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How to Write a Sales Report: A Step-By-Step Guide

Learn how to evaluate strategies, forecast revenue, identify coaching opportunities, and prioritize next steps.

By Candi Bashiri, Director, Systems Sales Operations, Lynx Software TechnologiesOpens in a new window

November 19, 2024

Sales reports are to sales leaders as a baton is to a musical conductor. By using the data in sales reports to coach their teams, sales managers can help everyone work together effectively and maintain a steady rhythm. They can even select their first chair performers when a sales report highlights exceptional results. This is why generating, maintaining, and using the right sales reports — and training others to understand and use them too — can help you grow your business.

Learning how to successfully run and use sales reports enables leaders to make informed decisions and ultimately drive team success. Here's how.

What is a sales report?

Sales reports are a presentation of data pulled directly from your CRM to provide a snapshot of sales performance metrics and related insights. Sales professionals and business leaders use the data in these reports to track key performance indicators (KPIs) that help guide their decisions and point to next steps for meeting sales goals.

Depending on the purpose of each report and its audience, they can be used on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or even annual basis. Many sales people use reports, usually daily or weekly, to monitor their progress toward goals, check in on their pipelines, and determine their most immediate tasks. Sales managers use reports to stay abreast of their team's performance and determine where and how they can best help individuals meet their goals.

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Importance of a sales report in business

Sales reports are a treasure trove of insights into your sales performance. At a high level, sales tracking Opens in a new windowinforms leaders on how their teams are performing against year-to-date targets, making it easier to gauge individual and team effectiveness. Sales reports also help forecast whether you're on track to meet your sales goals, allowing you to fine-tune your overall strategy along the way.

Here are four ways you can use sales reports at various levels within your organization.

  • Evaluate strategy: Tracking sales data and reading these reports helps you understand what's selling, when it sells, how long the sales cycle is, who's buying and where, and who's selling best (with insights on how they're doing it). This information empowers sales leaders to refine their strategies, enabling them to make proactive adjustments that drive growth.
  • Forecast revenue: In doing so, you can make more informed decisions about overall business strategy and adjust accordingly.
  • Pinpoint coaching opportunities: Sales reports help locate weak spots in your sales cycle or teams. With this information in hand, you can help teams and individuals overcome challenges and grow within their sales roles. By analyzing sales reports to identify underperforming areas, you can target specific skills, such as closing techniques or product knowledge, to help team members improve their sales outcomes.
  • Identify and prioritize next steps: By reading up-to-date sales reports, sales teams can identify which opportunities to follow up on and determine when to do so. This can be accomplished by identifying key trends and areas for improvement, and then focusing on actions that will drive the highest impact on sales growth and align with current business objectives.

There's also the personal angle. As you get more practice drafting and using sales reports, you'll not only find ways to improve your skills as a salesperson, but you'll also raise your internal profile as a strategic player. That builds your value and gives you more opportunities to collaborate at higher levels. In fact, sales statisticsOpens in a new window from Salesforce's Trends in Data and Analytics for Sales report show that 94% of sales leaders say their organization should be getting more value from their data. If you're one of the people who understand how to do this, then you're better positioned to move up quickly.

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Key components of an effective sales report

Sales reports generally include the following components:

  • Sales data: This could include sales metrics related to activities, revenue, pipeline, sales performance, sales by product or service, customer insights, or any combination of these. You can categorize sales data Opens in a new windowinto two types — outcome metrics (like revenue and contracts) and process metrics (like leads and sales calls) — and choose what to include based on your learning goals and how you'll use the report.
  • Graphs and other visuals: Sales reports should be presented in a way that helps readers get information quickly and determine next steps with ease. Use colorful charts, graphs, and comparison tables to help people digest data quickly. If you need to include a more complex chart, create a legend or key to help readers understand it. Finally, use proper fields to clearly identify and organize data in your tables and charts, and always include the data's timeframe.
  • Key trends and insights: Don't stop at presenting the data; you should also draw insights. Include concise bullet points to highlight important sales trends and suggest next steps. For example, if the data shows that contract renewals are declining in just one service area, highlight that trend. Then, suggest next steps to investigate the issue. This could include determining whether the team has maintained its focus on renewals and seeking feedback from the field to understand why customers have chosen not to renew.

A tip for creating sales reports: When selecting KPIs, always consider who's using the report and what they want to learn to determine which metrics you should include and how granular to get. I've also found that showing which filters you've used and how you're sorting helps people understand various reports more easily.

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5 important types of sales reports

Sales reports vary by frequency, focus and level of detail. In general, the closer the person using the report is to the data, the more detailed and frequent their report will be. The further they are from personally affecting the data and the higher they are in the organization, the more digestible and high-level the report or sales dashboard Opens in a new windowshould be.

For example, a sales representative likely wants a daily report on their own activities, leads and deals so they can track their progress against goals and prioritize their tasks for the day. A sales manager may prefer a weekly report on team-level progress, while their VP of sales prefers to get monthly reports on sales performance for each region, line of business and product. The highest-level viewers, such as board members, may only want quarterly sales reports with year-to-date revenue and high-level sales forecastsOpens in a new window.

Here are some of the most commonly used sales reports.

  1. Sales pipeline reports: Enable sales teams to track their leads through each stage of the sales cycle. They can help sales managers identify what their team does well and where they need help. Sales leaders may use it to get an idea of whether sales teams will hit their targets.
  2. Conversion rates reports: Show the conversion rate of your sales leads. Depending on which fields you include and how you segment the data, you can get insights Opens in a new windowon the conversion rates for each stage of your sales cycle, informing how many contacts and leads you should work to include at the top of your sales funnel. Ensure you understand the context of the conversion rate, because different types of deals convert in different ways. For example, renewals would be different than new business.
  3. Leaderboards: Display how individuals, teams, or regions perform against each other relating to a specific metric or goal. It can inform high-level sales strategy, help inspire friendly competition between teams and individuals, and identify collaborative mentorship opportunities.
  4. Average deal size reports: Show the average value of each deal, which helps sales managers and leaders determine the potential revenue from each customer lead. With this information, they can set informed targets for their sales reps to ensure the company meets its goals.
  5. Activity reports: Sales managers use these reports to get a pulse on their team's productivity. They can also see how various types of activities, such as emails or booked meetings, affect sales metrics and success. That way, sales leaders can glean insights regarding which activities are most effective at qualifying customers and, ultimately, closing deals.

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Step-by-step guide to writing a sales report

Today's reporting technology Opens in a new windowmakes creating and updating sales reports easy. For instance, Sales Cloud Opens in a new windowcreates simple visualizations of data and enables users to drill into key drivers such as lead volume and sales pipeline metrics. However, that doesn't mean the human touch isn't important — especially when it comes to understanding what to include and how to best display the data. Use this simple process for writing a sales report.

  1. Start with your purpose: Determine what you need to know and how you'll use the information. For example, you might choose to write a sales report on overall results from the previous quarter.
  2. Define your target audience: Consider who's using this report to determine how detailed the data should be and which insights will be most important to them. The VP of Sales will likely want a high-level overview, while a team manager may want to drill into the details.
  3. Collect relevant data by selecting your KPIs and data filters: Once you know the purpose and audience, you'll be able to decide which fields to pull in (e.g. total revenue, meetings booked, total pipeline, etc.), how to filter the data (e.g., which timeframe or region to include), and how to filter the information.
  4. Present visualizations of your data: Our eyes tend to zero in on visuals over text, so use charts or graphs to display key data. That helps you emphasize the details you want your audience to remember.
  5. Highlight trends and insights: Write brief, to-the-point sentences to showcase trends and share key insights from the data, including suggested next steps.

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Common mistakes to avoid when writing a sales report

Staying away from "don'ts" is always a best practice, so watch out for these common sales report pitfalls:

  • Including inaccurate data: Ensure all data is pulling from the right sources and is getting updated in real time. You'll want to use your CRM (not spreadsheets) for this detail.
  • Using overly complex language: Instead, use simple wording to ensure you deliver insights clearly and efficiently. A good guideline is to write for an eighth-grade reading level.
  • Including too much detail: Including too many metrics for the intended audience can bog down the report and make it difficult to keep users' attention. Instead, present data as simply as possible. Make sure it's relevant by using the right filters such as timeframe, location, and team. Users can always drill further into the details if desired.
  • Duplicating reports without updating the filters: If you use a template, double check that you've updated all filters to pull in only the data relevant to your new report. You don't want to confuse your audience with outdated information.

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Best practices for writing a clear and effective sales report

Sales reports should be consistent and clear, with information that helps the viewer track against targets and meet their goals. Use these best practices to build concise, actionable sales reports.

  • Include charts and other graphics to help tell a story: Most CRM software, including Sales Cloud, can generate these visuals for you. By including them, your sales report will deliver key data trends quickly, guiding viewers to insights. Ensure your charts, graphs, and tables aren't overly complicated. Only show the data that needs to be shared in order to convey a message.
  • Keep your sales reports rooted within your CRM: Instead of exporting data, plan for users to view reportsOpens in a new window within your CRM. This not only makes them accessible to everyone who needs to see them, but it will also ensure the data is fresh and that viewers can drill down as needed.
  • Include insights about key metrics over time: This gives viewers context and helps them identify trends over time or compare timeframes (e.g., month over month, year over year, and this time last year).
  • Build interactive dashboards: Display high-level data with filters that allow users to change date ranges and toggle between product lines, teams, geographic location, sales funnel stages, industries, etc. This way, your dashboard can work for multiple groups and serve various user levels without recreating the wheel.

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Write effective sales reports and empower your team

Securing the right tools helps sales leaders better analyze Opens in a new windowteam performance and identify areas for improvement. Modern software provides automation that improves accuracy and can even build in real-time analytics. This is why it's essential to know your tools — their capabilities and how to use them. Platforms with the latest AI can even identify action items for you and your team. Learn your technology. Train to become a master of the tools you use to create your sales reports, and not only will you optimize your current efforts, but you'll build a brighter future for your career.

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