What is sales reporting?

Sales reporting may be the next best thing to start for your company’s ultimate success. Businessman Bernhard Burgener shares the benefits of sales reporting, what it is, and how to conduct sales strategy to help your team convert more leads. 

Sales reporting is one of the most critical aspects of creating a prosperous and agile business. Considering the basis of business includes adaptability and honest analysis, sales reporting can provide tangibility to make better decisions based on actual numbers and documented reports. 

In essence, sales reporting, or sales analysis reporting, aggregates past performance, revenue returns, and spending from sales team activities. As in any analysis, every step of the sales funnel can be utilized to identify points of high or low lead engagement, periods of stagnancy, and activity checkpoints to consider when developing a new strategy or framework. 

According to business expert Bernhard Burgener, who has over 40 years of industry experience, the practical tips associated with sales reporting are better than simply theorizing. 

Unfortunately, most professionals skip the numbers and continue conducting business without implementing any concrete facts. This leads to disappointment from customers due to a lack of growth in their paid services, but also from internal executives at the company. 

Benefits of sales reporting

Companies and sales teams use reporting to assist the success of any business strategy. Burgener notes four primary benefits of regularly implementing sales reporting in your company: 

1. Improve business transparency and accountability 

2. Highlight successful strategies from the past to implement in the future 

3. Identify company challenges and overcome them with more tools 

4. Advance communications with all stakeholders, customers, and employees 

Sales reporting benefits companies’ futures based on past insights into the sales team’s performance and quality of pipeline leads. Burgener says the incoming number of leads is also important to monitor in sales reporting. The volume of leads can be managed in a team if there is accurate and clear forecasting for what’s expected to come. 

If you need more motivation and transparency among your sales team representatives, a sales report can help you and your representatives. This initiative will help your team understand whose efforts are working and how others who need more motivation can follow their lead. Team members can take lessons from top-performing employees to understand what habits to accumulate for an ever-growing sales pipeline. 

Types of sales reporting to consider

There are almost countless varieties of sales reports. To limit unnecessary action items, Bernhard Burgener will walk through three specific types of sales reports you can implement today. 

1. Sales forecast 

2. Sales funnel analysis 

3. Conversion report 

Sales forecasts 

Sales forecasts are the best way to compare desired versus actual sales. Forecasts consider past sales history and implement it into revenue predictions and expected campaign time frames.                        

In addition, setting aligned goals with a sales forecast can help your team stay on track with leads and understand how much they need to sell to reach their KPIs. 

In sales forecasting, you can even estimate the likelihood of a winning sale. Information like this provides clarity so that post-sale communication is succinct and convertible, growth rates stay on track, and your team can remain agile. 

Sales funnel analysis 

Sales funnel analyses are a great way to keep track of your leads at their different stages. The information from a sales funnel analysis includes retention rates, drop rates, and deals won. All the data is combined into an easily viewable format to provide sales professionals with how processes are going. 

Necessary follow-ups, bottlenecked leads, and lost or won pitches can be sorted in sales funnel analyses so teams can realize their full potential. After viewing an analysis, management should better grasp the health of their sales funnels and be able to conduct conversations with employees depending on where attention is needed most. 

Conversion 

Conversion reports play an essential role in understanding your sales team’s success in the long run. These reports note the total number of deals won within a certain period. Using conversion reporting at quarterly meetings can ensure your team knows their performance levels and what number they might aim for in the next quarter. 

Deals won are the most crucial metric in sales teams. Sales make up a large percentage of companies’ revenue, mainly if that company sells a tangible product, such as software. Conversion reports help executives and managers create well-informed, long-term goals and serve as a crosscheck for sales forecast accuracy. 

How to create your own sales report

When managing a sales team, using a CRM is a critical aspect of fluidity. You can create sales reports easily with a CRM you already use, like Salesforce or HubSpot. 

Click on the reports dashboard in your CRM and select the desired report type. The keys here are to consider your target audience, choose a theme for the report, select sales metrics to focus on (KPIs), compile the appropriate data, and include relevant visual aids. 

Your CRM will develop a chart for you, depending on your input. After you see the chart, graph, or infographic, utilize the settings section to filter the graph based on desired timelines and teams.