Sales reports play a vital role in informing operational adjustments and strategic decisions by offering insights into business activity and performance. Crafting impactful reports entails determining objectives, audience, and time frames, followed by extracting and analyzing data from your sales data sources.

This article will introduce you:

• What is a sales report
• Importance of sales report
• Tips for writing a sales report
• 4 types of sales reports & their purposes (with samples and templates)
• How to create daily, weekly, and monthly sales reports automatically and efficiently?

What is a Sales Report?

A sales report, also known as a sales analysis report, provides an overall sight of sales activities’ performance within a period. You can see such information as current and past sales and emerging trends that matter most to your business in your report.

Why is a Sales Report Important?

The sales report is necessary because it details the sales representative’s work performance, reveals whether the team is reaching the quota as planned, and alerts management to potential problems. It can help sales managers analyze the achievements and shortcomings of the sales team and customer shopping data.

Besides, the company’s executives always hope to obtain high-level sales performance reports from sales managers to promote evaluation and decision-making. After all, the sales department can be said to be the company’s profit engine.

Tips for Writing Sales Reports

Sales reports don’t have to be purely numbered, nor paragraph upon paragraph of dry information. You can make it visually appealing by adding charts, lines, and bar graphs. 

Moreover, you can use some report templates design, for example, quarterly report templates for sales scenarios to get rid of the tedious report writing process and automate the daily, weekly, and monthly report work (just like the following examples I made with FineReport).

Advantages of Sales Report

Maintaining standardized reporting practices is essential for the prosperity of your business. Consider the following key advantages of establishing a regular sales reporting rhythm.

Enhancing Team and Representative Performance

Sales reports provide valuable insights driven by data, shedding light on the sales performance of individual representatives as well as the entire team. This enables you to identify underperforming reps who may benefit from coaching. Additionally, it allows you to pinpoint individuals who would benefit from regular one-on-one meetings to elevate their performance and achieve their quotas.

The same principle applies to your team as a whole. If your team is not meeting the company’s revenue goals, sales reports can help identify areas for improvement in the sales process.

Facilitating Swift Decision-making

Informed and timely decision-making is crucial for the success of any sales strategy, and sales reporting excels in this aspect.

Regular sales reporting empowers your executives or managers to swiftly adapt and iterate based on factors driving the company’s growth. It also enables tracking and adjustment of sales tactics that are performing below expectations.

Boosting Morale within the Sales Team

While creating daily sales reports may be time-consuming, whether done on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, these reports have the potential to elevate team morale.

Monitoring and showcasing the sales performance of each team member serves as motivation to strive for greater achievements. By introducing gamification elements to performance results, you can challenge team members to surpass average performance levels. In essence, sales reporting fosters healthy competition and encourages your sales team to aim for the highest possible outcomes.

4 Types of Sales Reports with Templates & Samples

Let’s take a look at some sales report examples that have been adopted in some companies, hope these templates can give you some inspiration.

Note: All the sales report templates shown in this article are created by FineReport, a powerful reporting tool that has been honorably mentioned by Gartner Magic Quadrant for ABI Platforms. You can download FineReport for free and have a try!

Sales Management Report

The sales management report allows managers to track the progress and activity of the sales team. It is easy to monitor real-time sales performance by multiple dimensions such as product, region, customer, channel, and revenue. So the managers can have a comprehensive view of sales performance and adjust the sales strategies timely.

Overall Sales Performance Report

The sales performance report shows each sales rep’s performance, with their progress over the same period last year. It also allows you to monitor the company’s sales performance and target achievement progress. To understand the detailed information in each region, you can drill down to the provinces and cities.

Multi-Dimensional Sales Analysis Report

A sales analysis dashboard makes you better understand the sales performance by product, region, or branch. You can view revenue and profit from various dimensions, which facilitates in-depth research on specific regions and products, and ultimately improves the corresponding sales strategy.

Sales Leaderboard Report

The Sales leaderboard is an excellent way to track individual sales performance and motivate the team to hit targets. You can see who’s performing best on your team across multiple sales metrics and KPIs. And making the data available to the entire business can develop friendly competition within your sales team.

Three Steps to Create the Daily, Weekly, and Monthly Sales Reports Efficiently 

The daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly reports might be the most common and powerful way to track sales performance. It is also necessary to send a summarized report to top management during the timed marketing promotions or seasonal spikes.

Although the content varied in the daily, weekly, and monthly reports, the method for generating reports is the same. Here, I take the weekly report as an example to show you how to create it effectively.
The core of simplifying weekly sales reports is report automation; the most important are automated data entry and reporting.

You may use Python and Excel to meet these needs. However, the coding might be too time-consuming to use in the sales team. Here, I suggest that the reporting software requires less code and can be operated efficiently through its drag-and-drop interface.

1. Gather the data for weekly reports in a time-saving way

Now that I am the regional sales team manager, my weekly task is to generate weekly sales reports based on the data I collected from each sales rep. However, if I have to send them Excel files and merge the Excel sheets they send back to me, it will be extremely time-consuming. Unfortunately, data gathering and cleaning might be the most frustrating part of most sales analysis projects.

If you encounter the same problem, using a reporting tool such as FineReport can quickly solve it. Let us see how to make it. 

FineReport provides a data entry function. That is, end-users can fill in data back to the database via online forms. In this way, the sales manager can pre-set the team’s form format and then send the online form to the sales representative to fill in to realize the automatic collection of information. The database where you stored the data will be updated once others enter the latest data.

You can also import Excel data into FineReport in batches. It is convenient to import data from Excel to FineReport in a few clicks after designing the importing templates based on EXCEL sheets.

Besides, when sales data is scattered in ERP, CRM, or other business systems, FineReport can also extract data from various data sources and update the data in real-time.

2. Automate the sales report generation with the report templates

With the data collection problem solved, it is time to design and make the reports. But here is a catch: if I need to do it manually every time I create a weekly report, it will be a waste of time. After all, the weekly report’s structure and style are the same from week to week, but only the data needs to be updated.
Therefore, it would be the best solution if I only need to make a weekly report once, and then the reports can be automatically generated when the database is updated.
How to solve it? First, use the sales templates built-in FineReport or customize the templates and save them with the designer. Bind the weekly report to the data source, then the data presented in the weekly report will be up-to-date. Furthermore, all the report templates can be used directly by the team next time, which dramatically reduces the time for making reports.

3. Share the reports with your team, sales manager, or director

If your leaders tend to know the weekly sales performance regularly, you can still write the report manually every Sunday and prepare it to be sent on Monday. But bad things can happen, and often do, that is, in an emergency, the news will be delayed.

With the schedule function of FineReport, the sales report can be delivered every week automatically via email, SMS messages, or mobile app notices. 

If you are responsible for making weekly reports, you can make full use of FineReport’s regular scheduling and message-reminding function to deliver the sales report to corresponding managers.

If you’re a sales manager who waits for someone to submit a weekly report, you only need to check the FineReport app or your mailbox. In this way, you can monitor your sales performance anytime, anywhere. 

Summary

A sales report is critical in assessing sales activities. To achieve your sales management goals, you can use four types of solutions: sales management report, sales performance report, multi-dimensional Sales Analysis, and sales leaderboard.

Sales data analysis is sometimes arduous, but simplifying reporting process is easy with the reporting software. If you are interested in FineReport’s sales solutions mentioned above, you can download them and build your own sales management system.

Feel free to make an appointment for a live demo with our product experts. We will be more clear about your needs and see how FineBI can help you and your organization transform data into value.