What is a sales report?

A sales report, also known as a sales analysis report, is a document that summarizes a business’s sales activities. This report typically includes information on sales volume, leads, new accounts, revenue and costs for a given period. It may also analyze this information along each step of the sales funnel and indicate your sales team’s performance (or any gaps therein).

These reports might help your company modify its sales approach and other growth initiatives. They can provide insights into sales methodology successes, predictions of future sales data, analyses of performance compared to previous periods, and greater understanding of customer motivations.

What are the different types of sales reports?

No two sales reports look exactly the same. Different types of sales reports focus on different sales metrics, needs or strategies. These are some of the report types:

• Sales forecasts. These reports predict the number of sales your team will make in a given period. You can use them to anticipate seasonal slowdowns or plan for issues that might affect business.
• Sales funnel reports. These reports show how close a lead is to buying your product or service. Sales funnels help you understand how to best nurture leads and, ultimately, convert them into customers. If you compare back-to-back sales funnel reports, you can identify weaknesses in your sales pipeline.
• Conversion reports. These reports resemble sales funnel reports in that they assess the progress of leads along the sales funnel, although they look specifically at the conversion of leads to customers, not the status of leads along the funnel. A standard conversion tracking report includes information about contacts, leads generated and qualified, and wins, with period-to-period change rates indicated as well.
• Opportunity score reports. Opportunity score reports are based on the Einstein opportunity score. This metric, which artificial intelligence determines, rates leads from one to 99, where a higher score means a higher likelihood of a sales win. These reports are useful for planning how to divide your team’s time pursuing leads.
• Upsell and cross-sell reports. These reports detail the number and value of items upsold or cross-sold to customers. Your team can review these reports to identify future upselling and cross-selling opportunities or flag certain products and services as especially suited for these sales approaches.
• Sales call reports. These sales reports concern calls placed to leads, prospects and customers to encourage purchases. These reports can help you gain insights into your reps’ performance and your leads’ qualities.

Sales reports can be set to various frequencies and tied to key performance indicators (KPIs), helping you to monitor your success over time. These are some common frequencies:

• Daily sales reports. A daily sales report can track KPIs such as a rep’s number of daily calls and leads generated.
• Weekly sales reports. A weekly sales report can track KPIs, such as the entire sales team’s deals closed or revenue earned.
• Monthly sales reports. A monthly sales report can provide a longer-term overview of the metrics tracked in either a daily or weekly sales report.
• Annual sales reports. An annual sales report is an especially lengthy, detailed version of a monthly sales report. It may be the most useful for determining a subsequent year’s sales quotas. It can also help you address sales management issues, indicate seasonal fluctuations, observe the impacts of marketing campaigns, and identify especially successful sales reps.

What are the key elements of a sales report?

The key elements depend on the type of report. In general, though, sales reports should contain the following figures:

• Relevant KPIs, as determined by the above criteria
• Sales volume
• Net sales (this is a dollar figure, whereas sales volume is simply the number of sales made)
• Gross sales (net sales minus the cost of sales)
• Percent of KPI change compared to the previous reporting period

You’ll notice that this list of figures is relatively short, even though you may have many KPIs to include in your report. That’s because staying concise is key; you don’t want to overwhelm the people reading your report right out of the gate.

However, figures alone aren’t enough to constitute a sales report. You’ll also need to provide a written explanation of what these numbers mean and how they should compel the company to act. We’ll discuss this step in the detailed report-writing guide below.

How do you write a sales report?

Follow these steps to create a sales report:

1. Decide how your sales report will look.

A sales report should be more than a document full of numbers and explanations. It should also be eye-catching and easy for someone to read without feeling overwhelmed. To achieve this, you can download a sales report template from your point of sale (POS) system. Alternatively, you can use any of the best CRM software to easily create several report types.

2. Consider your audience.

If you’re a high-ranking sales team member presenting a report to your head of sales, you may want to include a lot of KPIs. Executives might be looking for a more succinct summary. Further, a CEO might be interested in different data than a CFO. Your CRM software should be able to help you reformat your sales data for any audience.

3. Include the appropriate information.

Once you know your audience and the depth of reporting expected, you can decide whether to include or exclude certain data sets, such as sales revenue and costs, period-to-period KPI change, progress toward sales goals, sales by product or service, sales forecasts, and future sales plans.

4. Determine your current and previous periods.

Given the frequency criteria described above, determine whether the information you want to convey is best presented in an annual, monthly, weekly or daily view. Then, compare your information for this period to an equivalent prior period. For example, if you’re presenting sales information for February 2021, note percentage changes in this period’s KPIs as compared to all of January 2021 — and not just the final week of January.

5. Compile your data.

Once you’ve established your information needs and data period, it’s time to actually compile your data. This step typically means logging in to your CRM software and pulling up data, then either downloading it for use in another program or turning it into reports right from your CRM dashboard. Either way, sales reporting doesn’t stop at getting your data in one place.

6. Present your information appropriately.

Sales reports should be more than lists of numbers. Include plenty of graphs and other helpful images to help your audience make sense of these figures. Make sure to use the right type of graph. For example, an annual report might call for a line chart to show revenues month over month. Your CRM software might be able to auto-generate these charts, or you can use Excel to assist in graph creation.

7. Double-check your data and information.

After you’ve compiled your data and created charts and graphs, you should go back to steps one and two: considering your audience and including appropriate information. Sometimes, you won’t realize you’ve put in too much or too little information until after your first draft of a report. Don’t be afraid to take out information, recreate graphs or ask a fellow sales team member for assistance. Remember, everyone needs an editor. It’s important to strike a balance between insight and overabundance well before you walk into your meeting.

8. Explain your data.

This final step is perhaps the most important. Again, presenting data itself is only half the battle; you need to put words to your data for it to mean much to your audience.

For example, if your monthly report shows a sales decline from the previous period for the first time in several months, don’t assume your audience will infer the cause of this decline. Provide an analysis that suggests the decline is due to an expected seasonal slowdown compounded by an economic downturn. You should also open your report with a written summary of data from the previous period. 

Your written explanations should at once justify your figures and be justified by your figures. They should also outline fixes that your team plans to implement. For example, if a key competitor’s limited-time discounts have reduced your sales, explain how you will pursue the customers lost to that promotion. You can meaningfully present even the most concerning data if you determine an actionable, fixable root cause.

Once you do act, sales could increase. Therein lies the value of the sales report.

Sales report template

This template of a simple daily sales report could be used for retail stores, restaurants or any other business managing inventory including several different items. If you’re using one of the best point of sale systems (POS systems), you will be able to easily pull this data using the platform’s reporting tools. 

There are certainly more robust types of sales reports, such as sales funnel conversion reports and upsell/cross-sell reports, but this basic sales report is the most essential for a small business. 

Sales reports help guide business success

When you have sales data organized in easy-to-review reports, you can make better decisions about which products and services to emphasize and which might be losing you money. With sales data at your fingertips, you can help guide your business to solid ground and scale what works best for your bottom line. Whether you want a simple daily sales report or you’re looking for more complex data, consider using POS software. It can streamline the task for you as well as prevent double data entry and human error.

Jacob Bierer-Nielsen contributed to this article.