Sales managers should always stay on top of their company’s growth and development. But in reality, it’s hard to determine exactly what or who contributes to its success. This is because there are a lot of factors and stages involved in sales processes.
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So this is where sales reporting come in. In managing a sales team, it takes more than just computing revenues. If you want to be an effective sales manager, you need to know the whole process of sales. In terms of this, there’s a lot to learn!
Have you ever considered using sales report templates? A sale reporting gives an insight into the whole foundation of sales. It also helps you understand the process of sales operations.
And the sales report would help you keep track of all the information at each step of a sales process. You can analyze the data on it and somehow predict where the success of your company lies. You can also come up with ideas for improvement based on the data in the report.
There’s more to calculating the growth of your company through your sales numbers. You also need to know what’s driving the sales to discover what drives those sales. You need to do this so you can keep your sales up even if your market grows.
Sales Report Templates
You need to be able to understand the reasons behind the results of your sales report. Then you’ll be able to focus on more important things. This is why such reports are very important. Here are some questions you can answer using the document:
- How come a specific member of the team has many prospects but doesn’t close a lot of deals?
- How come one member can break sales records while another can’t even get past the first stage of sales?
- Is your company currently on track to meet your yearly target?
- Do you need to make some modifications to your sales processes?
Such reports are truly beneficial. This article is all about this document. By the end of the article, you should be able to understand sales reports and even make them effectively.
The benefits of using a sales report
When you make a sales report template, you may be able to enhance your sales processes. There are some important benefits to using sales reporting tools. These apply to any type of business you’re in. Here are some of those benefits:
- It can help provide genuine communication. A daily sales report can help you learn all about the sales processes which happened in a day. But generally, such tools can help you make the sales process more personal. This is especially for your clients. Even if you have a lot of clients, you can keep a file for each of them. On the file, you can store the whole sales history along with other relevant details. Through this, you can give your clients a better experience each and every time.
- You can save time with easy access to information. You may want to use your time wisely in order to generate income. To do this, you’ll benefit a lot from asking your people to produce a daily salesman report. These reports would contain relevant information which you can access quickly and easily. If all your information is in one location, referencing becomes a lot easier.
- You can improve your strategies for client acquisition. The data on your reports may help enable you to identify your best prospects correctly. You can also use the information to focus your communication efforts. This is in relation to your client acquisition strategies. You can lessen the time and expenses of determining if a client is worth pursuing or not. This means that you have higher chances of speaking to clients who are more receptive.
- Use it to analyze data for development planning. Again, you can use the data on the reports for to your advantage. You can analyze the data to generate useful insights. This may help you boost your sales, close more deals, and enhance your forecast accuracy.
- Documents all important information. When there are changes and turnovers in your organization, reporting tools may help. They would contain all the information which you may need as for reference. They would help recall important information about clients dealt with in the past.
- Allows you to deliver an excellent client experience. Clients who work with your organization expect an excellent experience. It’s the basis of your entire sales business. Managing client relationships in a timely manner will definitely enhance your earning potential. Therefore, you’ll be able to form relationships easier in the long-term. As you can see, such reports are truly beneficial. They may seem simple but they would provide you with a lot of advantages. Now let’s take a look at some of the common types of reports made in sales.
Sales Report Examples
Common types of sales reports
You can make different types of sales report templates or download it from here. Alternatively, you can create it depending on the requirements of the company. You can make a customized format which would fit into your own business.
In doing this, you can create a report template you can use to get all the benefits of sales reporting. Here are some of the most common types of reports:
- Activities
When you’re managing your sales team, you should be able to coach them well too. The success of sales comes from the efforts of your salespeople. If you want to keep track of their performance, you can ask your people to make a sales activities report.
Through this, you can see how your people are performing. You’ll be able to spot easily who needs help. Then you can help your people improve if needed. Such reports may show the activities as well as the people performing them. Analyzing all this information would be very useful.
- Bookings trend
This type of report would show you how the sales are doing in a particular time frame. This information would help you identify where you currently stand with your goals. You can determine if you’re on track or you’ve already fallen behind.
- Churned customers
This type of report would help you understand why people churn out of your customer base. This information may be more useful than learning about why you’ve lost deals in the past.
The information in this report can reveal what went wrong in your sales processes. This mistake may have been the reason why your customers churned out.
- Company-wide sales benchmarks
This report is also extremely useful. Through this report, you may be able to assess how much stock you can place in your reps’ forecasts. Do this by understanding the usual conversion rates in the steps of your sales process.
This report would also contain the standard cycle length and deal size.
- Lead aging
This type of report would show you all the information about your leads. Great sales managers know that most leads don’t work out, at least for the first few days. This means that the probability of the leads converting falls drastically.
If all sales personnel make a daily salesman report of this type, it would be very beneficial. It would show information about which people need help in their follow-up processes.
This would then increase the conversion rate of leads to potential opportunities.
- Pipeline
This type of report is a must-have in a business dealing with sales. Without such a report, there’s no effective way to evaluate the success of your business. A pipeline report can help you learn the things you need to deal with.
You can learn better which deals are “sure” and which ones you’re likely to lose. Also, you may learn how these deals would impact your business.
- Rep-specific process benchmarks
This type of report serves as the other half of Company-wide sales benchmarks. With both reports, you will be able to understand your business a lot more. This type of report is especially useful if you’re running a huge business.
If one of your reps struggles with meeting the quota, you can use this report. You can refer to it when you’re suggesting some points for improvement.
- Won and lost deals analysis
In order to understand your business better, these reports would be very useful. You need to keep track of all the deals you win and lose. Then you can start analyzing the deals in order to understand them better.
Try to look for any common aspects of the deals. In doing this, you may gain some valuable insight into your product. You may be able to learn more about its strengths and weaknesses.
These are the most common types of sales reports businesses use. Of course, if none of these apply to your own organization, you can choose to make other types and formats. The important thing is that the report must suit your own needs.
Sales Report Samples
Tips for making an excellent sales report
If you’re in the sales business, you may have already encountered a sales report. You may have already read different kinds of sales report templates. All these made by different people.
Some are simple and easy to understand while some are too complex. Because of this, you may even become confused after reading them!
When you’re tasked to make such a report, you need to make sure that your readers will understand what you’ve made. Remember that the information in your report is very important. To help you out, here are some tips to guide you:
Know your audience
No matter what kind of report you make, you should already know who will read it. If you know your audience, it will be a lot easier to create the report using the correct wording.
For instance, if you’re writing a daily sales report and you know your boss will read it. Make sure it’s clear and professional. Your report must show the needs of your specific audience. This way, the document will be very useful and efficient.
When you’ve already identified your audience, think about the information to share. In some cases, you don’t have to share too many details. But there are also some reports which need to be very detailed. You need to include a lot of details so your audience will understand them better.
Usually, most reports given to the upper management of a business would be very detailed. But such information isn’t required for each report you write. This applies if you’re submitting it someone who’s interested in specific information.
Set a time period
Depending on the type of report you’ll make, you need to set a time period to complete it. If it’s something like a daily salesman report, then you’d have a deadline for submission.
But when you’re deciding for your employees, you need to set the time period. You can ask your sales personnel to create a report daily, weekly, monthly, and so on. The time period will help your people determine where to focus on when making the report.
Use the right visuals
Reports don’t just have to contain text. You can make use of different visuals to convey the information in your document. Remember that the way you present the content is just as important as the content itself.
Collect all the data you need
You can’t create any kind of report without collecting all the data you need first. Make sure that the information is correct and from reliable sources. You need to learn how to collect data efficiently.
Do this so that you can create a compelling and accurate report.
Limit the fluff
It’s quite useless to create an extremely lengthy report which just contains a lot of fluff. Then your audience would have to read the whole thing, even all the useless information.
More often than not, people are more interested in reading brief reports.
It’s very tempting to stuff a report with a lot of information. This is especially true if you want to convey your message completely. However, you need to resist the urge to include too many details.
You need to present a clear, concise, and complete report. This would help them take action if needed.
