Your role as a sales manager or director comes with multiple responsibilities, from developing and overseeing sales strategies to coaching and managing sales reps. Generating insightful sales reports is a critical component of your role and can involve some heavy lifting. That’s where sales report templates come in handy.
Creating and presenting detailed sales reports that colleagues and management can easily understand can prove time-consuming. But with a few key sales report templates in your arsenal, you’ll have the foundation you need to quickly build and deliver the daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual sales reports required.
Read on to learn more about sales reports, templates, and how to create them, including helpful sales report template examples to get you started.
A sales report, or sales analysis report, is a detailed representation of your team’s sales activities and performance over a specific period. Creating a sales report requires gathering, analyzing, and presenting sales data to spot sales and customer trends and patterns, and determine whether your business’s sales strategy is effective.
Understanding your company’s key performance indicators, sales process, and industry trends is an absolute must to ensure your sales report provides the overview you need. With it, you’ll have the information you need to make data-driven decisions related to your approach and objectives that could impact business growth.
Why is a sales report important? Analyzing sales activity and performance is essential to the success of your overall sales strategy and process. Effective reporting offers insights that may not otherwise be evident and could be the difference between business success or failure.
Let’s take a look at some of the primary benefits your sales department could reap from regular sales report generation and analysis:
Enhance team performance: Understand each sales team member’s and the whole team’s performance and use this to identify potential improvements, such as coaching needs, quota adjustments, and roadblocks in your sales process.
Enable swift decision-making:Regular sales reporting helps management teams quickly pinpoint what’s working, what’s not, and where adjustments must be made to boost sales revenue and growth.
Increase team morale: Tracking and presenting individual sales rep performance can be a great motivator, challenging colleagues and spurring healthy team competition for better sales results.
The different sales report types
Now that you know the importance of a sales report to your team’s success, it’s time to delve into the different types of sales reports you might want to generate and assess.
Yes, there is more than one kind of sales report. And, yes, you’ll want to explore them all for a holistic view of your business’s sales performance. While you may not need to examine every kind of sales report daily, you’ll still need to generate each at regular intervals to track sales, identify trends, and make quick decisions for continued success.
For the best results, each of these reports should be included within a comprehensive sales report covering all the necessary KPIs and metrics.
Here are the core sales report types you should be familiar with:
The sales pipeline report is a snapshot of the sales process and overall sales health, outlining the number and value of deals at each pipeline stage and how likely they are to close.
2. Conversion rate report
The conversion rate report measures the effectiveness of your sales team’s ability to convert prospects into leads and leads into customers.
3. Customer churn report
The customer churn report is a tool for tracking customer churn and identifying possible pricing, product quality, and service issues to resolve and encourage customer retention.
4. Sales forecast report
The sales forecast report provides a prediction of future sales based on historical performance data, market trends, and other related factors.
5. Deals won and lost report
The deals won and lost report provides an overview of sales opportunity outcomes, both overall and by individual sales team members. It offers insights into deal success rates, lost sales, quota attainment, areas for improvement, and more.
6. Average deal size report
The average deal size report offers an overview of the average revenue generated per closed deal, helping you set sales quotas, track performance, and forecast sales revenue.
7. Average sales cycle length report
The average sales cycle length report evaluates the average time a sales rep takes to close a deal, giving you further insight into individual rep performance, sales process efficiency, and opportunities to improve.
8. Sales call report
The sales call report is an assessment of sales rep interactions with prospects and leads to analyze sales team performance, establish winning strategies, and optimize the sales process.
9. Marketing collateral usage report
The marketing collateral usage report helps you determine which marketing materials are most relevant to prospects and effective in driving sales, providing insights into areas for marketing content improvement.
10. Lead response time report
The lead response time report measures the average time your sales reps take to contact prospects after they’ve expressed interest, helping improve lead follow-up efficiency and conversion rates.
11. Revenue report
The revenue report is a breakdown of sales activity, highlighting new business, renewals, and individual sales rep contributions and demonstrating the impact of team member efforts on the overall revenue generated.
What is a sales report template?
A sales report template is a customizable report framework created ahead of time and used as a basis for sales reporting as needed. Inputting your most recent figures and making minor adjustments is all you should need to do when creating a sales report from a template.
Sales directors and managers typically keep a master template for all the different types of sales reports they need to generate regularly. With a template on hand, there’s no need to build a new sales report from scratch each time you need to produce one.
The value of a sales report template
Building sales report templates for your most integral sales analysis reports is a great way to enhance data accuracy, productivity, and growth. In fact, effective use of sales report templates can mean several impactful benefits for you and your sales team, including:
Improved efficiency: You’ll create reports faster with a customizable template, leaving you more time to focus on more critical tasks.
Better data interpretation: Utilizing a sales report template ensures you present data in the same format each time you generate reports, making it easier for team members to familiarize themselves with and understand your reports.
Consistent data tracking: Following your sales report template ensures you report on the same KPIs and metrics each time you generate a report, ensuring consistent data monitoring.
Easy performance comparison: Tracking data consistently using your report template makes it easier to compare data over specific periods or on the whole.
Clearer trend spotting: Another advantage of consistent data tracking and formatting through sales report templates is that it’s easier to spot trends and gain insights when comparing data.
Key sales report template components
No two sales report templates are created equal, and it’s important to ensure yours provides the data essential to your business and team while remaining easy to read and understand. For instance, including too much written content and not enough tables, charts, and graphs for easy data visualization can make your sales report template ineffective.
To ensure your report ticks all the boxes and becomes a useful tool for business growth, we recommend including the following core elements:
Relevant KPIs and metrics: Include all the relevant metrics and KPIs you and your colleagues need to accurately measure performance and make informed decisions.
Specific time periods: Present information over a specific time frame to better track and compare performance over certain periods.
Clear comparison data: Add a column or section that includes comparison data from a previous period to track changes in performance and identify trends and patterns.
Easy-to-read visualizations: Make your report easier to understand and your data easier to compare and digest with attractive visualizations like tables, charts, and graphs.
Customizable fields: Allow for report and data customization to ensure your report remains applicable and effective when market, business, and data changes occur.
Steps to creating a sales report template
There are certain standard steps to creating a sales report template, regardless of whether you’re using sales reporting software, such as a CRM system or Microsoft Excel. Let’s explore some of the most critical steps in this process and walk through why they’re important.
Defining the primary and secondary goals of your sales report and template is a critical step. Once you know your sales reporting objectives, the rest of the template creation steps become easier. Your sales report goals influence the types of data you’ll include to measure those goals and your ideal reporting timeframe.
Consider how often you’ll need to assess progress toward these goals to determine which daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly metrics you should include.
2. Align your report with your audience
Who will use and view your completed sales reports—your CEO, VP, or sales reps? When building your template, think about who your sales report audience will be, and ensure you include the information they’ll want to see.
For example, a busy CEO may only need to see high-level sales and marketing metrics, while your sales team members may want to get more into the specifics of sales activities and performance.
3. Decide on the reporting time period
In step one above, we touched on the cadence of data generation and analysis and how this will depend on your business needs and goals. Step three calls for establishing the most appropriate data presentation and evaluation timeframes, the most common being daily, weekly, and monthly reporting.
Here are some examples of the types of KPIs and metrics you may want to include in each:
Here are some examples of the types of KPIs and metrics you may want to include in each:
Daily sales report template: To track daily sales activities and performance figures, you could include the following:
Outbound call duration
Total sales opportunities
Total outbound calls
Total proposals sent
Total emails sent
Weekly sales report template: For weekly sales performance assessment, consider including these metrics:
Call volume
Conversion rate
Total appointments scheduled
Total deals closed
Sales per channel
Sales per region
Monthly sales report template: Your monthly report should provide more of an overview of performance over the month and may include metrics like:
Total deals per pipeline stage
Total appointments scheduled
Average sales cycle length
Average conversion rate
Average deal size
Total sales volume
4. Gather and evaluate your sales data
You’ll need a tracking and reporting tool to draw the sales data needed for your report and template. The most efficient and seamless way to do this is through your company’s CRM system. If your sales and marketing teams are using your CRM platform effectively, all the sales data you need should be readily available and easy to download or share.
With the right CRM solution, you can track performance, filter and extract the data you need, analyze it, and automate report generation according to your requirements. Without a CRM system, you’ll need to track and gather data using a reliable tool to ensure you have the information you need for your reports.
5. Highlight the central data insights
Granted, your sales reports can provide an endless supply of information and insights. But it’s important to know which are worth investigating and how to present your findings in your report. Ensure there’s space provided within your sales report template to explain the results shown.
For example, your data may indicate a spike in closed deals over the past month compared to the month before. If you’ve implemented a new sales strategy over this period that could account for the rise in sales, it would be wise to include that information next to those results to provide context.
6. Incorporate visualizations to present data
There’s no denying that people usually respond better to information presented using visual elements rather than a wall of text. That’s why data visualization is a key component of an effective sales report template.
If you’re using a CRM like Nutshell with robust reporting features, you can take advantage of its attractive line charts, area charts, pie charts, bar graphs, scatter plots, histograms, tree maps, heat maps, and more.
Effective sales report template examples
To help you get started on your sales reporting journey, we’ve gathered four of the most popular sales report template examples. Using these templates will help you understand the most important metrics to track and gather, as well as how best to present them to your specific audience.
If you’re looking for an easier way to create and present your sales reports, we recommend investing in a reputable CRM system like Nutshell.
You’ll find the following template in this section:
This sales report template is ideal for monitoring daily sales performance metrics across a spectrum of products. It’s a simple template, making it easy to use and perfect for straightforward sales reporting through Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel.
Use this weekly sales report template to monitor sales performance against company and team goals over the week. This report helps you track sales activities such as sales calls, emails, meetings, and closed deals for each sales rep across multiple locations and products. You can use this report to compare daily and weekly progress, spot trends, and build monthly sales reports.
This particular monthly sales report template example is in the form of a sales dashboard, presenting an array of essential high-level sales metrics. Use this report template to gain an overview of individual and team monthly performance and visualize crucial numbers like call volume, meeting frequency, lead generation, and conversion rates.
That’s not all. You can also analyze sales pipeline stages, compare monthly revenue, monitor trends, and identify areas for improvement with this sales report dashboard template.
This basic sales forecast report template gives you a monthly breakdown of historical and prospective sales revenue. With this report, sales managers and teams can evaluate sales opportunities, lead assignments, sales pipeline stage success, and the likelihood of a won deal. It’s the perfect report template for income prediction and business goal setting.
Level up sales reporting with Nutshell
Maximize your sales report templates and put your reporting on autopilot with a world-class CRM solution packed with all the reporting and analytics tools you’ll need.
With advanced reporting software right inside your CRM system, you can leverage lead, contact, sales, and marketing data for deeper insights into your activities, performance, and customers.
Let Nutshell generate custom sales reports for you automatically, analyzing and presenting a broad spectrum of metrics relevant to your business goals. Easily format your sales reports with eye-catching charts and graphs for better data visualization and sharing.
Through powerful automation features, you can generate the reports you need and free up time to focus on tasks that have a more immediate impact on business growth.
Not a Nutshell user yet? Give our award-winning CRM a try today through our 14-day free trial!
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