To compete and win in business in our digital age, sales leaders must trust their company’s data and make timely decisions based on insights they can extract from it. Sales reports enable executives to identify sales trends and customer behavior patterns impacting their company’s growth trajectory and take decisive action, whether to continue their current strategy or change course towards more profitable outcomes. 

Sales executives need to gather insights from data collected from multiple input channels, including contact centers, sales representatives, and customers themselves via e-commerce storefronts and online portals and residing in multiple applications. 

Sharing this data with your employees in a sales context requires sophisticated, customizable analysis tools. Few salespeople have advanced data science skills or advanced analytics tools. It is critical that sales reports provide scheduled or real-time access to reporting tools that intuitively present KPIs with the right amount of context. That includes historical sales reports, reports that capture a moment in time, and predictive reporting that can guide the way forward based on past results.   

What is a sales report?

A sales report – or sales analysis report, if you prefer – is a detailed record of sales performance over a specific time period, including predicting future outcomes. Let’s explore ten types of sales reports to help you analyze performance. Depending on what data you want to share with your team, you may turn it into dashboards, which will help you monitor performance in real-time.

  1. Revenue forecasts: Many companies are shifting to automated forecasting because sales reps are often overly optimistic about the likelihood that their customers will buy during this fiscal period. Some reps sandbag deals to manipulate quota or to ease pressure from management. Forecast accuracy (or exceeding forecasts) should be rewarded for these reasons. Automated forecasting doesn’t just improve accuracy based on historical trends.It helps your intradepartmental colleagues ensure you have the operational support and fulfillment resources you need to satisfy your customers, investors, and leadership team based on reliable sales intelligence.
  2. Revenue closed by sales representative: When your sales reps consistently meet or exceed their revenue quotas, they distinguish themselves as top candidates for financial rewards, promotion opportunities, and mentoring new hires. Closed revenue reports also provide feedback and coaching opportunities and inform territory or industry coverage based on the needs of your business. Most top-performing sales pros keep an eye on their revenue number above all else, as it tends to have the biggest impact on their paycheck. Even if your reps are paid on company performance, quantifying their contribution to company growth provides important context your sales reps can build their career on.     
  3. Win rate: Tracking each representative’s win rate can identify where your time would be best spent coaching your representatives or where training is required. Opportunity win rates that capture the products or services your company offers may not address the needs of your target market, or you might need better sales enablement tools or marketing assets. Your product team may need to revisit their pricing strategies or roadmap to identify opportunities to make your offerings more attractive.
  4. Average deal size: In my experience, value-based is a better strategy than going head-to-head with competitors on price. Coaching your team to sell on your company’s strengths, like product quality, service offerings, or customer satisfaction, and protecting your profit margins. These kinds of sales reports also identify your reps who are doing the best job at upselling and cross-selling, so you can reward them and motivate them to share their strategies for increasing contract values by bundling value-added services or selling top-tier subscription plans.
  5. Sales rep activity: Motivating sales reps to make more calls, send more emails, and share more company content on social media takes more than telling your team that “Sales is a numbers game.” A report that presents your team’s numbers, along with their activity rates, such as their quarter-to-date (QTD) or year-to-date (YTD) closed revenue, is a better way to ignite that “fire in the belly” and drive to succeed. 

    Conversion rate reports that monitor scenarios like how often Sales Development Reps (SDRs) convert leads to opportunities.
  6. Pipeline velocity: Running internal sales competitions that motivate your sales reps to close deals faster is a great way to “pressure test” your sales methodology at each process stage. You may need to adjust your workflows where leads or opportunities tend to bottleneck. Or, you may identify individual or team-wide coaching opportunities on topics like improving presentation or negotiation skills, or how to ask for the contract if deals are stalling on the goal line.  
  7. Speed of Orders to Invoice to Cash: It’s natural for salespeople to want to bask in the glory of a win and move on to the next selling adventure. Yet motivating your team to take greater ownership of their customer relationships beyond the purchase order can deter transactional sales behaviors and motivate post-sale relationship management. 

    A scheduled sales follow-up to ensure a goods shipment arrived on time, or a service engagement met expectations and an invoice can be issued. Your customers also have an increasingly larger variety of online payment options, like PayPal, Stripe for SaaS, and Recurly, which can offer important customer buying insights. Motivating your sales reps to bring in outstanding receivables is another opportunity for a sales follow-up and possible upsell, like training or other consulting services that might accelerate a slow deployment start.
  8. Lead acquisition source and response time: Identifying your top lead generation channels helps sales managers decide about market development funds for resellers, partner lead registration rules, and territory coverage models. Suppose an inside sales agent or business partner is getting good traction in a region where a field salesperson would be too costly. In that case, you can tailor your sales approach and targets accordingly. 

    Monitoring your sales development reps’ campaign lead response times can identify what works best for your target audience. 
  9. Top opportunities: The effect of a significant opportunity being added to or removed from the pipeline or one side of the win/loss column can’t be overstated. In a recent role, every sales cadence call I attended kicked off by discussing the status of the “top opps,” and we discussed the business development process of how those opportunities were discovered as success stories. These opportunities are obviously great for morale and quota reasons, and they are excellent learning opportunities that your team can share along the way through the funnel.
  10. Renewal and churn rates: Monitoring the rates at which customers are choosing to extend their relationship with your business and its services or take their business elsewhere is critical. Renewal pipeline reports often use predictive analytics to issue renewal notices and prompt sales reps to follow up with customers to close the loop on the renewal process. 

    Depending on the size and nature of your business, you could benefit from customer lifetime value (CLV) reports, which measure the customer’s revenue contributions over the lifecycle of their relationship with your business, and Win/Loss reports, which can contribute to repeatable strategies for winning renewals. Or lessons learned for continuous improvement.

Why sales reporting is vital to business success

Automated sales report generation minimizes the administrative work, human error, and technical overhead you’ve likely endured with manually generated reports. It provides current, trustworthy insights that sales managers and their teams can count on to:

  1. Inform sales managers of patterns and trends so they can act accordingly 
  2. Trigger workflows for events like when NPS or CSAT scores are low
  3. Share account management-specific data like at-risk accounts and subscription plan changes 
  4. Coach underperforming salespeople and reward top performers
  5. Enrich sales meetings and make them more structured
  6. Motivate sellers to do their best work through friendly competition
  7. Boost employee morale and engagement by recognizing achievements and milestones
  8. Communicate sales milestones to remote and onsite employees with a need to know

Choosing the right systems to generate, present and share your sales reports and dashboards is vital. Sales reports typically pull data from business data sources like:

  • CRM apps
  • Ecommerce platforms 
  • Finance apps
  • Spreadsheets
  • Contact center management applications 

Investing in a sales reporting tool that can extract and analyze data via APIs from multiple data sources–without requiring advanced business intelligence knowledge–is vital for high-growth, multichannel businesses.

What’s the difference between a dashboard and a report?

Sales dashboard examples

We should clarify the difference between a report and a dashboard (even if the terms are sometimes used interchangeably).

Generally speaking, a report is more detailed, and is shared at regular intervals. It might include some manual analysis or commentary, which can only be produced periodically. Reports help you understand and diagnose what’s happened in the past. 

A dashboard, on the other hand, helps people monitor KPIs in the moment. The data on the dashboard stays up to date and is designed so users can easily access the information they need at a glance. Dashboards help you monitor performance and keep your team aware of their current progress.

Key approaches to effective sales reporting

Years ago, creating sales reports years ago was a complex, manual process that required considerable technical skills. It was prone to error since reports often required manual data entry, and reporting apps didn’t offer the kinds of role-based data access controls (RBAC).

For example, HubSpot and Salesforce enable departmental and regional sales managers to have visibility across their teams. A VP of Sales will have broader access across all sales industries or territories, and reps only have reporting visibility to their pipeline and account-related data.

Important reporting strategies and priorities include:

  • Defining your audience and target market: Framing your ideal client profile (ICP) and marketing personas
  • Deciding on scheduled report frequency: Should reports be available on-demand, monthly or quarterly?
  • Choosing the most impactful KPIs: Personalized metrics that best reflect your business performance:
    • Ensure your company’s sales efforts align with your short- and long-term business goals
    • Provide clear visibility into sales performance 
    • Guide strategic decision-making 
    • Drive meaningful improvements toward meeting individual and team targets
  • Creating dashboards to help your team and other stakeholders visualize the data with identify patterns and trends at a glance.
  • Sharing reports and dashboards based on audience needs: Sales teams may need detailed reports on individual performance metrics like revenue targets, win rates, deal progress and pipeline stages. Executives might prefer high-level summaries and trend analyses.

Sales reporting best practices

As CRM and business analysis tools evolve, ensuring sales report accuracy follows the classic ‘quality data in, quality data out’ mantra—or QIQO if you will (as opposed to garbage in/garbage out or GIGO). Creating company policies around data accuracy and quality is important to generating sales reports and dashboards you can act on. A sales dashboard system that can integrate with multiple data sources minimizes human data entry and improves data integrity. 

For some companies, different areas of the business have varying priorities pertaining to the sales data that matters most to their role, while others are common across the business. Using a system that provides tailored dashboards based on their needs and preferences helps make the dashboard a vital tool in their day-to-day duties. 

For example, an ecommerce manager will be concerned about top products by sales, average order value, and sales volume. Meanwhile, B2B direct sales managers care about lifetime account value, pipeline value, and average deal size. Product managers will want to see sales volumes on a per-product basis for inventory planning purposes. 

Businesses that reach their target market through multiple channels, including online, direct sales and resellers, can configure and customize their dashboards for the unique needs of each user role.  

Sales reporting success stories

Just as your employees in different roles will prioritize certain sales reports and dashboards, certain industries have reporting types that are especially very useful. For example:

  • SaaS providers - Monthly recurring revenue, customer lifetime value (CLTV) and churn analysis reports. Case study: Finstrat Management
  • Retail and ecommerce - Sales by product, average order size, store performance, customer buying patterns, unfulfilled orders. Case study: Premiere Book Group and Jigsaw
  • Manufacturing - Sales by product, sales by region, supply chain performance, competitive analysis. Case study: Dymatec
  • Healthcare services - Sales by rep, service line performance, sales pipeline, referral sources. Case study: Touchcare

Choose and implement sales reporting and dashboard tools for your business that are interoperable with your existing application stack, including CRM, e-commerce, and analysis data sources. They should be flexible enough to align with your real-world business workflows and the roles and preferences of your employees whose jobs depend on the success of your business development, sales and account management teams. 

Conclusion

Leading a sales team in a high-growth business can be a lot like driving a high-performance sports car. A sales manager needs to know their team’s pipeline value and activity rate by rep. A driver needs to know that their engine has the fuel it needs to reach their destination, how efficiently the vehicle is running and consuming fuel. 

Just as a driver shouldn’t need to be a mechanic to drive a modern vehicle, a sales leader shouldn’t have to be a data scientist to access the KPIs and data points they need to monitor their team’s performance. Due to advanced SaaS-based apps, sales analysis is faster and easier to personalize and share than ever before. 

Are you looking to create dashboards that distill sales report data into visuals that motivate and inspire your sales team? 

Do you need to provide executives with macro-level revenue performance snapshots on demand? Try Geckoboard for free for 14 days. Build KPI-rich sales dashboards in minutes, and see how easily you can get more value from your company’s data to drive business growth.