Think your business is doing just fine without a daily sales report? Think again!
Maintaining a weekly or monthly sales report is easy. But, these reports do not analyze the day-to-day activities in your business. Thus incapacitating your managers from identifying the operational bottlenecks at the grassroot level.
Businesses have realized that daily sales reports helps them understand the challenges of their workforce and suggest corrective measures in time. But, from the salespeople perspective, it’s a redundant activity – especially when there is no real update to share. Nonetheless, managers ought to know the daily updates from teams to make informed decisions on how and where to focus their time and resources.
Additionally, preparing daily report isn’t much of work if it is automated. Several organizations use sales CRM software that automatically generates daily reports based on business KPIs and users need not spend any time doing it.
Let’s delve deeper into why daily sales reports are important and how can you make this process a piece of cake.
Why a Daily Sales Report is Important?
Below are a few ways daily sales reports can help expedite sales performance and the growth of your business.
1. Helps to Shorten the Sales Funnel
Pushing a lead through the sales funnel can be incredibly difficult. It is because not all leads are created equal. You must have a bunch of leads coming in from several sources, some with lower/higher quality scores than others. Moreover, the response rate/connect rate for some of these leads might be lower than others. Therefore, without a fast feedback loop, your sales team might end up wasting their time contacting leads from sources that are repeatedly bringing in lower quality leads.
With a daily sales report that gives you a cumulative feedback of the leads that have come in, the contact rates, the quality scores, the lead scores etc., you’d be able to:
- Set automated rules to prioritize historically good quality channels/higher quality queries higher up in the prioritization list, while deprioritizing consistently lower quality ones
- Alert sales teams of any possible leakage that may have happened by looking at the “assigned leads vs contacted leads” reports
- Alert marketing teams of the channels to reduce/increase the budgets accordingly
This way, with precise sales data, salespeople will be able to reach out to high quality leads first, reducing the sales cycle altogether
2. Aids Informed Decision-making, Every Day
The bane of the managerial role is making sound decisions at the right time. While this is already an onerous task, it becomes even worse if the manager does not have enough data to make decisions from. Who are your regular customers? What is the cash flow? Which part of the business brings more revenue? How many prospects do you have in the pipeline? Why do some team members get high prospects but low conversion? What are your sales team focusing on? Are there any lags you need to amend? These are some important questions that a manager will have to answer to further push the businesses towards the spotlight.
It is not enough to keep a monthly sales report that barely shows the foundation of each sale and how well your marketing team is performing. Daily sales reports give you a clear picture of everything that happens both in the office and on the field, making it easy for you to track performances and your customer base. With daily sales reports, you can easily pinpoint a problem and tackle it before it gets overblown. Also, you can tell where the business is excelling and where to focus more revenue on. Easy peasy!
3. Monitor and Motivate Salespeople
Believe it or not, challenge motivates your sales and marketing team. By having a report that shows who is working hard and who is working well, other team members will be motivated to do better to earn the title too. Therefore, you have a bunch of sales reps who are willing to up their game both in the field and in the office. This ultimately leads to increased productivity of your sales team and of course, more sales. It is an all-win situation for you.
4. Saves Time and Resources
I guess this is the most important of all the benefits of daily sales reporting. Time and resources are invaluable to the growth of any business. However, it is not always a shortage of time or resources that dampens the growth of a business. More often than not, the problem lies with poor management of these two critical growth factors.
Thanks to sales reporting, you can now tell which leads are worth pursuing and which should get less time. Furthermore, you can tell what type of customers patronize your products or services, thus allowing you to know the targeted audience to focus on. Sales reporting makes sales super easy. It is not an option!
5. Give Everyday Insights for a Better Performance
While weekly and monthly sales reports are lauded for offering astounding benefits, it is in fact, daily sales reports that actually gives clearer insights into how well the current quarter is going, how well last quarter went and what the next quarter may look like.
From monthly reports, it is easy to get the gross total and make decisions on a broader-scale. But you may not know which days brought the best sales, what times are best to connect with people, what caused such increase, and more to achieve even greater sales in the next quarter. The role of daily sales reports to a business cannot [and I repeat, cannot] be overemphasized.
What Should Be Reported?
It is not enough to adopt the habit of maintaining a daily sales report. You have to learn how to properly create a report and the details that it is supposed to contain. Although these details vary with businesses, here are a few common data points that your sales report should include.
- Number of prospects in the pipeline
- Average time it takes for a lead to complete the sales cycle
- Daily sales goals and quotas
- Number of meetings held daily and the plans
- Assigned territories of sales reps
- Average deal size in your pipeline
- Daily conversion rate
- Number of sales negotiations conducted
- Number of opportunities that open and deals that close daily
- Landing page conversion rate
- Number of sales calls and their duration
- Number of queries received
Resource: Masterclass on LeadSquared Reports & Analytics. Also look at the ready-to-use sales report templates available in LeadSquared CRM.
An Easy Way to Stay On top of Your Game – Sales CRM
Daily sales reporting can be incredibly difficult to maintain. It is no wonder businesses readily opt for weekly or monthly sales reports. Well, you don’t really have to struggle to maintain a healthy reporting system. With a professional sales CRM, you are sure to get every necessary data entered without breaking a sweat.
Even more, your sales reps do not have to deal with entering a ridiculous amount of data after returning from the field. They can enter every information right on the field with a mobile CRM app. Don’t be responsible for your business’ stunted growth.
FAQs
First, know your reporting audience (is it the management, the sales head, or the regional head). Then collect important sales metrics (that you also want to improve), and add context for data. Do not clutter it with too much information, and keep only those data points that align with your sales goals.
You can also use sales CRM software to generate daily reports.
Reporting sales activities daily, weekly, and monthly have their specific purposes. Daily sales report gives insights on a sales rep’s/agent’s day-to-day activities, and you can identify operational bottlenecks or any other challenges on the way.
Weekly sales reports can help managers monitor the number of deals closed by the team or the revenue generated. Monthly sales reports provide a bigger picture of the sales activities, sales reps’ performances, and overall team performance.
A sales activity report is a quantitative outline of sales team’s performance, leads acquired, sales pipeline, product demos, deals closed, and revenues generated over a specified period.
Include the summary of the accomplishments/tasks completed during the day, planned activities, targets vs achievements, and problems/challenges/solutions to those problems (if applicable) in your daily sales report.
