Are you finding difficulty in achieving your sales targets?
Sales analysis reports can help identify the areas of improvement for consistent sales growth. It eliminates all the guesswork and ensures you target the right metrics for increased conversions.
But what is sales analysis and how do you create a detailed sales report?
In this article, we will cover different types of sales analysis reports. We will also show you the right of conducting analysis for calculated growth.
Let’s begin with a basic understanding of sales analysis and its importance.
Meaning of sales analysis
Sales analysis refers to analyzing the overall sales data of a company in a defined period. The time of sales analysis report creation varies from company to company. Creating a sales analysis report weekly, monthly, or annually depends on your company’s pre-set goals. When done correctly, it helps identify the areas requiring improvement.
Companies set sales targets based on criteria achieved in a period (weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc.). A sales analysis helps identify the progress and standing of sales reps. It further helps in modifying the current strategy to achieve more sales. Moreover, a sales analysis runs from the bottom to the top level to understand progress at every stage.
Companies, irrespective of size, should conduct sales analysis for the following reasons:
- Identify missed opportunities
Analyzing historical sales data helps identify missed opportunities and develop an edge over competitors.
- Help impact core decisions.
It impacts core decision-making processes like continuing or discontinuing a particular product based on overall sales. Let’s say a product has a continual decline in sales in a specific region. Companies can discontinue selling in that region to save costs.
- Understand current and upcoming trends
Sometimes a decline in sales occurs due to a lack of focus on current or upcoming trends. A sales analysis helps identify the current trends to understand customer behavior and make decisions accordingly.
- Improve marketing and sales strategies
Marketing and sales go hand-in-hand. Extracting crucial customer insights with sales analysis helps improve marketing and sales strategies.
What is a sales analysis report?
A sales analysis report is a document consisting of relevant data for analyzing a company’s performance in terms of sales. It includes current and upcoming sales trends, historical sales data, sales team performance, etc. The data sets included in the report vary from company to company based on size.
A periodic sales analysis report is a company’s most common type of report. It helps understand the increase or decrease in sales compared to previous years. You also understand the reasons behind a drastic increase or decrease in sales.
Lastly, teams devise enhanced strategies, avoid irrelevant costs, and focus on areas of improvement.
A sales analysis report covers the following areas:
- Identify reduced product demand.
A sales analysis report helps in identifying reduced product demand. It’s beneficial specifically for businesses selling multiple products. Let’s say the demand for a particular product is at an all-time low. The report helps understand the core reasons behind the decline in sales. Next, you can focus on creating a better product based on customers’ changing preferences. Therefore, it saves you from losses with a lack of focus on customer needs.
- Help identify untapped market opportunities.
Comparing actual sales with projected sales help identify untapped opportunities. It impacts core decision-making processes like expanding production in a particular region. It also helps in deciding whether you should grow and explore new markets. More often than not, identifying these opportunities lead to heavy growth.
- Assess market prices
A sales analysis report also helps in assessing the market prices. You understand the amount customers are willing to spend on a product based on its features. Let’s say your competitors provide the same features or better at a comparatively low price. You will likely lose your customers to them. Conducting a deep analysis to assess market prices play an important role in selling.
8+ types of sales analysis report to try in 2023
Creating sales and marketing strategies requires a focus on different sales-related areas. Let’s look at the top sales analysis reports covering different areas to make easier decisions.
#1 Sales conversion report
A sales conversion report helps identify the conversions and performance of sales reps at every funnel stage. You can figure out the reps matching the set targets and others lagging. It emphasizes companies focusing on the effectiveness of sales reps at every funnel stage.
Moreover, the breakdown of performance at various stages helps identify the stages requiring an increased focus.
#2 Average sales cycle report
The average sales cycle report focuses on the time taken to convert a prospect from the initial funnel stage to the final buying decision. It’s one of the core performance monitoring metrics required in devising strategies. Understanding the sales cycle length helps you forecast sales in a defined period.
#3 Actual vs. Forecasted revenue
High-performing teams always set targets and timely track them. The actual vs. forecasted revenue report helps you identify whether your team is on the right track to achieving the set targets. When sales are drastically lower than the forecast, you can find the areas requiring increased focus. Remember, the actual sales may not match the forecasted sales. However, a drastic difference between the two is never a good sign.
#4 Pipeline report
A sales pipeline report helps align the marketing and sales goals for collective analysis. It consists of critical factors like sales qualified leads (SQLs), conversion rates, sales cycle length, etc. Teams easily identify sales opportunities and estimated revenue through a pipeline report.
Identifying efficiencies of sales reps becomes more accessible as the pipeline report targets every stage of the funnel. Teams creating pipeline reports often increase total revenue generation and decrease costs associated with delays. Furthermore, the collected data thoroughly targets every stage, leading to accurate sales forecasts.
#5 Average deal size report
The average deal size report helps estimate revenue generation and monitor your funnel efficiency. It leads to improved alignment with revenue targets through a clear representation of required sales to achieve the same. Furthermore, teams succeed in setting influential milestones for the sales cycle based on acquired results.
With this report, companies identify the most critical metrics, training requirements, and factual information assisting in reviews. Teams must align to improve average deal size to increase overall revenue generation.
#6 Win/Loss analysis report
You cannot close every lead you get without effective marketing and sales strategies. However, understanding your failures helps you create strategies leading to improved conversions.
It targets core questions like—what percentage of leads did you lose to your competitors? What lured those prospects, and how can you improve those areas of your products/services?
Research has shown that an effective win/loss analysis can increase your conversion rate by 50%. Instead of blindly hunting new leads, you can focus on understanding the reasons behind the failure in closing old ones.
#7 Marketing collateral usage report
This report focuses on identifying the marketing efforts driving conversions. Marketing collateral includes blog posts, ebooks, infographics, case studies, etc., helping customers understand your brand better. It allows prospects to eventually move along the funnel to make the buying decision. The material consists of everything used by marketing teams to close better deals.
The report consists of all marketing materials impacting the sales decision. However, the primary emphasis remains on determining the ones that garnered results.
After identifying the marketing collateral generating maximum results, you can spend time producing more of it. It reduces the waste of time and effort in creating content, not impacting the buying decision.
#8 Sales trends analysis report
Sales trends analysis focuses on analyzing past sales data to understand buying patterns. After detecting patterns, one can quickly determine the estimated revenue growth over months. It’s specifically helpful to businesses selling different products in different regions. Break down the region-specific sales for various products and analyze them on a trend line.
Let’s say you analyze sales by product. You will determine whether product sales are at an all-time high or decreasing over time. Next, focus on determining the reasons behind the decrease in sales to improve your products accordingly.
#9 Sales opportunity report with trend analysis
A sales opportunity report helps in identifying the volume of opportunities and the efficiency of teams in converting them into sales. The report consists of the average opportunities received by every person. Then the win ratio percentage and average win ratio percentage are determined. It helps set the right benchmarks for team members based on their capabilities.
Identifying the opportunities that converted along with the missed ones helps in accurate sales forecasting. This report is specifically important for sales managers to determine the performance of the sales team. It helps identify the right ways to deal with underperforming employees.
#10 Sales and order report
The sales order report consists of all core information related to sales order transactions. It helps companies understand customers’ patterns of spending money and the products generating maximum revenue. You also know about the customers paying the highest amount for your products/services.
Moreover, this analysis report is an excellent way of comparing past and current sales volume.
#11 Customer churn report
Businesses must focus on the number of customers they have lost in a given period. It’s crucial to identify the reasons behind a sudden decrease in sales. Using this report, re-frame your marketing and sales campaigns for better results. Moreover, your product development team can also access core information impacting different decisions.
#12 Sales call report
The sales call report helps in keeping track of the number of calls, follow-ups, and responses by prospects collected by sales reps. It helps understand the customers better along with identifying efficient reps. The report helps identify common reasons behind customers not converting. Teams can further work on the areas to improve the overall experience. Furthermore, you will determine the underperforming employees that require further training.
How to analyze your sales results?
Now that we know all crucial sales analysis report types, let’s move on to understanding the process of analyzing your sales results. Here are the steps to analyze your sales using Growth Nirvana👇
Step-1: Connect your CRM
Growth Nirvana is a reliable platform that allows easy integration with all CRMs. We offer 300+ no-code connectors to easily connect with your data sources.
Step 2: Sharing your challenges and dashboard needs.
Start by briefing the Growth Nirvana team about your pain points and dashboard needs. We create custom dashboards as per specific requirements. No data engineering or technical knowledge is required from your end. We ensure our team handles every technical aspect to leave your focus simply intact on creating strategies.
All you need to do is provide some details, and our team will create a dashboard to help you analyze your sales results.
Here is an example of a dashboard created using Growth Nirvana.
Conclusion
Creating a sales analysis report is crucial for all businesses, irrespective of size. However, the KPIs you target might vary depending on the business size.
You can easily create reports and track your business performance with clear goals in mind and the right metrics. The sales reports mentioned above help tackle various aspects, increasing your customer base and overall revenue generation.
Feeling too overwhelmed with sales analysis report creation and tracking? Create your sales analysis report in no time with Growth Nirvana
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