Reporting is critical for sales and marketing, so much so that it may make or break your company. When you initially establish a business, the first thing that comes to mind is probably the growth and expansion of your company. Both the sales and marketing divisions are equally responsible for the state of your firm. With the same goal of increasing revenue, most firms have learned that only sales and marketing reports or alignment via a sales report can assist them inaccurate business analysis.
Now, what criteria do we use to determine whether a business is successful? We’re not sure about the other points, but there is one that definitely boasts about the success scale of your firm. And the entity in question is sales! Sales are highly important in your business since the more sales you make, the more famous your brand becomes! On the other hand, marketing guarantees that the pertinent information about the business reaches the right people who are genuinely in need of the services that your organization offers. Marketing raises brand visibility, engages customers, and, of course, improves revenue! As a result, both the sales and marketing departments must support similar goals and collaborate to support one another. It is the only method to boost revenue.
What Is a Sales Report?
The purpose of sales report is to summarize a company's sales data for a specific period. The benefit of reports in business is the information it provides into the effectiveness of specific goods or sales strategies, assisting management in determining how to make changes to maximize income. Typically, sales managers are responsible for generating this report and presenting it to top management for approval. Managers can generate sales reports to provide an overview of daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annual sales. Key performance metrics, sales targets, sales volume, number of deals, growth, and average transaction size can all be included in the sales report.
The Importance of Sales Report for Your Company
A sales reporting system's primary function is to assist organizations in growing by automating and improving their effectiveness. A sales reporting system is an important aspect of sales and marketing, and it is also credited for raising one's business cycle. This portion of our blog will explain the purpose of sales report and a sales reporting system. Let's get started:
∙ Aids in the Shortening of the Sales Funnel
Moving a lead through the sales funnel can be quite difficult. This is because not all leads are created equal. You must have many leads coming in from various sources, some of which have lower/higher quality scores than others. Furthermore, some of these leads may have a lower response/connect rate than others. As a result, without a quick feedback loop, your sales staff may end up spending time contacting leads from sources that consistently bring in poor-quality leads.
∙ Assists in Making Informed Decisions Every Day
It is insufficient to maintain a monthly sales report that only displays the foundation of each sale and how effectively your marketing team is functioning. Daily sales reports provide you with a clear view of everything that occurs both in the office and on the field, allowing you to easily track performance and your customer base. You may rapidly spot a problem and rectify it with daily sales information before it becomes a huge issue. You may also see where the company is succeeding and where more income should be directed. Simple as that!
∙ Keep Track of and Motivate Salespeople
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Challenge, believe it or not, inspires your sales and marketing staff. Other team members will be driven to do better to gain the title if a report shows who is working hard and who is working well. As a result, you have a slew of sales reps eager to improve their performance in the field and in the office. This, in turn, leads to higher sales force productivity and, of course, more sales. For you, it's a win-win situation.
∙ Saves Time and Money
This, we believe, is the most crucial of all the advantages of daily sales report. Time and resources are priceless in the development of any firm. However, it is not necessarily a lack of time or resources that stifles a company's growth. Most of the time, the issue stems from the improper management of these two important growth hormones.
Thanks to the sales report, you can now know which leads are worth following and should be given less attention. Furthermore, you may determine which kind of clients use your products or services, allowing you to identify the target demographic to focus on. Sales reporting simplifies sales. It is not a choice!
∙ Provide Everyday Insights for Improved Performance
While weekly and monthly sales reports are acclaimed for their incredible benefits, daily sales reports provide greater insights into how well the current quarter is going, how the previous quarter went, and what the following quarter might entail. It is simple to obtain the gross total from monthly reports and make larger-scale decisions. However, you may not know which days generated the biggest sales, what times are optimal to engage with customers, what prompted such a rise, and other elements that can assist you in increasing your sales in the future quarter. The importance of daily sales reporting to a business cannot be overstated.
How to Create a Sales Report?
Anyone can put numbers into a report and go on about it over a lengthy meeting. The actual issue is designing a sales report that conveys the right information without putting your audience to sleep.
Here are five steps to putting out a good sales report that checks all the boxes.
1. Determine Your Objective and Target Audience
The first stage in preparing a sales report is determining the report's purpose and audience. If it's a sales report for the end of the fiscal year, include data from the entire year compared to the prior year. If you're going to prepare a sales report for the marketing department, you'll need to include marketing-specific data. For example, the conversion rate or return on investment of each marketing campaign (ROI).
2. Gather Data
After you've decided on the objective and audience for your report, you'll need to decide on the time frame for the report and gather any necessary data from your customer relationship management platform (CRM). If you're putting together a weekly sales report, you don't need to include data from the previous week.
3. Concentrate and Organize the Information
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As a sales manager, you most certainly have a massive amount of data recorded in your CRM and included all of it in your sales report would make the document impossible to read. Instead, focus and arrange essential information into easy-to-read categories, such as a section on door-to-door sales performance, another on expenses and revenue, and another on the performance of each of your many products or services. You can use a sales report template, but be sure to tailor it to your purpose and audience so that only the most essential information is included.
4. Employ Visual Aids
Documents that just include sales data can be difficult to understand and interpret. Consider using a few graphs in your sales report for number sets and sales metrics. Data visualization tools can help you present information more quickly and effectively. Bar graphs, for example, can be used to track development and compare it to past periods, whereas pie charts might illustrate money allocation across departments or goods.
5. Analyze and Contextualize
Sales reports employ data to make meaningful recommendations for improving operations, such as underperforming goods or the most effective sales approaches. Provide a few preliminary observations and takeaways in your sales report to help contextualize the data and make the next steps more clear.
How Can Strikingly Assist You With Creating Your Sales Report?
Strikingly is one of the greatest free blog services in the business for simplifying website creation. It comes with an easy-to-use website editor and an integrated blogging platform that allows you to set up your site in as little as 30 minutes. Strikingly can assist you in creating your sales report in a variety of ways.
A. Analytics
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Strikingly's Analytics dashboard displays the number of visitors to your site as well as their location. We also categorize traffic sources, such as direct traffic, social networking platforms, and traffic from other websites. Strikingly can help you make sales report using the following information.
1. Analysis of Visitors
- Top Pages - most visited pages.
- Countries – the locations from which visitors are browsing.
- Devices - Are the visitors using a desktop or a mobile device?
- Sources of traffic – where visitors are coming from before they arrive at your site (direct, search engines, etc.).
2. Store Analytics
- Revenue - the overall revenue value of all orders in the selected period and across all time.
- Orders Received - the total number of orders received within the specified period and for the entire time.
- Sales Funnel -Which sales funnel generated the most revenue?
3. Blog Posts Analytics
- Top viewed blog posts -Most popular blog posts
4. Subscriptions, Signups, and Contacts Analytics
- Contact Form Responses - the total number of responses received within the specified time and for the entire period.
5. Downloads of files Analytics
- File Downloads - the total number of downloads within the specified period.
B. Export Orders
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Exporting your store's orders also helps you make sales report by allowing you to see the entire number of orders rather than checking them one by one. On the Simple Store Orders dashboard, you can export orders to an a.csv file. Click "Export Orders," and the.csv file will be downloaded to your computer right away. You can use Microsoft Excel, Numbers, Google Spreadsheets, or any spreadsheet tool to open the file.
Conclusion
Sales reporting may not be the most enjoyable aspect of business management, but it is unavoidable. Sales reports serve as the firm’s foundation, providing guidance for future campaigns and overall business success. Follow the methods and ideas above to make sales report that is quick to create provides relevant information, and has the greatest impact.
