As a sales manager, it’s your responsibility to unlock the full potential of your team and drive remarkable business growth. There are different ways to achieve this, but one toll is the alpha and omega of informed decision-making: a sales manager report.
In this blog post, we’ll talk about:
- Creating sales manager reports that are clear, concise, and engaging
- Presenting the data to highlight the key insights and recommendations
- Using these reports to coach your team and boost their morale
- Implementing sales report best practices
What’s a Sales Manager Report?
A sales manager report (also known as a sales analysis report) is a document that highlights different trends impacting your sales operations within a specific period.
This essential document summarizes and analyzes the activities and results of your sales team and helps you:
- Monitor your sales reps’ performance,
- Identify their strengths and weaknesses,
- Determine the health of your sales pipeline,
- Improve sales outcomes with data-driven insights,
- Forecast your sales.
Insights from this report help you identify the strengths and weaknesses of your sales strategy and make better decisions.
How to Create Sales Manager Reports
Collecting relevant and accurate data is essential to your sales reports. Still, it’s not enough to cram all these numbers into a lengthy report and present them in a meeting that will turn into a snoozefest.
An effective sales manager report is more than a sum of numbers and data — it’s a roadmap that directs your sales team in the right direction and serves as a useful tool for sales forecasting.
Here’s how you can do that.
1. Determine the purpose of your report
The first step in creating an engaging sales report is identifying your goal. Only then will it be possible to quickly determine a reporting timeframe and the best data to include.
For instance, if the purpose of your sales report is to motivate your reps, a weekly report showing several KPIs will show your team how far they are from the company’s monthly goal.
2. Define the target audience
Who will read your sales report?
Your sales reps will be interested in (and benefit from) an entirely different set of metrics than your CEO. Similarly, your VP of Marketing will require other metrics and insights. Although all these roles are from the same organization or department, they need different information to do their job properly.
Sales reps may want granular details on their sales performance.
Your marketing team lead may only be interested in how marketing campaigns translate to sales.
And your busy CEO may only want a recap of how joint marketing and sales efforts performed without the specifics of how you reached your goals. That’s why your sales report should reflect those needs.
3. Analyze and explain key insights from your data
You need to make sense of your data by explaining why each metric is important and contextualizing it.
For example, instead of just stating that there’s a drop in the sales rate, a high lead conversion ratio, or an increase in deals won in a specific region, it’s crucial to provide the why for each of these data points.
In other words, whenever you notice an upward or downward trend in your data, make sure to interpret and operationalize it so that your team can understand what they should improve and what they can continue doing to achieve the best results.
4. Decide on a reporting timeframe
Your reporting timeframe depends on your sales objectives and how frequently you need to update your team or management. You can do this in three ways:
- Daily sales reporting shows the sales activities that each rep does every business day. It helps you monitor your rep’s day-to-day performance, keep them accountable, and measure sales outcomes such as how long each cold call lasts, how many sales opportunities they create, how many cold calls they make, how many proposals they send, and how many emails they write.
- Weekly sales reporting evaluates the weekly sales results of each rep and your whole sales team. It lets you know which reps meet their KPIs and which ones need more support. Weekly sales reports include metrics such as how many calls/contacts they make, how many leads they turn into opportunities, how many leads they convert into customers, how many appointments they book, how many deals they close, how much sales revenue they generate by channel, and how much sales revenue they generate by region.
- Monthly sales reporting summarizes your team’s sales performance for the month. It helps you assess how well your sales strategy works and what changes you need to make, if any. Monthly sales reports cover metrics such as the number of sales at each stage of the pipeline, how many meetings are scheduled, how long it takes to close a deal, what the average close rate is, what the average deal size is, and what the total sales revenue is.
5. Leverage Data Visualization
Use visuals to illustrate vital trends and metrics.
Creating attractive visuals like pie charts or bar charts saves time for those who don’t want to wade through spreadsheets with lots of numbers.
You can use different types of charts to show your sales data in a clear and engaging manner. For instance, a line graph can display how revenue changes over time. A pie chart can show the percentage of sales for each product category. Bar graphs can help compare the performance of different salespeople.
Using visuals in your sales report can help you communicate your main points effectively and attractively. It can also reveal important patterns and issues in key sales indicators that may affect future sales results.
Moreover, using visuals can help you create a stunning report that keeps your audience engaged and interested.
Types of Sales Manager Reports
Many types of sales reports depend on your goal, audience, or timeframe.
For example, you’ll probably want to have monthly, quarterly, and annual reports to analyze your sales progress and trends. Or you can focus on different sales process stages and draft a separate report for the number of leads generated and conversion rates.
Some of the most common types of sales reports are:
1. Sales Pipeline Report
A sales pipeline report is a document that shows the status and progress of your sales opportunities. It allows you to understand everything that happens with your leads the moment they’re in the funnel and why.
A sales pipeline report can help you identify:
- The number of leads in your pipeline
- The sources your leads come from
- How long it takes to move a lead from one stage to another
- Conversion rates and win rates at each stage
- The revenue you can expect from your pipeline
- The deals that are at risk of being lost or delayed
- How you improve my sales performance and efficiency
This kind of report gives you valuable insights into your sales activities and outcomes. You can identify bottlenecks and gaps in your sales process, prioritize your tasks and resources, forecast your sales accurately, and optimize your sales strategy.
2. Sales Activity Report
Are your sales reps hustling or slacking?
Do they need any help diversifying their efforts?
Are their CRM records up to date?
A sales activity report will answer these and many other questions related to the productivity of your sales reps and how they’re spending their time at work. Besides getting a clear overview of their activities, such as the number of calls they make or the emails they send each week, as well as if they’re following up with leads regularly and leveraging social media for networking and selling, this type of report will help you identify how to make the most of your sales reps’ time.
Statistics say that sales reps spend only 28% of their time actually selling.
At the same time, most of their week goes into tasks such as data entry, prioritizing leads, paperwork, and networking with prospects virtually, to name just a few.
Not all these activities are equally important because many can be automated. For example, instead of tasking your sales reps with determining who’s the next hottest lead to reach out to, you can take advantage of VanillaSoft’s Lead Routing feature. This system prioritizes the opportunities most likely to convert and pushes them to the front of the call queue.
3. Average Deal Size Report
The average deal size is a critical sales operations metric, as it tells you how many sales your team has to close to hit your revenue target.
Let’s say your quarterly revenue target is $500,000, and the average deal size is $25,000. This means your reps have to secure 20 deals over the four months to achieve this goal.
Additionally, knowing the average deal size can help you plan how to allocate your resources, monitor the effectiveness of your campaigns, track your business growth, and evaluate your reps’ performance.
4. Customer Churn Report
65% of an average company’s revenue comes from existing customers. So if your churn rates are high, you’re losing lots of business opportunities and money due to some deep-seated problems you need to pinpoint and resolve.
This could be for several reasons — misalignment among different departments during the sales process, mainly sales, marketing, and customer support, poor product or service quality, inadequate pricing, or lack of critical product features.
In case you notice an increase in the churn rate, make sure to talk to your customers and ask them about the challenges they face and what they would like you to change or improve.
5. Lead Response Time Report
Speed to lead or lead response time is a vital sales metric that makes a difference between a won and lost deal.
Even if your sales cycle isn’t lengthy, it’s essential to get in touch with your potential customers within the first 10-60 minutes after they become leads, as that significantly increases the likelihood they’ll convert. In some industries like insurance, this window of opportunity to ultimately close a deal is even shorter.
So, measuring how long it takes for your sales reps to follow up with new leads will allow you to identify potential bottlenecks and speed things up.
6. Marketing Collateral Usage Report
This report is a document that provides an overview of how your marketing collateral is being used.
It can help you understand which content works and which doesn’t. This report can also help you identify areas where you need to improve your marketing collateral to better meet your target audience’s needs.
Use this report to help your marketing team create more effective and valuable collateral that will allow your sales team to nurture and qualify leads better and move them down the sales funnel more quickly.
Closing Words
Creating sales reports is necessary and an opportunity to improve your sales performance and strategy. By tracking the right metrics, analyzing the data, and presenting it in a clear and engaging way, you can gain valuable insights into your sales operations and make better decisions. Whether you use a template, software, or your own creativity, sales reports can help you achieve your sales goals and grow your business.
