What is a sales report?

The sales report is a document that concentrates all the information on negotiations made in a given period by the commercial team. Its objective is to keep the company informed of the activities and results generated by the sales team and provide the management of strategic data to set new goals.

In addition, the external sales report brings a series of benefits to the team, such as productivity, efficiency and quality in customer service. Want to know how it works? Keep reading!

It is a document that provides an overview of the company’s sales, bringing a detailed history of the results obtained over the months.

The sales report allows you to identify trends and opportunities, measure salespeople performance, and develop a data-driven team.

What should a sales report include?

There are different types of sales reports and the elements they include will depend on what you want to report. Each section allows managers or directors to make adjustments to the sales process, and also serves as a presentation to other team members so they can see the growth of the company.

Each report is different, for example:

• Sales summary:  serves to visualize the growth and progress of sales. The elements to highlight are the sales levels achieved, the monthly growth and the percentage of growth obtained.
• Profit and Loss Report –  Works to measure customers gained and lost. The relevant elements are the  quotes  made, the objectives sought and the annual closing rate.
• Contact Report:  This analysis is very useful when a company wants to know its new opportunities. Here are the names of the contacts, their industry, contact dates and other information that serves as a reference to approach them.

1. Daily sales report

A daily sales report gives you information about the performance and amount of activities carried out by your sales team with your prospects and potential clients in the last 24 hours. 

Monitoring the daily activity of sales teams is extremely important for subsequent decision making. Knowing how many calls or emails all members of the sales force are sending is vital information for managers, and will help them with the necessary steps to maintain a good level of productivity in their area.

A daily sales report allows you to know first-hand if there is any failure in any of the KPIs of your company’s sales process. This way you will know if any of your salespeople are having difficulties or if your process in general requires a review to make it healthier and thus prevent your sales force from suffering or performing below the expected level.

2. Weekly sales report

A weekly sales report is especially useful to know all those situations that need to be corrected immediately, whether in your sales process or in your team. This will help you prevent prospects in your sales pipeline from becoming lost customers.

A weekly report is the ideal way to stay on top of your team’s productivity, and your weekly meetings typically revolve around these results. Having weekly sales reports or reports with accurate information will show you the difficulties that any member of your team may be facing. This way you will be able to know who requires more support from you to achieve the objectives.

Although having weekly meetings with your sales team can be complicated, since many members of your team may be dealing with a prospect at that moment, generating the culture of creating a weekly sales report is a great way to have all members aligned. of the sales force.

3. Monthly sales report

The monthly sales report, unlike daily and weekly sales reports, does not seek to discover situations that are affecting your sales process or the business. The purpose of this report is to provide an overview of your sales team’s performance against long-term objectives.

A monthly sales report helps you determine if you are achieving the desired conversion rate, know the status of your sales pipeline, and know if your team is performing as expected.

Taking this into account, it is time to move on to creating the sales report. Consider that the following steps will help you create not only daily sales reports, but also weekly or monthly sales reports, or any other type of sales report with the frequency you decide. 

Why do sales reports?

The sales report is like a compass that guides the external sales team towards the objectives stipulated in the commercial strategic planning.

It provides a series of insights to improve the commercial management of the company as a whole, not only driving the sales strategy, but also encouraging salespeople to engage more with the organization and the results sought.

Through the analysis of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), your sales team has at hand the necessary tools to correct deviations from goals, improve the accuracy of conversions and win customers with greater assertiveness.

How does the sales report optimize processes?

The use of sales management software integrated with other solutions is already a reality for many companies, but not all.

Implementing technologies that keep the company and external employees connected is critical to accelerating processes and promoting a unique experience for the organization’s customers.

When you have a tool that digitizes the completion of the sales report and automates the sharing of information with other sectors, it gives greater speed to the processes that will ensure that the product or service sold reaches the customer with quality and speed.

In addition, important information is prevented from being lost along the way and the sale is prevented from being affected by the inefficiency of manual processes.

Why does the sales report increase productivity?

Time is a scarce resource, therefore, one of the most valuable for any organization. The more we can produce in the same amount of time, the greater our productivity at work .

In this sense, the external sales report comes in as a time optimization tool, as it allows you to send information online without having to travel.

Using software or applications that allow parameterization of some information that is standard for all salespeople, such as a price list, it is faster to fill digital service orders, consolidate sales data and keep the company always up to date with the evolution of commercial goals.

The monitoring of external work teams through GPS contributes to the optimization of routes, which also influences the optimization of time and the productivity of salespeople. With fewer trips to make, you can talk to more customers.

Integrated into the company’s time tracking application , sales reports provide even more data on salespeople’s behavior, making people management easier.

Start and end time of the workday, number of customers visited per day, unnecessary displacements or stops and better use of hours worked are some of the information that can be collected from these tools.

How to create your sales report?

The type of sales report depends on the company’s objectives, the characteristics of your business, the profile of the team and also how often you want to monitor the performance of the team. Therefore, you must:

1. Define the purpose of the sales report

What is the purpose of the sales report for your company? What kind of information should he gather? How will they contribute to achieving the organization’s strategic objectives?

2. Identify your target audience

Who will have access to sales reports and why? Keeping in mind the audience for which the document is intended makes it easier to define a language and format for the report, as well as the communication channels used to give visibility to the information.

3. Stipulate the frequency

Will your sales report be daily, weekly or monthly? Here it is essential to understand how long it takes a seller to close a deal, so that there are no unnecessary charges in the process.

Working under constant pressure can undermine your sales team‘s confidence and affect results.

4. Select KPIs to monitor

What performance indicators will appear in your sales report? Are they easily monitored and understood by everyone? Do they really help the company make strategic decisions about trade policy?

5. Provide the context

Data presented in a raw form, without contextualization, are not always reliable. For example: your company may have a drop in sales in the month of May, however, due to a constant seasonality in the search for your products and services.

If seasonality is not mentioned and sales history for the same period in other years is not presented, it may appear that your team’s performance has dropped, which would not be accurate.

6. Use visuals

Ensuring that everyone involved understands the context and reality of the data is essential to arouse the engagement of the team and also of the managers. In this sense, the use of visual aids is always recommended.

Instead of presenting all the numbers in spreadsheets, prefer to use graphs, infographics and comparatives. Control dashboards are very good at presenting results in a visual and intuitive way.

You already have the first steps to develop your external sales report and increase team productivity. Now it’s time to put the knowledge learned into practice.