Let us face the reality. In sales, there are few easy closes. According to studies on sales and marketing, only 2 percent of the first meetings with the prospects culminate in an on-the-spot sale, while the rest 98 percent of leads needs to be followed-up, advised, entertained, and therefore nurtured through the sales processes. This is why you need sales reporting.
Even when your customer count is in the single digits, you still need to keep track of your customer’s activities over weekly meetings and remember their details by putting them in a spreadsheet. However, as it happens with most businesses, as your sales team and customer pipeline grows, it is natural that you tend to lose your overview of this crucial process, especially when you as a small business owner have responsibilities to shoulder beyond sales.
This is exactly why businesses need a sales reporting system.
Performed rightly, sales reports can help managers quickly spot issues, analyze performances, and take necessary action to aid businesses to sell and grow faster. Moreover, good sales reports are also capable of providing income related business forecasting, budgeting plans and resourcing oriented business decisions for predictive sales.
Hence, in nutshell, the bottom-line is, sales reports are priceless for any organization.
Here are 3 types of sales reports that all businesses must have for understanding their growth.
Real-time sales report can be documented in several types, but these 3 reporting formats are easy to create and so can be recommended as an utmost necessity for your sales strategy:
1. Daily Sales Report
Daily sales reports are not to measure outcomes; rather it is a measurement of the number of activities that have been performed with your leads and prospects within the last 24 hours.
It helps you to evaluate how many emails or calls your sales team is sending every day so that you can monitor your sales rep’s individual performance and identify their inefficiencies.
Therefore, daily sales report is a key sales performance indicator to ensure that your team remains successful while performing their day in and day out activities.
2. Weekly Sales Reports
Beyond the granularity of the daily sales reports, weekly sales reports help in revealing any immediate trends that you need to address with your sales process.
Apart from this, weekly sales reporting also provides a good enough reason for a sales team meeting to help you address sales related pitfalls before businesses are lost.
Having a well-formulated weekly report also allows you to have a direct and data-oriented conversation with your sales team.
3. Monthly Sales Report
Monthly sales reports are meant for understanding your sales performance curve and highlighting on any seasonal trends that can affect your business. It helps you to understand the state of your sales funnel, your conversion rate, and your overall team performance and so are not related to any immediate and preventive actions that you may need to take for your business growth.
How can you put together a sales report?
The ideal sales reports make use of metrics to let you become aware of how deals are progressing. Here are some of the most critical things that you would most certainly want to measure in your report:
Tools that you need to build a sales report
Although sales reports can be generated from spreadsheets, as your company grows spreadsheets gets complicated. Hence, creating timely sales reports are infinitely easier with purpose-built tools like CRM.
Customer Relationship Management software not only helps in combining detailed reporting with its user-friendly interface but it also aids in monitoring your sales process and your team.
Hence, sales reporting when used wisely not only help in tweaking your sales process to perfection, but it also guides your business forward by helping you to close more deals.
