How To Write a Sales Report + Types of Sales Reports

Business owners track countless metrics, but few are as crucial as sales performance. Sales reporting transforms raw sales data into actionable insights that help you understand what’s working, identify growth opportunities, and make informed decisions about your business’s future.

Sales reporting doesn’t have to be complicated. With the right approach and templates, you can create comprehensive reports that reveal trends, highlight successes, and pinpoint areas for improvement—all while saving time and maximizing the benefits to your business.

What is a sales report?

A sales report (also known as a sales analysis report) is an overview of a company’s sales activities or outcomes over a period of time. You can use sales reports to establish performance benchmarks, identify trends, and monitor progress across revenue-driving activities. Sales reports can also reveal the internal and external factors affecting sales performance, helping you anticipate future sales and make more informed business decisions.

Sales reporting processes vary by company. Businesses with internal sales teams typically have sales managers, or designated sales reps, prepare comprehensive reports and deliver them to leadership on a regular schedule. If you don’t have an internal sales department, you can prepare reports yourself. Many small business owners run their own sales reports, focusing on a few key performance metrics and using sales report templates and reporting automations to save time. Whether you’re selling a service or a product, sales reports are a key part of staying on track with your sales goals.

Types of sales reports

• Sales performance reports
• Sales activities reports
• Sales pipeline reports

Sales generates extensive data across multiple business areas, creating numerous analysis opportunities. You can focus your reports on performance, employees, or processes, with each category containing multiple report types. Here’s an overview of popular options by analytical focus:

Sales performance reports

Sales performance reports analyze the outcome of sales activities, collecting data like the total number of products sold or the total profit earned. You can use performance reports to set benchmarks, monitor progress, and evaluate the effectiveness of your sales strategies. Performance reports are broadly useful and can provide value to any business that sells products or services.

Key metrics

• Revenue generated
• Leads qualified
• Deals closed
• Average deal size

Common types

• Sales tracking reports, which summarize sales by variables like product type or channel
• Total revenue reports, which calculate total revenue generated during the period
• Conversion rate reports, which measure the percentage of leads that made a purchase
• Customer churn reports, which calculate the total number or percentage of customers that stopped doing business with the company

Annual, quarterly, and monthly sales reports often include performance data. While it’s also possible to run daily or weekly reports on sales performance, many business owners find that these intervals are too short to provide meaningful information.

Sales activities reports

Sales activities reports focus on the steps your sales team has taken to win new customers during a particular time period. You can use these reports to evaluate individual sales representatives or entire sales teams. They can provide value to any business with an internal sales team, and they’re particularly popular with B2B businesses, many of which generate a significant portion of revenue through active selling.

Key metrics

• Outbound call volume
• Outbound call duration
• Number of emails sent
• Lead-to-opportunity ratio

Common types

• Lead response time reports, which show how quickly sales reps follow up with prospects after initial contact
• Won and lost deal reports, which analyze the characteristics of successful and unsuccessful deals
• Sales call reports, which measure the total number of calls by sales rep, client type, or another variable

Some business owners run weekly or daily sales reports that provide a granular picture of day-to-day sales rep activities. You can also use longer reporting intervals for an overview of team performance.

Sales pipeline reports

These reports examine the current state of your sales pipeline, helping you identify strengths and weaknesses in your sales process and facilitating more accurate sales forecasting. They can benefit ecommerce businesses with lead information, including those with robust lead-scoring systems and those with more rudimentary funnel data, such as access to information about customer behavior.

Key metrics

• Average deal size
• Average sale cycle length
• Number of sales opportunities

Common types

• Opportunity score reports, which assess how likely leads are to convert and report lead volumes by purchase probability
• Sales pipeline reports, which record the number of leads at each stage of your sales pipeline

Like activities reports, pipeline reports can provide valuable insights over short reporting intervals. Including pipeline data in daily or weekly sales reports shows you how many deals are in your sales pipeline, how close your team is to closing them, and how efficiently they move through different funnel stages. All of this can help you predict future sales and spot weaknesses in your processes.

How to write a sales report

1. Identify your purpose
2. Choose a report type
3. Select a reporting period
4. Choose a sales report template
5. Gather sales data and assemble your report

Follow these guidelines to create effective sales reports:

1. Identify your purpose

There are no universal rules about which reports to prepare, when to run them, or what data to include. The best sales report is one that helps you meet your specific goals, so start by asking yourself what you’re hoping to learn from (or do with) your report. The answer to this question is your reporting purpose.

2. Choose a report type

Select a sales report type that suits your purpose. You might choose an activities report to design a development plan for your sales representatives, or a process report to predict next month’s revenues. Reports are also highly flexible. You can mix and match metrics to create a custom report type around the data you need.

This guide focuses on sales performance reports, which can provide value to any type of business. Common goals include measuring the effectiveness of your overall sales strategy, setting performance targets, and monitoring progress. Some small business owners also share performance reports with third parties, like sales consultants or potential investors, to demonstrate growth potential or request strategic guidance.

3. Select a reporting period

Choose your reporting period, considering your available resources and reporting goals. Small business owners typically track performance-related sales on a monthly, quarterly, or yearly basis, since daily or weekly data often lack the volume needed to reveal meaningful trends. Here’s an overview of different time interval reports:

• Monthly sales reports. Help business owners identify trends early and adjust strategy on the fly.
• Quarterly sales reports. Cover enough time to surface meaningful progress, but not enough to obscure the relationship between strategic decisions and their outcomes with quarterly sales reports.
• Annual sales reports. Track long-term progress and help validate performance to a third party with annual sales reports.

Consider your sales cycle length as well. Generally speaking, the more time it takes you to close deals, the longer your reporting period will be. Although businesses generally reserve daily or weekly sales reports for activities-related tasks (such as evaluating sales reps or sales team performance), a company with a very short sales cycle might use weekly or daily reports to understand how experimenting with sales and marketing tactics affects short-term results.

4. Choose a sales report template

Sales report templates help businesses and sales teams save time by eliminating the need to develop a structure from scratch. Consistent formatting facilitates comparison with previous periods, and some sales report templates automatically generate engaging visuals that highlight key information for readers and make detailed reports easier to digest.

Look for a sales report template that’s geared toward your report type, tracks metrics relevant to your goal, and meets your design or formatting needs. If you’re preparing a performance report for a potential investor, for example, you might prioritize reporting templates with built-in data visualization and sleek design.

Shopify automatically generates ecommerce and POS retail sales reports and supports extensive customization options from the Shopify dashboard.

5. Gather sales data and assemble your report

Use your sales report template to decide which metrics to include in your report, and collect sales data from your customer relationship management (CRM) software. Sales performance-focused report templates often include the following:

• Total sales
• Units sold per product or service
• Total sales revenue
• Sales revenue by product
• Total profit
• Profit by product
• Returns by product type

Many reporting templates are customizable, so you can modify metrics tracked based on your specific goal or combine elements from multiple templates into one deliverable.

Shopify customers can automatically run ecommerce and POS retail sales reports from the Shopify admin dashboard. Shopify’s automatic sales reporting features include total sales over time, total sales by product, product variant, vendor, billing location, currency, or referrer. The platform can also track sales by sales channel, discount, and individual customer, and calculate average order value over time.

What to look for in sales reports

Sales performance reports help you evaluate whether your sales strategies are serving your sales objectives. They also help you spot trends, identify opportunities, and monitor progress. Here’s what to look for in performance-focused sales data:

• Products or service trends. You can use sales reports to see which of your products or services sell the best, bring in the most revenue, or generate the highest profits. If you sell 10 times as many tennis shoes and tennis rackets but rackets generate 75% of your profits, you might look for ways to increase tennis racket market penetration or boost profit margins on shoes.
• Changes in performance. Sales performance changes are noteworthy. Keep an eye out for increases or decreases in gross sales, net sales, total sales volumes, sales volumes by product or service, and profitability. A sudden drop in gross sales can indicate a problematic shift in your market, but if net sales are consistent, it may just mean that you’re finally reaching your ideal customers.
• Sales goal attainment. Note how your sales numbers compare to your goals. If you’re regularly exceeding your sales goals, they might not be appropriately ambitious. If you consistently fall short, you might set more conservative targets or adjust your sales strategy.
• Seasonal fluctuations. Comparing current sales data to previous periods can help you distinguish between cyclical sales variations and emerging trends, helping you plan for the future and identify potential problems early on. The insight that your sales typically double in December can help you source inventory for the holiday rush, for example.