Sales Reports Templates Free Download
Briana Habbyshaw
How often are sellers making decisions based on intuition or gut feeling? Sales dashboards present relevant and actionable sales data, allowing sellers to make data-driven decisions quickly. Having the right sales dashboards based on current data leads to time savings: sellers can be hyperfocused on which leads need contacting that day, how close they are to hitting their quota, what talking points to use in a call, and more. In this article, we'll share with you why sales dashboards are necessary to effective sales strategy, how to begin building effective dashboards people will use, and share seven examples to inspire.
To begin building out impactful sales dashboards that your sales organization will use: focus on your audience and think about the KPIs that are relevant to this audience. Ask yourself the following questions before you start.
Having a comprehensive business intelligence platform like Tableau makes creating useful sales reporting that serves all of your audiences easy and scalable. Anyone in your organization can subscribe to a Tableau sales dashboard as well as create automated alerts based on any condition or value they determine. Sales leaders can remain focused on the bigger picture, but also have access to essential details on the ground with alerts for when teams have hit quota or when bookings or revenue have hit a certain amount.
Use this dashboard to understand the health and status of your pipeline. Being able to slice the data and view pipeline by opportunity stages, KPIs, size buckets, timeline, and sales representative, means that you can spot opportunities that require you to pivot quickly, if necessary. Seeing a complete and accurate picture of the status of your sales pipeline means that you evaluate where your leads are coming from and take action early to help teams reach quota.
Quickly filter your sales growth data by region, segment, salesperson account with this dashboard and view YOY comparisons by selecting the filters you want in the top, dropdown menu labeled, "Select how to slice results." The most effective use of this sales growth dashboard will come from the context it provides, helping managers to identify patterns or trends, set realistic goals, and nurture sellers. For example, seeing the status of deals by representative means that you can help sellers change tactics and avoid leaving money on the table. These actionable insights can re-engage discouraged sellers, focus your team on customer success, and reduce uncertainty in planning.
In the creation and assignment of sales territories, having a proactive approach can improve seller performance. We have found that optimizing territory design can increase sales from two to seven percent without changes in resources. You need the data to understand the sales KPIs impacting your territories to better balance workloads across the field and easily see unworked opportunities.
As your business grows and a lot of deals start coming in, spreadsheets are an inefficient way to track and maintain data. It can quickly get cluttered with multiple deals and contacts, making it difficult to generate more meaningful reports.
A CRM such as Freshsales even allows you to custom curate multiple sales dashboards for your different teams, functions, and leadership. You can also share these dashboards with your internal teams and decision-makers.
The company obviEnce (www.obvience.com) and Microsoft teamed up to create samples for you to use with Power BI. The samples use anonymized data. The samples represent different industries: finance, HR, sales, and more.
For each of these samples, we've created a tour. Tours are articles that tell the story behind the sample and walk you through different scenarios. One scenario might be answering questions for your manager, another might be looking for competitive insights, or creating reports and dashboards to share, or explaining a business shift.
This industry sample explores a software company's sales channel. Sales managers monitor their direct and partner sales channels by tracking opportunities and revenue by region, deal size, and channel.
This industry sample contains a report for a fictitious company named Contoso. The Contoso sales manager created this report to understand their products and regions' key contributors for revenue won or loss.
This industry sample analyzes retail sales data of items sold across multiple stores and districts. The metrics compare this year's performance to last year's in these areas: sales, units, gross margin, variance, and new store analysis.
This industry sample analyzes a manufacturing company, VanArsdel Ltd. It allows the Chief Marketing Officer to watch the industry and the market share for VanArsdel. By exploring the sample, you can find the company's market share, product volume, sales, and sentiment.
Let's start with the built-in samples. The built-in samples are available in the Power BI service. You don't have to leave Power BI to find them. These samples are each a bundle of one or more dashboards, semantic models, and reports that you can use with the Power BI service. These built-in samples aren't available for Power BI Desktop.
Want to understand how the data in these Excel workbooks gets converted to Power BI semantic models and reports? Opening the Excel samples in Excel and exploring the worksheets provides some of the answers.
Weekly sales report
A weekly sales report tracks the performance of sales reps and the sales department as a whole over five business days. Weekly reports include metrics such as call/contact volume, lead response time, and the number of appointments set. These micro reports provide a way for managers to gauge progress before monthly reports come in.
Monthly sales report
A monthly sales report is a longer-term measurement of sales performance carried out every month. It offers a broader view of performance than other types of sales reports because it covers a wide enough range to measure complete sales cycles. Monthly sales reports track metrics such as the number of marketing qualified leads, number of meetings scheduled, and number of won deals.
- Collect relevant dataHow do you know what figures to track? Choose metrics that support the purpose of your report.
Say your sales department had a very good month and surpassed its forecasted sales. You could get excited and show off the numbers but also explain what factors (both internal and external) helped your team outperform the previous month. It could be that your team tried a new prospecting tactic or started using an effective CRM.
Always contextualize information in your sales reports so your audience can use the data to inform their decisions.
- Make it eye-catchingA report with only numbers and text might fail to engage your audience. Visualize your data with charts, graphs, tables, and other infographics to make your sales report easier to digest.
An activity overview report helps managers keep close tabs on sales rep and team productivity. It tracks activities that lead to closing deals, such as setting up calls, sending emails, visiting prospects, and completing tasks.
To set up the activity overview report, enable the Voice, Email, and Visits features in your Sell account. As sales reps work, the data will automatically be collected into three categories: Call Outcomes, Email Outcomes, and Visit Outcomes. You can use filters to choose which of the activities you want to track or select data from specific sales reps.
A forecasted sales report compares your sales forecast to the actual sales within a certain period of time. It shows the true value of sales and helps businesses track team performance, identify revenue gaps, and strategize.
The best sales reports helpfully present information so that everyone can quickly and easily understand it. Done right, it can be a critical tool in growing your sales and helping your team be as productive and effective as possible.
Sales reports can give the clarity needed to motivate your sales team and provide direction for leadership. On any given day, sales might be great or slow. Some sales reps might be making record sales, while others are facing significant challenges. Witnessing sales on an individual or daily basis gives little insight into how well or poorly the company is doing.
Reports can bypass this short-term view of sales by providing clear trends in the overall data. Everyone can clearly see exactly what direction sales are headed instead of being distracted by a bad day or a superstar sales rep.
No matter your company size, sales reports are an essential aspect of a successful sales team. For small businesses, they can help inform strategy and provide vital insights for forming your sales process. Medium and large companies can use reports to ensure they stay the course and combat any inefficiencies that can often hinder further growth.
A good sales report takes the audience, sales circumstances, and convenience into account to create actionable insights. What this will look like specifically depends on your company, sales team, and intended audience.
While there is a lot that a sales report can do, it takes a good sales report to actually accomplish them. A boring or mediocre sales report might be able to provide some insights but will more often be a waste of your valuable time. A good sales report, though, is an integral part of a successful sales team.
If you are presenting a sales report to your team, on the other hand, more detailed information would likely serve them better. They will more likely benefit from digging into more specific sales activities and looking at their individual performance instead of only the whole team.
An introduction that overviews the data and key takeaways is a valuable part of your sales report. Your audience may not have time to pour over each statistic, especially when presented to leaders who are short on time. They will likely appreciate a solid summary that gives them the highlights. Also, an introduction can help shape how the audience views the information if they know the critical points from the beginning.
760c119bf3