Sales Reporting: A Complete Guide

Sales reporting isn't just about collecting data. It's about connecting the dots. Tools with strong sales reporting capabilities turn raw data — such as opportunities, closed deals, lead sources, and pipeline stages — into meaningful insights that can help sales leaders understand what's working and what isn't. If a rep is using a spreadsheet, they might spend hours identifying which leads to chase first. But a data-driven sales report will instantly show them stalled deals, high-value opportunities, and which follow-ups to prioritize.

Reporting helps you answer questions like: Are we hitting the right sales targets? Where are our deals getting stuck? Which reps in which regions are performing best?

In short, sales reporting helps you deliver value to the business. That's why it's important to build effective sales reports. Read on to learn how to use sales reporting to make informed decisions and drive team success.

Sales reporting relies on sales data pulled directly from your customer relationship management (CRM) software to give a snapshot of sales performance. Both sales professionals and business leaders use sales reporting to track key performance indicators (KPIs), helping guide decision-making and ensuring your team can reach its sales goals.

Sales reporting encompasses a wide variety of sales reports that you can run or include in a sales dashboard. Depending on the purpose of each report and its audience, sales reports may be used daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually. Many salespeople use reports daily or weekly to monitor progress toward their sales targets, check in on their pipelines, and determine their most urgent tasks. Sales managers rely on sales reporting to stay on top of team performance and identify areas where they can best support individuals in meeting their goals.

Sales reports provide a wealth of insights into your sales performance. At a high level, sales tracking informs leaders on how their teams are performing against year-to-date targets, making it easier to gauge individual and team effectiveness. Sales reports also help forecast whether you're on track to meet your sales goals, allowing you to fine-tune your overall strategy along the way.

Here are four ways you can use sales reports at various levels within your organization:

• Evaluate strategy: Tracking sales data helps you understand what's selling, when it sells, how long the sales cycle is, who's buying and where, and who's selling best (with insights on how they're doing it). This information empowers leaders to refine strategies, enabling them to make proactive adjustments that drive growth.
• Forecast revenue: With a clear understanding of how much you stand to impact revenue, the broader business can make better-informed decisions about overall business strategy and adjust as needed. Effective sales forecasting relies heavily on consistent, accurate sales reporting.
• Pinpoint coaching opportunities: Sales reporting helps locate weak spots in your sales cycle or team and provides opportunities for coaching. By analyzing sales reports to identify underperforming areas, you can target specific skills, such as closing techniques or product knowledge, to help team members overcome challenges and improve their sales outcomes.
• Identify and prioritize next steps: Sales teams can identify which opportunities to pursue and when to follow up by regularly reviewing sales reports. Look for key trends and areas for improvement, then focus on the actions that will drive the highest impact, as they align with broader business objectives.

As you get more practice creating, updating, and using sales reports, you'll also find ways to improve your skills as a salesperson and raise your internal profile as a strategic player. That builds your value and gives you more opportunities to collaborate at higher levels.

Sales reports generally include the following components:

• Sales data: This could include sales metrics related to activities, revenue, pipeline, sales performance, sales by product or service, customer insights, or any combination of these. You can categorize sales data into two types — outcome metrics (like revenue and contracts) and process metrics (like leads and sales calls) — and choose what to include based on what you're looking to learn and how you'll use the report.
• Graphs and other visuals: Sales reports should be presented in a way that helps readers get information quickly and determine next steps with ease. Use colorful charts, graphs, and comparison tables to help people digest data quickly. If you need to include a more complex chart, create a legend or key to help readers understand it. Finally, use proper fields to clearly identify and organize data in your tables and charts, and always include the data's timeframe.
• Key trends and insights: Include concise bullet points to highlight important sales trends and suggest next steps. For example, if the data shows that contract renewals are declining in just one service area, highlight that trend. Then, suggest the next steps to investigate the issue. This could include determining whether the team has maintained its focus on renewals and seeking feedback to understand why customers have chosen not to renew.

A tip for creating sales reports: When selecting KPIs, consider who will use the report and what they want to learn. Then you can determine which metrics to include and how detailed they should be. Showing which filters you've used and how you're sorting can also help people understand the reports more easily.

Sales reports vary in terms of frequency, focus, and level of detail. In general, the closer the person using the report is to the data, the more detailed and frequent their report will be. The further they are from personally affecting the data and the higher they are in the organization, the more digestible and high-level the report or sales dashboard should be.

For example, a sales representative likely wants a daily report on their own activities, leads, and deals so they can track their progress against goals and prioritize tasks for the day. A sales manager may prefer a weekly report on team-level progress, while the VP of sales may prefer to get monthly reports on sales performance for each region, line of business, and product. The highest-level viewers, such as board members, may only require quarterly sales reports that include year-to-date revenue and high-level sales forecasts.

Here are some of the most commonly used sales reports:

• Sales pipeline reports: Enable sales teams to track their leads through each stage of the sales cycle. They can help sales managers identify what their team does well and where they need help. Sales leaders may use it to get an idea of whether sales teams will hit their targets. Understanding the difference between sales forecasting vs. pipeline management is crucial for effective sales pipeline reporting.
• Conversion rate reports: Show the sales conversion rate of your sales leads. Depending on which fields you include and how you segment the data, you can get insights on the conversion rates for each stage of your sales cycle, informing how many contacts and leads you should work to include at the top of your sales funnel. Make sure you understand the context of the conversion rate, because different types of deals convert in different ways. For example, renewals would be different from new business.
• Leaderboards: Display how individuals, teams, or regions perform against each other on a specific metric or goal. This can inform high-level sales strategy, help inspire friendly competition between teams and individuals, and identify collaborative mentorship opportunities.
• Average deal size reports: Show the average value of each deal, which helps sales managers and leaders determine the potential revenue from each customer lead. With this information, they can set informed targets for their sales reps to ensure the company meets its goals.
• Activity reports: Sales managers use these reports to get a pulse on their team's productivity. They can also see how various types of activities, such as emails or booked meetings, affect sales metrics and success. This gives sales leaders insights into which activities are most effective at qualifying customers and, ultimately, closing deals.

Today's technology makes it easy to create and update sales reports. For instance, Sales Cloud creates simple visualizations of data and allows users to drill into key drivers such as lead volume and sales pipeline management metrics. Reporting capabilities include automation, but the human touch remains valuable, especially for understanding what to include and how best to present the data.

Building a report is one thing; effectively using sales reporting to guide strategy and tell a story is another. That's why it's important to think about how your sales reports will be viewed and shared. Here's how to get started:

Determine what you need to know and how you'll use the information. For example, you might choose to create a quarterly performance report.

It's helpful to understand past data, such as what the previous quarter looked like or how this quarter compares to the same quarter last year. But you may also want to ask yourself: What did we measure before that we should include again, or what did we not measure that we should start reporting? Depending on your industry, seasonal considerations might impact how you create or update reports.

Consider who's using this report to determine what level of detail to include and which insights are most important to them. The VP of sales will likely want a high-level overview, while a team manager may want to drill into the details.

Once you know the purpose and audience, you'll be able to decide which fields to pull in (e.g., total revenue, meetings booked, total pipeline, etc.) and how to filter the data (e.g., which timeframe or region to include).

Use charts or graphs to display key data whenever possible to make the sales report easier to read and emphasize details you want to bring attention to. Most CRM software can generate these visuals for you. And, if you're presenting your sales report, take the extra step to briefly summarize insights or next steps for your audience.

Your sales reporting will only be as good as your data, which is a critical reason to keep your CRM up to date. As you build sales reports, watch out for these common reporting pitfalls:

• Inaccurate data: Ensure your CRM is connected to the right data sources and can provide real-time updates to guarantee accuracy. Use your CRM — not spreadsheets — for sales reporting.
• Unnecessary complexity: Stay focused on what you're trying to achieve and avoid data dumping. Consider what this report will support and the value you're aiming for. You can customize views, use conditional formatting, and automate reporting, but don't overcomplicate your sales reports. Apply the right timeframe, location(s), and team filters, and let others dive deeper if they wish.
• Duplicating reports: Before creating new reports from older ones, or using templates, double-check that you've updated all filters to ingest only the most recent and relevant data for your new report. This way, you won't confuse your audience with outdated information.

Use these best practices to ensure your sales reporting is effective and actionable.

Sales automation is crucial for sales reporting, and I strongly advise that you use this capability. Many tools offer AI for sales features that can save time and ensure you're learning from historical wins and losses. Predictive features and real-time sales reporting help you stay ahead of the curve and adjust your strategy as needed. Modern AI sales agents can even automate parts of the reporting process.

It's worth noting that sales teams that use AI come out ahead. The latest State of Sales report found that 83% of sales teams with AI saw revenue growth in the past year, versus 66% of teams without AI.

Sales reporting should reflect how your sales team directly impacts your business. You can report on anything, but it's essential to keep your reporting relevant to what matters most to the business at present. (That said, reviewing reports regularly may also reveal areas for business opportunities.)

Encourage and enable users to view reports within your CRM rather than exporting data into other formats. The more you can provide a single source of truth with the most recent information, the better decisions everyone can make.

Use historical data to give your audience context and reveal trends over time. This is crucial when applying sales forecasting techniques that depend on historical patterns.

Display high-level data with filters that allow users to change date ranges and toggle between product lines, teams, geographic location, sales funnel stages, industries, etc. This way, your sales dashboard can pull from multiple sales reports and serve the needs of many groups or audiences.

If your organization uses channel sales strategies, ensure your reporting captures performance across all channels and partner relationships.

While sales analysis is both an art and a science, tools like Sales AI and Agentforce are transforming the industry. Comprehensive sales analytics software provides the foundation for effective sales reporting, helping teams turn data into actionable insights that drive revenue growth.

With advanced automation capabilities and integrated sales agents, modern sales reporting has evolved from static reports to dynamic, intelligent systems that help sales teams stay ahead of trends and opportunities. The key is to use these tools to create reports that both track performance and predict future outcomes.