two people reviewing sales reports templates" width="595" height="400" />Are you finding it difficult to hit your sales goals, unclog your sales funnel, and increase your sales velocity? Sales reports can help.
two people reviewing sales reports templates" width="595" height="400" />
Sales reports allow you to improve your sales process, fill knowledge gaps, and hit your quotas consistently. As a sales manager, creating a sales report also allows you to gather hard data for your colleagues or C-suite to make informed decisions quickly.
In this post, you’ll learn what sales reports are, their benefits, and how to use sales report templates.
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Reporting data in a standardized way is crucial to the success of your business. Here are the common benefits of developing a sales reporting cadence.
Sales reports provide data-driven insights about the sales performance of individual reps and your entire team. This allows you to know if underperforming reps need coaching. You can also identify who would benefit from regular one-on-one meetings to level up and hit their quotas.
The same applies to your team. If your team isn’t hitting the company’s revenue goals, you can use sales reports to find gaps to improve your sales process.
Making informed and timely decisions is vital to the success of any sales strategy. This is where sales reporting shines.
With regular sales reporting, your C-suite or managers can quickly iterate on what drives the company's growth. You can also track and adjust sales tactics that are performing below par.
Creating daily sales reports may be time-consuming. But whether you do this daily, weekly, or monthly, these reports can take team morale to new heights.
Monitoring and showing the sales performance of each team member motivates them to do more. Gamifying performance results can challenge other team members to quit settling for average performance. Put another way, sales reporting can create healthy competition and push your sales team to aim for the “best” outcomes.
The goal of every sales report is to pass actionable and detailed sales information to your team. To do this, you need to know the purpose and audience of your sales report. You’ll also need to use the right data, decide on a reporting timeframe, and create engaging slides.
Here’s a breakdown of how to write an engaging sales report.
Identifying your goal is the first step toward creating a winning sales report. With your goal in mind, you can easily determine the best data to include and decide on a reporting timeframe.
Let’s say the purpose of your sales report is to motivate your reps. A weekly report showing several KPIs will show your team far they are from the company’s monthly goal.
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Metrics that interest your sales reps may not interest your CEO. Those that interest your CEO may not interest your director or VP of marketing. These folks are in the same organization as you, but they have different interests.
Sales reps may want granular details on their sales performance. Your marketing lead may only be interested in the sales reports from marketing campaigns. And your busy CEO may only want the overall results of your marketing and sales activities without the specifics of how you reached your goals. See, different strokes for different people. Tailor your sales report accordingly.
Your reporting timeframe depends on your sales objectives and how frequently you need to update your team or management. You can do this in three ways.
A daily sales report tracks the sales activities of each business day. This report increases your rep’s accountability, encourages productivity, and includes sales performance metrics like:
A weekly sales report measures the weekly sales performance of individual reps and your entire sales team. This report allows sales leaders to know which reps are on track to hit their KPIs. Weekly sales reports track metrics like:
A monthly sales report summarizes your sales performance for the month. This report helps you determine the effectiveness of your sales strategy so you can tweak it if necessary. Monthly sales reports track metrics like:
Collecting and analyzing your sales data is a lot easier when you’re using a CRM. With a CRM, you can use filters to remove duplicate records and pull specific information. That’s more fun than relying on clunky spreadsheets, right? Here’s a quick video on how you can gather sales data for your reports.
You can also create custom reports if you regularly use certain sales data. Here’s how:
You need to make sense of your sales data by explaining the “why” of each one.
Just as the questions are endless, so are the insights you can gain by evaluating your sales data. For instance, more won deals could have resulted from a new tactic your team tried, a new channel they started using, a partner ecosystem they joined, and much more.
When you state why there’s an upward or downward trend in your data, you provide a roadmap for what your team can improve and what they can continue doing to achieve the best sales results.
Note: If possible attribute which changes to your sales data were caused by team tactics and which are attributed to the larger macro-economic environment. A spike or dip in sales may be the result of factors beyond your control. You’ll want to distinguish those factors where possible.
A free, interactive template to calculate your sales KPIs.
