Sales Report – Its importance, and the essential ones for sales leaders!

Have you ever invested in the stock market?

Don’t you research and go through various reports before investing your hard-earned money on a company’s stock?

Well, the sales industry isn’t much different. It is as risky as the stock market.

One mistake and you might lose your potential buyers to your competitors.

Besides oodles of patience, you require a lot of information to make the right decisions.

The best way of getting this information is through a sales report.

A sales report is like a navigation tool. It not only shows where you are headed but also leads you in the right direction.

You get a clear picture of what’s going on in your company’s sales and how your team is performing.

With insightful graphs, it becomes easier to capture a large amount of information about anything and everything that can impact your profits.

Why are sales reports so important?

Well, most of the sales personnel will agree that converting a lead isn’t an easy task.

79% of leads never convert into sales.

Many opportunities are missed, and several sales targets remain unfulfilled.

Sales reps start the race of conversion with great enthusiasm, but they fail to reach the finish line.

Businesses spend their precious dollars on hiring a winning sales team. So like investors of the stock market even they expect timely returns from such an investment.

They would want to know what went wrong. Why are sales reps not meeting the sales quota?

Sales leaders are answerable to management.

So, it’s necessary to find out if the sales teams are translating their efforts into real sales.

If not, then what are the hurdles that are obstructing their path to success.

15% of sales manager’s time should be spent measuring performance and holding salespeople accountable.

Sales reps are under pressure to reach their targets.

So they are curious to know why are the prospects abandoning them?

A sales report can help the top management, sales managers, and sales reps in answering all these questions.

It is a data-driven approach that provides a more holistic view of the company’s sales process, trends happening in the sales volume and overview of each sales rep’s action.

Sales reports track sales metrics that are important to improve the conversions.

These insightful reports throw light on the sales team’s performance. They help in spotting opportunities and identifying potential risks in real-time.

Sales reports help in finding out what triggers a potential prospect to buy a product and what prompts them to abandon the sales process mid-way.

There are various sales reports to help you get logical answers and not just rely on your gut feeling alone. Before we explore those essential sales reports, let’s first focus on how to create them.

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How to create a sales report?

The building wouldn’t stand strong if the foundation is weak. Similarly, extra attention must be given while creating a sales report.

If done properly, sales reports can provide crucial insights that can help in achieving the company’s sales goals.

Here is how you can create the best sales reports for drawing essential insights:

1. Define the purpose of your sales report

You might have to share quarterly sales reports with the top management.

Or create a performance feedback report for your team.

Both the sales reports will have different structures and information.

So, be very specific.

Why are you creating the sales report?

“What is the most important thing that you want to convey through your reports?”

The purpose should be crystal clear to get the intended results.

An extraordinary business starts with extraordinary people. Extraordinary people start with purpose. – Jesper Lowgren

2. Time period

You would want to know how many calls your sales reps made in a day or how meetings did he/she attend.

For this, you’ll need a daily report.

You might want to monitor the changing purchase patterns or track the effectiveness of your sales strategies, for that you’ll need a yearly sales report.

Therefore, you will need to figure out what time period you want to focus on.

It is essential to be clear whether it is a daily, monthly, or yearly sales report.

Selecting a specific time period will help in performing more accurate timely sales comparisons.

3. Collecting data

Without relevant data, it is difficult to create a strong sales report that will provide vital insights.

91% of businesses suffer from sales data error and that bad data is responsible for an average 12% loss of revenue.

Sales reports aren’t just about flashing some random numbers.

Presenting relevant information in the right way will help in contextualizing and reinforcing trends as well as results.

Monitor every aspect of your sales to ensure you don’t miss out on important details. Track your sales metrics and organize your data in one place.

4. Creating visuals and communicating your findings

Too much data can be difficult to digest. Simplify dense information by adding visuals.

Include graphs and bar charts to make the report easily understandable.

You should be able to see all the vital numbers at a glance to make important decisions.

Add helpful illustration inside your sales report for eliminating unnecessary confusion.

5. Take the help of a CRM

CRM can make your work a lot easier.

With this smart solution, you can find all the relevant information about your sales.

• How many deals are about to close?
• Who is handling which deal?
• Who are the best sales performers?
• Which sales reps are falling behind?
• Where are unqualified leads coming from?

This and a lot of other information is systematically streamlined in one place.

You can either use pre-built reports or choose to get customized reports within this intuitive tool.

CRM reports can give you a big picture of all those important figures and show you where you need to put in extra efforts.

Using the best CRM you can customize the sales reports as per your business needs.

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Various types of Sales reports

One size doesn’t fit all.

Similarly, there cannot be one common sales report.

You need to keep track of various aspects inside your sales process and analyze them.

So, you’ll need multiple sales reports to get high-level insights for winning more deals.

Here are the most important sales reports that you should be creating:

Sales pipeline reports

Opportunities flow through the pipeline.

Which is why you need to give extra attention to your sales pipeline.

Creating sales pipeline reports will help in finding out where you are inefficient.

The sales pipeline report is a great way of visualizing how deals are moving in the sales process.

Through sales pipeline report you can find out:

• How much time does a lead take to move from one stage to another?
• At which stages are most of the leads getting stuck.
• How many leads are qualified, which are in negotiation, and how many have reached closure?
• How much time does an individual sales rep take to convert a lead?
• At which stages do the sales reps need extra coaching.

With sales pipeline reports, you can keep a tab on all your leads.

Through the insights garnered with these informative reports you can optimize your process and create new strategies to level-up your sales game.

Win/loss sales report

You won’t always have a win-win situation in sales.

There are times you might lose.

But you can’t overlook those losses.

It is necessary to dig deeper and find out the reason for losing a deal.

For that, it is essential to keep a track of the deals you’ve won or lost over a time period.

And the win/loss report helps you track it.

Ponder over the lost deals by looking at their history.

See what went wrong, and why didn’t potential prospects choose your company.

By conducting win/loss analysis through such reports you can get information that will help in improving your close rates.

Win/loss sales reports also help in finding out which sales reps are making most sales, and which are struggling to convert a deal.

So that required guidance and help can be given to the sales rep.

Revenue goals sales report

Goals give sales reps a direction; a motive to thrive and perform.

But are they taking these sales goals seriously?

Well, you can find that out through revenue goals report.

Just setting attainable goals isn’t enough, you must measure it as well.

Check which of your sales reps are achieving or getting close to those goals.

A steady flow of revenue is only possible if your team performs, and achieves their sales goals.

With revenue goal reports, you can see what’s the contribution of each sales rep towards the company’s revenue goals.

In a CRM this is visible in a clean dashboard. So, that helps in creating a healthy competition within the team that pushes everyone to win more.

Activity reports

Through an activity report, you can get valuable insights about a team’s daily activities and individual sales rep’s efficiency.

You will know where your sales reps are investing their precious time.

There are three major kinds of activity reports that you can create:

Sales call report

Most of the time you’ll hear sales reps saying that they’ve made “many calls”.

But how many calls did they actually make in a day is visible in the sales call reports.

You can see when the sales rep called a specific prospect, what was the duration of the call and what was its outcome.

Sales email report

Through email reports, you can see how many emails were sent in a day.

Which of those emails were opened by the clients?

Tracking and analyzing emails becomes easier with a CRM as you can clearly see the open, click, and bounce rate.

Moreover, you can even create sequences to automate your follow-up and view the performance of each sequence in a detailed report.

Sales meeting report

Sales reps spend their valuable time in commuting and meeting a prospect.

So it is essential to know whether those meetings were fruitful.

Find out who the sales reps met and what was the summary of the meetings by creating sales meeting reports.

Besides, with the help of geo-tracking functionality in a mobile app know which areas your sales reps covered in a day and where they spent their valuable time.

Accessible sales data

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Sales forecasting report

Forecasting reports help in anticipating how much sales you can expect in a specific period.

Companies with accurate sales have 10% greater chances of growing their year-over-year sales.

It is a great way of planning ahead.

You get valuable insights that can help in building new strategies and making informed decisions.

You can quickly find out which deals have high chances of closing and allocate your resources accordingly.

Sales forecasting reports help in taking timely actions.

Easily prioritize your deals and focus on the opportunities that can bring you maximum sales.

Besides, with these useful sales reports, you can look over the previous forecast for hints in what worked and what didn’t.

This will prevent you from repeating your mistakes.

Wrapping up

Sales reports hold a wealth of information that can help you and your team in reaching the goals that were set.

However, to get the best results you need to create well-detailed sales reports and analyze them regularly.

With the help of the useful sales reports, you can keep monitoring your team’s performance to ensure they aren’t headed on the wrong track.

Sales reports aid in keeping track of the progress.

You’ll know what you are doing is working or not.

Whether you are on the right path or you need to change the direction and do something different for getting the desired output.

It is better to use smart sales reporting software rather than depending on excel sheets for creating sales reports.

A cutting-edge sales reporting software will give you actionable insights to drive revenue and improve the bottom-line of your business.

It will make things crystal clear for your team. They will focus on more important deals and meet the top management’s expectations.

You can either opt for a single sales reporting software or go for a much-advanced solution like Salesmate CRM that offers various features along with smart reporting.

Using this intuitive tool, you can get your sales reports in minutes.

Being a customer relationship management software, it holds all the vital data in a centralized repository.

You can easily get any sales related information needed for customizing your reports.

Besides, Salesmate has a simple and well-designed dashboard where all the important insights are clearly visible.

It is a smart solution you can rely on for growing your business.