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What is a Sales Report: How to Create One [+ Templates]

Written by Unenabasi Ekeruke
Published at Jul 01, 2023
What is a Sales Report: How to Create One [+ Templates]

The success of a business depends on its ability to make data-driven decisions. That's where sales reports give companies a huge boost.

Sales reports provide intelligence to help you make informed decisions, enhance customer engagement and ultimately drive more sales.

With the significant investments going toward sales initiatives, creating a sales report is no longer an option. It's important for driving healthy growth for your business.

According to a McKinsey report, 53% of B2B sales teams leverage analytics to track sales and overall business performance.

Analyzing sales data can benefit your company in various ways, whether you prioritize strategic planning or ongoing decision-making.

By examining sales trends, identifying patterns and tracking key metrics, you can gain valuable insights to optimize your sales strategy and increase conversions.

In this article, we’ll cover everything you need to know about creating a sales report. We've also included customizable templates to help you create compelling reports that will propel your sales efforts.

Let's dive in!

 

Table of Contents

 

Quick Read

  • A sales report or sales analysis report is a document that summarizes sales activities within your company.
  • These reports provide vital information such as sales numbers, customer insights, and performance indicators.
  • Businesses may detect trends, determine areas for development and capitalize on chances to optimize their sales strategy by analyzing sales statistics.
  • Visme has an extensive collection of sales reports and sales-focused templates to help streamline your business reporting and operations.

 

What is a Sales Report?

A sales report is a document for analyzing a company's sales performance over a particular period—daily, weekly, monthly or annually. It helps firms analyze their sales strategies while making informed future growth decisions.

Whether it's a daily sales report or a monthly sales report, these periodic snapshots enable companies to track their sales performance over time, discover patterns, and identify possible areas for growth.

Organizations may learn better about their sales trends, change their strategies, and promote continuous growth in a highly competitive environment.

When it comes to sales report presentation, data visualizations are essential for effectively presenting data and insights.

Using tools like Visme to create charts, graphs, plans, reports, and infographics can make your sales report appealing. Stakeholders can easily grasp information and make data-driven decisions swiftly.

 

Benefits of a Sales Report

Sales reports are critical for enhancing awareness of a company's overall operation. The reports help firms review their sales tactics, discover their strengths and shortcomings, and make informed choices to promote growth.

Let’s dig deeper into the other advantages of making sales reports:

Help with Sales Funnel Optimization

In a study, 48% of marketers prioritize improving their sales funnels. But how do you optimize your marketing funnel if you can't track how you've performed?

That's where sales reports shine.

Sales reports enable firms to track and analyze essential metrics at every sales funnel stage.

Companies may discover bottlenecks and areas of potential in their sales process by evaluating lead generation, conversion rates, and deal closure rates.

Marketers can concentrate their attention on the most potential leads and prospects, leading to greater sales conversions and increased revenue production.

Fosters Transparency and Accountability

Sales reports encourage responsibility and openness within your company. According to a study by Sprout Social, 86% of Americans agree company transparency is more crucial than ever.

By sharing sales statistics with your team, you establish a transparent culture and inspire individual accountability. It creates a collaborative atmosphere where everyone focuses on meeting sales objectives and achieving progress.

Helps Recognize Trends and Patterns

Reports give valuable information on client behavior and trends in the marketplace. You may uncover patterns, periodic swings, and developing trends by analyzing data and your sales cycle over an extended period.

This data helps you fine-tune your marketing approaches, reach your ideal audience, and execute timely campaigns or initiatives.

 

5 Types of Sales Reports

Now that you are acquainted with the benefits and meaning of a sales report, let’s dive into the different types of sales reports.

Sales Performance Report

The sales performance report estimates your pipeline's overall and projected value. This report shows you how your sales reps are performing.

This report may assess overall sales performance, observe patterns, and create realistic sales goals. Businesses may use it to track progress, analyze sales efforts, and make data-driven choices carefully.

This gauge chart template will help you highlight the performance of any department.

Performance Report Gauge Chart Square
Customize this template and make it your own! Edit and Download

The Sales Calls Report

Sales calls reports track and analyze sales team activity related to client calls and interactions. It provides data on the total number of calls made, the duration of the calls, and the results, such as potential leads or closed sales.

This report helps assess sales team productivity, identify high-performing salespeople, and highlight areas requiring more training or assistance.

This report type is measured monthly or weekly based on how frequently sales calls occur. Sales call reports are critical for sales executives because they can easily track conversations between their employees and prospects.

This template includes a step-by-step approach to all the questions you should ask before and after your sales call.

Sales Call Mind Map
Customize this template and make it your own! Edit and Download

Sales and Order Report

A sales and order report is a document that summarizes a company's sales efforts and orders acquired over a specific period. Order amount, order value, categories of products, and consumer demographics are all included.

You can calculate this report by adding the overall sales volume, revenue, new clients, costs, and the number of orders received and completed over the specified period.

Businesses can utilize this report for:

  • Monitor the work of the sales staff.
  • Track prospects' progress through the sales funnel
  • Determine areas for improvement

The Customer Churn Report

This report helps better understand client retention and loyalty. It allows firms to discover churn reasons, increase client satisfaction, and adopt customer retention initiatives. It examines customer attrition, often known as churn rates.

The formula for finding customer churn is (Number of lost customers / Total number of customers) * 100.

Customer churn information usually includes data such as the total number of customers lost, the percentage of customers lost, the cause of churn, and the revenue lost due to churn.

Marketing Collateral Usage Report

Marketing collateral usage is the frequency and effectiveness with which a company utilizes its marketing collateral to market its message, goods, or services.

Businesses can gauge the success of marketing collateral by analyzing its frequency of use across multiple marketing channels, like printed materials, web content, videos, and more. This report assists companies in optimizing marketing materials, refining messages, and aligning marketing activities with sales goals.

 

What to Include in a Sales Report

Sales reports contain vital elements that reflect the company's operations and marketing strategies.

Let's explore these elements and see how they help with efficient sales reporting and decision making. We have included various sales report examples.

1. Key Performance Indicators

KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators, are quantifiable indicators to assess an organization's long-term performance.

It monitors the efficacy and efficiency of sales teams and fundamental business health. KPIs help monitor how a sales team's performance meets established targets and how this performance affects the company.

Some sales KPIs are lead generation, average deal size, sales growth rate, pipeline velocity, and customer acquisition cost.

Adding KPIs to a sales report is critical for several reasons:

  • Evaluate effectiveness and efficiency.
  • Determine your strengths and weaknesses.
  • Ensure that everyone is on the same page.
  • Identify the appropriate activities to prioritize.
SaaS Company Quarterly Sales Report
Customize this template and make it your own! Edit and Download

2. Team Performance

Track personal and team sales objectives, quotas achieved, and critical information such as revenue from sales earned, number of transactions done, and customer feedback to evaluate the sales team's success.

Businesses may use this data to show the best performers, reduce performance gaps, and provide targeted training or assistance.

SaaS Company Quarterly Sales Report
Customize this template and make it your own! Edit and Download

3. Competitor Analysis

Conducting in-depth competitor research is vital for firms to comprehend their market situation and effectively differentiate themselves.

The objective is to stay ahead of the competition and identify areas to differentiate from them by evaluating competitor activities, market share, and pricing strategies.

4. Customer Acquisition Cost

This indicator determines the efficacy of marketing and sales efforts by measuring the cost of gaining new consumers.

According to Hubspot, tracking customer acquisition expenses in sales reports is critical for organizations to determine how much they pay to acquire new customers and whether they receive a decent return on investment.

5. Net Sales and Profits

Include a complete evaluation of net sales and revenue that considers revenue, cost of goods sold, operational expenditures, and taxes. This data assists firms in evaluating their development and making informed judgments to maximize profitability.

Promotional Sales Report
Customize this template and make it your own! Edit and Download

6. Sales Funnel Analysis

The method of analyzing every phase of the sales process, from lead generation through deal closing, is known as sales funnel analysis. Businesses may discover bottlenecks, optimize conversion rates, and increase overall sales effectiveness by analyzing the sales funnel.

The study helps in the comprehension of the customer journey, the identification of areas for development, and the implementation of specific sales tactics.

Mobile App Sales Funnel Chart Square
Customize this template and make it your own! Edit and Download

How to Write a Sales Report

Made with Visme Infographic Maker

Now that you have templates, let's show you how to create your sales report.

 

1. Determine the objective of your report

Developing a robust sales reporting process is only helpful if you have a goal.

Consider the following questions when determining the objective of a sales report:

  • Which part of sales performance or activity do you wish to evaluate?
  • What goals or milestones do you want to measure progress toward?
  • What data or insights do you require to make sound business decisions?
  • What are your sales team's or the company's main fields of focus or priorities?
  • Do you wish to highlight specific problems or opportunities in the report?
  • What measures or changes do you want to see in the report's findings and recommendations?
  • How will the sales report fit the company's overarching goals and strategies?

These questions will assist you in clarifying the purpose and nature of your sales report, assuring that it provides valuable insights and practical options for your particular needs.

2. Identify your audience

Knowing your target audience is essential for adjusting your report to their requirements. Sales executives, managers, team members, clients, or stakeholders may be among your target audience.

Consider their level of knowledge of sales data and their particular interests or concerns. This insight might assist you in presenting the information in a manner that is valuable and useful to them.

For example, if you present a sales report to investors, you should include indicators highlighting the financial performance, growth potential of the business, and market position.

3. Choose the appropriate sales report timeframe

Your timeframe will impact the amount of data you analyze and present. It should be consistent with your unique goals and the purpose of your organization. There are three options: daily sales reports, weekly sales reports, and monthly sales reports.

Here are some things to think about when deciding on a period for a sales report:

  • Business objectives and strategy
  • Seasonality and trends in sales cycle length
  • Decision-making requirements
  • Data reliability and accuracy

Remember that your timeframe must align with your objectives and give a whole new perspective on your sales performance.

4. Gather your sales data

Gather essential data from various sources, including CRM systems, sales tools, and accounting records. Ensure the data is accurate and complete to provide an in-depth understanding of your sales success.

This data will analyze patterns, discover opportunities, and make data-driven choices to promote sales growth.

5. Select relevant KPIs and metrics to track sales team performance

To avoid overloading your audience with too much information, concentrate on delivering only the most essential details in your sales report.

Evaluate the precise goals you want to accomplish with the report. Examine your sales data for KPIs and stats matching your target audience's interests and intended narrative.

For instance, if you work in the SaaS industry, you might want to prioritize KPIs like trials, sales-qualified leads, potential sales, the volume of monthly onboarding and demo calls, sales per representative, the duration of the sales cycle, interaction with customer conversion rates, and the growth rate of monthly recurring revenue (MRR).

By choosing the proper KPIs, you can:

  • Assess the productivity and effectiveness of your sales force
  • Discover the positive and negative aspects
  • Ensure everyone is on the same page, and
  • Decide which tasks to prioritize.

6. Use data visualization tools to present data

Imagine being in a conference room where the presenter bombards you with text-heavy stuff on slide after slide. Not only will it be tiresome, but your capacity to absorb and grasp the information provided will reduce drastically.

But with a data visualization tool, you can effectively transform raw data into visually appealing graphs, charts, and infographics. It helps you pinpoint crucial data points and tell stories with data.

Instead of asking your audience to analyze spreadsheets full of statistics, you present them with simple visualizations that make your data accessible.

To help you create and present data, we have around 30 widgets in the data visualization tools, including radial gauges, progress bars, population arrays, and more. We also offer 20+ charts, graphs, and interactive maps for large data sets.

7. Customize the report to match your brand's style and guidelines

Now, you need a sales report that provides valuable information and expresses your brand's identity.

With Visme’s drag-and-drop editor, it’s easy to customize the report to reflect your brand's style and standards. Simply set up your brand area and manually add your brand assets to the brand kit. Then, you can easily add your brand assets to the report during the design process.

Or simply input your website in Visme’s AI-powered Brand Wizard, and the tool will automatically pull your logo, brand colors, and fonts from your website.

You can also use dynamic fields to ensure that names, dates, contact information, and more are always accurate. Just input the necessary information once, and it will appear throughout your project.

For instance, you may easily insert personal and business information across several projects, pages, and even slides within the presentation. And if you want to create variables specific to your use cases, you can do so with the Custom Fields option.

8. Share and publish the report with your team, clients or stakeholders

You understand the thrill of presenting your detailed sales report to your team, clients, or stakeholders.

With Visme's sharing and publishing tool, you can easily publish your sales report online in Visme and share it directly with a URL or embed it on your website. We provide a user-friendly platform for creating and sharing sales reports and other business-related content.

You can securely distribute your customized sales report with just a few clicks, ensuring it gets to the right people at the right time.

 

9 Sales Report Templates to Make Your Own

Let’s face it: making a report from scratch is daunting. You don't want to spend all day juggling data and creating aesthetically pleasing designs.

But with our sales report templates, you don’t have to worry about designing them.

"Visme also helped us to free up our creative and design team to work on other projects across the organization. We created a supply of customizable templates they can cycle through and customize quickly on their own rather than waiting on a designer."
Matt Swiren

Manager of Partnership Marketing

We’ve got you covered with these nine templates. You can customize it with Visme’s editor per your industry and requirements.

1. Promotional Campaign Report Template

This template will help you present updates, growth, and outcomes related to your advertisement and other promotional activities.

It is excellent for presenting campaign results to stakeholders because of its pre-designed pages and pertinent graphic features.

Customize this template and make it your own! Edit and Download

2. SaaS Company Quarterly Sales Report Template

The SaaS industry is a rapidly evolving sector, and to stay one step ahead in this saturated industry, tracking and analyzing sales performance every quarter is crucial.

Use this quarterly report template to check your company's progress, determine trends, and make sound decisions.

This template provides a comprehensive framework for capturing key sales metrics, evaluating customer acquisition and retention, units sold, and outlining future strategies.

You can edit and add the metrics you want in your Visme Editor. And you can even change the colors, fonts, and other components to match your brand.

Customize this template and make it your own! Edit and Download

3. Expense Report Template

If you are an employee who wants to document their spending, we recommend you use this expense report template efficiently.

Businesses may also use it to manage their financial records, track spending habits, and ensure compliance with cost regulations.

Use this vibrant and dynamic expenditure report template to organize your next budget meeting. You may alter the text, photos, colors, fonts, and logo, among other things.

But that isn't all. You may go further into your expenditure data and monitor the effectiveness of your promotional activities with Visme's built-in analytics tool. Analytics enables you to monitor the traffic for Visme projects, allowing you to assess the performance of each of your reports, or even your expense reports, over time.

Customize this template and make it your own! Edit and Download

4. Furniture Expo Sales Report - Cone Chart Square Template

This template will help you measure and analyze your exhibition furniture sales performance. If you find it challenging to discover top-selling goods and correctly measure revenue generation, this appealing template is the way to go.

Easily create a cone chart to display your sales data. Best of all, Visme's simple drag-and-drop template editor allows you to customize the look of this template quickly.

Whether you want to incorporate icons to represent product categories, include illustrations to highlight customer testimonials, or utilize graphics to visualize sales trends, you can do that by using Visme's design assets. We offer an extensive library of design assets, including icons, illustrations, and graphics.

It will simplify your sales analysis, allow you to make better decisions, and help you succeed in the competitive furniture industry.

Furniture Expo Sales Report Cone Chart Square
Customize this template and make it your own! Edit and Download

5. Monthly Sales Report Template

A monthly sales report template is ideal if you need a sales or business monthly report with a corporate vibe.

Display your budget allocation using professional-looking tables and your financials using graphs and data widgets.

And if you spend hours meticulously collecting and organizing your sales data in Google Sheets or Excel, it's high time to stop.

Because with Visme's remarkable data import feature, you can seamlessly integrate valuable data into your sales report, saving you precious time and effort.

Customize this template and make it your own! Edit and Download

By importing your data into Visme, you can choose from pre-filled tables to construct your table swiftly and efficiently. It will allow you to connect to and import data from SurveyMonkey, Microsoft Excel, Google Analytics, and Google Sheets.

You can also connect a Visme table to live data, making importing external data from Google Sheets into stunning tables easy.

connecting a Visme table to live data

6. Sales Distribution Report - Pyramid Chart Square Template

A comprehensive sales analysis must include understanding the distribution across different goods and places.

Using the template, you can gain insight into your sales distribution.

You can use it to display sales distribution in a pyramid chart style, allowing you to discover top-selling products or areas and optimize your sales efforts appropriately.

Sales Distribution Pyramid Chart Square
Customize this template and make it your own! Edit and Download

Does the idea of providing your audience with detailed data at their fingertips right within the report itself excite you?

With Visme's interactive features, you can create popups or hovers that reveal additional sales information when users click or hover on them.

You can even link objects, blocks, or pages to other pages on the slide, external websites, or landing pages.

The best part? You can seamlessly create printable and interactive PDFs and add links, videos, popups, animated elements, and page transitions.

7. Performance Report - Gauge Chart Template

If you want to create a gauge chart that displays the performance report of a department inside your firm, this template is ideal for you. This professional gauge chart template clearly highlights the performance of any department.

Performance Report Gauge Chart Square
Customize this template and make it your own! Edit and Download

The template may be fully customized, including changing text, replacing pictures, removing or adding pages, and more.

You can communicate with your team in real-time utilizing Visme's robust collaboration tools. Through real-time editing, team members can share feedback, resolve comments and make changes, enhancing creativity and unity.

So say goodbye to time-consuming email exchanges and hello to a more efficient collaboration experience that improves the standard of your final report.

8. Quarterly Email Analytics Report Template

The Quarterly Email Analytics Report Template is an excellent choice for businesses looking to assess and analyze the efficacy of their email marketing efforts. Even students, nonprofits, etc., will benefit from this pick.

It gives an in-depth look at essential email data like open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and subscriber engagement.

Beyond the insightful data it provides, Visme offers an extensive library of high-resolution stock photos to spice up your designs.

Customize this template and make it your own! Edit and Download

With Visme's rich library of stock photos, you get access to a vast selection of high-quality images at your disposal. You can browse and search across any keyword from thousands of fully customizable and hand-picked stock photos.

If you cannot find the exact picture you're looking for, click the Generate AI Image button and provide a prompt. Give a detailed description of your creation for the best results.

9. Weekly Employee Performance Report Template

The Weekly Employee Performance Report Template helps organizations analyze and track their employees' performance every week.

This template offers an organized format for tracking essential performance indicators like personal goals, completed assignments, backlogs, and productivity measures.

With its user-friendly style and clear structure, this template allows efficient performance management and assists businesses in increasing performance and engagement among workers.

Customize this template and make it your own! Edit and Download

 

Create & Manage All Your Sales Reports with Visme

Creating a sales report should not be intimidating or time-consuming. This guide has provided you with the knowledge and tools to simplify your sales reporting efforts efficiently.

You can utilize Visme's user-friendly platform to take advantage of pre-designed sales report templates and easily customize them to meet your requirements.

However, Visme goes beyond just sales reporting. Our comprehensive design tool includes various features and templates for multiple teams and purposes. You'll find everything you need, from sales presentations and infographics to e-books, whitepapers, charts and graphs, case studies and more.

Sign up to create effective sales reports and other business documents =with Visme

Written by Unenabasi Ekeruke

Unenabasi is a content marketing strategist and tech enthusiast who has spent many years working on projects with top brands like Visme, Promo, and Searchific. He’s the content editor of Visme, in charge of making sure every published piece of content is epic.

As a writer, he’s covered hundreds of topics around marketing, business, e-commerce, technology, visual thinking, branding, artificial intelligence, animation, visual communication and design for business.

Outside working as a writer and editor, he has years of experience in content strategy and executive, business consulting, and SEO copywriting. He loves to help brands tell stories that drive engagement, and gain traffic, leads and loyal customers.

Connect with Unenabasi on LinkedIn and on X (@Profunen) to tap into his wealth of knowledge and industry insights.

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