Sales reports may be triggered at different intervals and linked to key performance indicators (KPIs), which can help you track your progress over time. Here are a few typical frequencies:

Daily sales reports. KPIs like the number of calls and leads a salesperson makes each day can be tracked in a daily sales report.

Weekly sales reports.

A weekly sales report might measure KPIs like the total number of transactions closed or dollars made by the sales staff.

Monthly sales reports.

The data monitored in either a daily or weekly sales report can be viewed over a longer period of time in a monthly sales report.

Annual sales reports

A monthly sales report is expanded upon and elaborated in an annual sales report. For figuring up sales targets for a following year, it can be the most helpful. You may use it to analyses the effects of marketing efforts, pinpoint particularly effective sales representatives, identify seasonal swings, and solve problems with sales management.

What are the key elements of a sales report?

The essential components vary depending on the kind of report. However, sales reports should often include the following numbers:

• Relevant KPIs established by the aforementioned standards
• Sales amount
• Net income (this is a dollar figure, whereas sales volume is simply the number of sales made)
• Gross revenue (net sales minus the cost of sales)
• Change in KPI percentage from the prior reporting period

Despite the fact that you may have a large number of KPIs to include in your report, you’ll note that this list of numbers is very brief. That’s because maintaining focus is essential; you don’t want to overload readers of your report right away.

However, numbers by themselves are insufficient to qualify as a sales report. You must also include a written justification of the significance of these figures and how they should drive the corporation to take action. This phase will be covered in the comprehensive report-writing tutorial that follows.

How do you write a sales report?

Follow these steps to create a sales report:

1. Decide how your sales report will look.

A sales report needs to be more than just a list of statistics and justifications. Additionally, it should be appealing and simple to read so that no one feels intimidated. You may accomplish this by downloading a sales report template or by using your customer relationship management (CRM) software to create several report kinds quickly and easily.

2. Consider your audience.

You might wish to include a lot of KPIs in a report that a high-ranking sales team member is delivering to the head of sales. A more concise summary could be preferred by executives. Additionally, a CEO may be more interested in certain facts than a CFO. You should be able to arrange your sales data for any audience with the aid of your CRM software.

3. Include the appropriate information.

You can choose whether to include or exclude particular data sets, such as sales revenue and costs, period-to-period KPI change, progress toward sales goals, sales by product or service, sales forecasts, and future sales plans, once you are aware of your audience and the level of reporting that is anticipated.

4. Determine your current and previous periods.

You should decide if the information you wish to transmit is best presented in an annual, monthly, weekly, or daily view based on the frequency requirements mentioned above. The next step is to compare the data you have for this era to data from a comparable earlier period. If you’re providing sales data for February 2021, for instance, mention percentage increases in these metrics compared to all of January 2021, not just this particular month.

5. Compile your data.

It’s time to really compile your data once you’ve determined your information demands and data period. Typically, this phase is connecting into your CRM software, retrieving data, and either downloading it for use in another application or directly converting it into reports from your CRM dashboard. In either case, sales reporting goes beyond just consolidating your data.

6. Present your information appropriately.

Reports on sales shouldn’t merely be a collection of figures. To make these numbers more understandable to your audience, use plenty of graphs and other useful pictures. Of course, you ought to choose the proper kind of graph. For instance, a line chart displaying income month over month would be required for an annual report. You may either utilize Excel to help with graph generation or your CRM software may be able to automatically produce these charts.

7. Double-check your data and information.

After gathering your information and producing charts and graphs, you should return to stages one and two and think about your audience and include the proper information. Sometimes, it takes finishing the first draught of a report before you realize you’ve included too much or too little material. Take delete information, rebuild graphs, or approach a member of the sales staff for help without hesitation. Keep in mind that we all require editors. Prior to entering your meeting, it’s critical to achieve a balance between insight and abundance.

8. Explain your data.

The most crucial step is possibly this last one. Once more, just giving data is only half the fight; in order for it to have any real meaning for your audience, it must be explained.

Don’t expect that your audience will deduce the reason for the fall, for instance, if your monthly report indicates a sales decline from the prior period for the first time in several months. Give an analysis that implies the reduction is the result of a combined economic slump and an anticipated seasonal slowdown. A written summary of the information from the prior timeframe should also be included in the report’s opening.

Your textual justifications should support your statistics and be supported by your figures simultaneously. They should also describe the corrections that your team intends to make. For instance, if a significant rival’s time-limited discounts have hurt your sales, describe how you plan to recover the clients you lost as a result of the campaign. If you can identify an immediate, solvable underlying cause, you can usefully share even the most alarming facts.