How to Make a Sales Report: 5 Tips for Crafting a Sales Report

A sales report is a summary of a company’s sales data over a particular time frame. This detailed report offers valuable insight into the performance of specific products or sales tactics, which helps management determine how to make adjustments to maximize revenue. Sales managers are typically in charge of compiling this report and presenting it to upper management for review. Managers can generate sales reports for an overview of daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annual sales. Sales reports can include key performance indicators, sales goals, sales volume, number of deals, growth, and average transaction size.

A sales report is the key to gathering and presenting sales data. This detailed report serves many functions, such as:

• Contextualizes a company’s progress. Throughout daily operations, important data is generated that highlights a sales team’s overall performance. During hectic day-to-day operations, management may overlook this pertinent data. A sales report is a great resource that allows sales managers to track team performances, sales goals, and progress over a specific time frame. Management can compare sales reports from different periods to note any major changes in selling activity and identify areas for improvement.
• Forecasts future sales performance. A sales report presents a large amount of data in an easy-to-read format, making it easy to identify trends and predict future sales numbers. For example, if last year’s sales report shows a significant spike in sales activity during the holiday season, a sales manager may predict a similar spike in sales in future holiday seasons. These sales forecasts are the compass for a business.
• Reveals opportunities for improvement. Most sales managers compile sales reports as a way to keep upper management apprised of company performance. Managers can use the data from sales reports to detect new opportunities for improvement. Sales reports offer key data that CEOs and managers use when making major business decisions, like changes to their product lines, pricing, sales tactics, or marketing efforts.
• Highlights the team's progress. While sales managers typically generate sales reports for upper management or other departments, this real-time data also offers valuable insights into the performance of their individual sales reps and strategies, all contextualized within the greater sales pipeline. By comparing key performance indicators (KPIs), sales volume, sales tactics, customer acquisition costs, lengths of sales cycles, and total sales among all salespeople, a sales manager can identify opportunities for improvement—like additional training or new sales approaches.

Crafting a sales report requires the following basic steps:

1. 1. Identify your purpose and audience. The first step in creating a sales report is identifying the purpose and audience of the report. If it’s an end-of-the-financial-year sales report, you’ll want to include data from the entire year compared to the previous year. If you’re going to create a sales report for the marketing department, you’ll need to include data relevant to the marketing team. For instance, each marketing campaign’s conversion rate or return on investment (ROI).
2. 2. Collect data. Once you’ve determined the purpose and audience for your report, you’ll need to decide the period of time that you want the report to cover and gather all relevant data from your customer relationship management tool (CRM). If you’re compiling a weekly sales report, you don’t need to include data outside that time frame.
3. 3. Focus and group the information. As a sales manager, you likely have an incredible amount of data stored in your CRM—and if you included all of it in your sales report, the document would be difficult to follow. Instead, you need to focus and group relevant information into easy-to-read sections—for example, a section on door-to-door sales performance, a section on expenses and revenue, and a section on the performance of each of your various products or services. You can use a sales report template, but make sure to customize it according to your purpose and audience so that you only include the most relevant information.
4. 4. Use visuals. Documents that only feature sales figures can be challenging to digest and interpret. Consider incorporating a few graphs for number sets and sales metrics into your sales report. Visualization tools can help convey data quickly and effectively. For example, bar graphs are a great way to track progress and compare against previous periods, while pie charts can show budget allocation across departments or products.
5. 5. Interpret and contextualize. Sales reports use data to point to actionable suggestions for improving operations—whether that’s which products are underperforming or which sales tactics work best. Your sales report should include a few preliminary findings and takeaways to help contextualize the data, making it easier to see the next steps.

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