The Ultimate Guide to Sales Reporting

What is Sales Reporting?

Sales reporting is the process of keeping track of information at every step of the sales process and analyzing the data to predict where the company's success lies. This process gives insights into the progress and foundation of successful sales operations, strategy, and analysis.

Why is the Sales Report Important?

A sales report is the company's navigator. It helps a company steer their plans to improve results. It shows what's happening in the sales volume, offers different steps of the sales funnel, and the performance of the sales executives.

And there is more to measure than sale volume - you need to know the exact driving factors and know how to keep them up as your market grows.

Once you understand the reasons behind the results, you'll have a clear understanding of where to focus your sales team's effort to drive decisions about production timelines, quantities, pricing, and other essentials that keep your business flourishing.

What Should Sales Report Include?

There are tons of metrics you can add to a sales report. But all that matters stems down to what your company's growth demands. It all boils down to the key performance indicators that allow a company to make informed business decisions.

Therefore, it is a waste of time to focus on metrics that are irrelevant in moving your leads forward.

For that reason, we focused on some fundamental data points that nearly every sales report should pay attention to. Here are the main components:

The Number of Prospect

It is essential to know the number of deals you have in all stages in your pipeline. But what's more important, to know where in your pipeline these deals are, the time you expect to close them, and the likelihood of these deals turning into revenue for your business.

Size of Deals

Sales contracts come with different valuation depending on multiple factors. However, you need to evaluate the average deal size in your pipeline to make quick, informed sales forecasts and strategies.

Close Rate

Go deep and determine the average number of deals you closed compared to the number of presentations you made. This shows how a given representative measures up because a salesperson is only useful as his deal.

Sales Velocity

This is the average time it takes for a lead to enter the pipeline and go through the sales process to the closing stage—the quicker the completion of a sales cycle, the better for your sales team.

Cost Per Lead

Understanding how much leads cost is the key, especially for the paid efforts. Not every lead type will have a charge associated with it, but it is critical to understand what your investment is to generate a rough cost per lead.

An Overview

Starting a sales report with a summary allows one to present the most important things you want to communicate with the sales report.

There are plenty of details you can include in your sales report dashboard. But over including Information can detract your audience from the fundamental insight you want to highlight. Instead, tailor your sales report to laser-focus on specific metrics that play a significant role in your sales process.

How to Write a Sales Report

Tons of factors come in place when creating a sale report. But laser-focusing on some elements will make any sales report effective.

Here are some factors you should pay more attention to when writing a sales report:

• Who Will Read the Sales Report?

Before you write, have a background check of who is going to read the report. What does your audience need to know? Will they be comfortable with the business slangs you're going to use?

It is all different when you're writing for a sales audience and a general audience. It is also different when writing a weekly sales report from quarterly sales reports.

• Why are you Writing the Sales Report?

Keep in mind the reason why you're writing the report. Is it a monthly advancement with the top management team? Are you only having a weekly overview and analysis of the sales objectives with your team? Different reports come with other formats. The Information you share will be added too.

• What's the Time Frame of the Sales Report?

The time interval of the sales report determines what you can put into it. You can write a daily, a weekly, or a monthly sales report. The Information you feed on a daily sales report will differ from the data you show from the last quarter or year.

• What Information do you need to Gather?

Here is one crucial factor that you should put all your focus on. Since a company tracks a set of Key Performance Indicators, your report should focus on them. Compile the KPIs and analyze them because the company designs them to ease your data tracking and create a compelling sales analysis in no time.

• Add Some Creativity

Regardless of the audience type that is going to read the report, it is going to be a human audience. You'll be more successful if you add a personal touch that will grab and hold attention. Add some creativity that will not only bring fun but makes you confident during your sales presentation.

You can add graphs and charts to visualize all the data you have.

• Create a Deeper Context

When you're deep in the reporting mindset, it is easy to forget that numbers alone don't create a complete picture, especially if you're presenting a daily sales report.

Go in a little deeper to craft more success in your crafting. Provide some background and the bigger picture by revealing how situations have been.

In Summary, What Matters in A Sales Report?

It is easy for a startup to worry too much about several metrics at once. But the most important thing when preparing a daily, weekly, monthly, or annual report of sales is examining the company's KPIs before starting writing.