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New deals won, contracts sent, sales meetings, and calls made; these are just a few of the metrics that many B2B sales teams look at.
Communicating sales progress on a weekly basis is one of the most important things that sales managers do. According to the recent Databox’s state of business reporting, about half of the companies report on sales at least once a week – which makes sales the most frequently reported operation.However, it is easy for these updates to turn into 20-page reports. Let’s face it – no one has the time or the desire to sift through that every week.
According to our findings, most weekly sales reports are distributed to both the sales and marketing teams.
You want your reports to be concise, easy-to-skim, and see where you are compared to your monthly, quarterly, or annual goals.
In this post, we surveyed more than 20 sales professionals to see what they include in their weekly sales reports.
Editor’s note: Are you tired of sharing links and documents containing performance updates back-and-forth? With Databox, you can display beautiful dashboards on your TV so that performance is visible, easy to understand, and actionable for everyone.
“New customers are most definitely a metric that should be included in any sales report,” says Andrea Loubier of Mailbird. “If all of your efforts are not producing new customers than you’ll need to readjust your strategies. Sometimes, there may be connections made that do not immediately evolve into a new customer relationship. This is why that type of information should be tracked as to scale the progress.”
Andrew Dorcas of ARHT Media says, “The most important metric to our organization is New Deals signed since the last report, alongside Totals for the Period.”
“One of the most important metrics we include in every weekly sales report is conversions,” adds Lisa Chu of Black n Bianco. “Our ecommerce site collects this data as it was built into our business dashboard. This data is shared weekly with our sales and marketing team to see how our products and brand are preforming. This metric is so important to our sales and marketing teams because it paints a clear picture of how our audience is responding to our brand. We have been tracking the conversion data for years, and it helps our company design products that resonate with our audience. We also use it to measure how we are performing from year to year, giving us a clear idea of where we can improve and grow our revenue. Essentially the conversion metrics is our weekly report card of how our business is doing.”
Get a broader overview of of all the leads in your funnel using this sales leads dashboard.
“Sales is a contact sport, and the more people you tell about your offering, the higher your chances of landing the perfect customer or many many perfect customers (whatever your goal is),” says Ryan Hiscox of Vend. ‘If monitoring this weekly, you should understand how many prospects you must get in front of in order to acquire new business. From there, you can modify weekly sales tactics to achieve the desired number of sales pitches to achieve the revenue/customer goal.”
‘Sales reports should be simple yet effective,” says Jamil Ali Ahmed of Cloudways. “We must make sure to measure all the team inputs, not just waiting for the outputs. Example: calls made, emails sent, meetings set up, leads generated, and deals closed.”
Alexandra Zamolo of Beekeeper adds, “I believe that it helps to include the sales for each individual representative. This can encourage a little friendly competition. In fact, to better engage your team, you can even offer monthly incentives to help everyone meet both their individual and group goals.” Editor’s Note: If you use Hubspot, this Sales Activity dashboard gives you a bird’s eye view over every stage of your sales funnel, including each rep’s contributions.
“We track scheduled meetings and closed orders weekly,” says Jessica Ibsen of Fully Promoted of Covington. “Both of these metrics help us keep an eye on the pipeline to make sure one end doesn’t lose flow. It’s important to focus on getting new incoming projects as well as how many are closing from the initial appointment setting. This conversion rate is a key performance indicator of an effective sales strategy.”
Oliver Lopez of Structsales takes this a step further by tracking the number of first meetings converted into follow up meetings.
Use this sales team activity dashboard to measure and compare your sales team performance and productivity
“An essential metric all sales reports should include is lead response time, which is how quickly your sales team is responding to inbound leads,” says Chris Wain of Africa Travel. “The longer your team takes to respond to a lead that has shown an interest in making a purchase with you, the more likely the source is to shop elsewhere.
Many companies don’t realize the impact that lead response time has on their sales, but if a sales team responds quickly to a lead, they have a far greater chance of securing a purchase from the customer. Including this metric in your reports will show a direct correlation between sales and lead response time. As a result, you can then analyze this correlation and figure out ways to make for a more streamlined process that cuts down the time it takes to respond to inquiries.”
“Anyone can have meetings, and I feel that the metric is a vanity one and can skew the views of productivity.,” says Jackie Pfriender of Impulse Creative. “If the meetings are not moving to contracts, they are not progressing the business along.”
“In addition to standards, like sales volume and number of calls, I also recommend tracking “we should of won it” lost deals,” says Jeremy Cross of teambuildingdenver.co. “It is important to track deals that are lost because of budget, client preferences or other factors less in our control, however, we really want to know how many deals we missed that we should have won — for example, because we replied too late or the client wanted to see more reviews. It is okay to see some of these lost deals come through, but our goal is zero, and we are always working toward it.’ This can be tracked with a business development dashboard
Jessica Falkenthal of Vendition says, “Just as every sales and marketing team craves feedback on what resonates with your audience, it is just as important to understand what does not. Your weekly sales activity report should include a summary of what points didn’t resonate with your buyers (alongside of which stage in their sales journey they are in). This information can either better inform Marketing/Sales to finetune your Persona documentation, and after seeing trends, should influence your product roadmap for better product-market fit.”
Akiva Goldstein of Onsitein60 adds, “The most important thing we track is not even a metric but rather an insight that has to be answered totally honestly: LEAKS! Where in the process of people’s tasks were things leaked along the way? The next step is, of course, how to correct the leak and prevent it from happening again, but detecting them is always the hardest step!”
“Other than sales, we also include the cost of sales (things that we can directly attribute to getting those sales such as Google Ads), that way, it helps us to keep track of profits as well as sales,” says David Silverman of Solution Loans.
To decide which goals meet the SMART criteria, sales managers need to look at sales analytics for their teams and monitor sales KPIs, for example:
Based on these metrics, and in light of other revenue-based and activity-based goals, you can identify and set desired goals for future performance, but how to get this information?
Now you can benefit from the experience of our sales experts, who have put together a great Databox template showing an overview of your sales team’s performance. It’s simple to implement and start using as a standalone dashboard or in sales reports, and best of all, it’s free!
You can easily set it up in just a few clicks – no coding required.
To set up this Sales Analytics Overview Dashboard, follow these 3 simple steps:
Step 1: Get the template
Step 2: Connect your HubSpot account with Databox.
Step 3: Watch your dashboard populate in seconds.
Farasat Khan of IsItWP says, “Number of clicks driving from each page. By having this metric, it allows us to ensure that you are aware of the amount of traffic you are generating from a page, and if the number of clicks drops, you will be aware of the loss of traffic.”
“The one metric that everyone needs in a weekly sales activity report is new business versus upselling,” says Morgan Taylor of LetMeBank. “This tells you not only what business you’re generating, but also what you’ve managed to hold onto. New business is important, but so is holding on to clients. They’re the backbone of your business and this tells you whether or not it’s worth investing more in customer service or outreach.”
“We track revenue attribution (marketing-attributed revenue, referral-attributed revenue, client expansions, etc),” says Jennifer Lux of LyntonWeb. “By understanding the origins of our main sources of closed deals or revenue, we can put more emphasis on prospecting from those pools of contacts, and/or marketing to them. Taking it a step further, because we have this source information, we can determine the origins of our most loyal clients’ over time and continue to build our client base from the sources that will provide long-term recurring revenue.”
Omi Diaz-Cooper of Diaz & Cooper Advertising adds, “It’s crucial that marketing and sales are aligned, so I highly recommend adding leads by source – to keep track of what channels and campaigns are providing a reliable volume of prospects.” This metric can be easily tracked using a sales dashboard software.
“You should include YTD revenue by rep,” says Michael Snowden of Training Industry, Inc. “This keeps everyone accountable, and gives reps easy visibility into their goals for the year.”
Editor’s Note: Use this Close Rate by Sales Rep performance dashboard to help every member of your team hit their quota. Learn how to recreate in Databox below.
“We try to understand what are the chances of conversion of a client,” says Avinash Chandra of BrandLoom. ‘If the chances of conversion are high, we try to figure out what else can be done to ensure that the client gets converted.”
Melanie Musson of US Insurance Agents says, “Include a comparison for how the previous week compares to the previous month and the previous year. That will give the report context.’
Hope Ashley of UpFlip adds, “Every weekly sales activity report should show a comparison of data tracked in your sales dashboard from the past several weeks. One of the most important things regarding a report of this nature is to be able to illustrate if you have improved from the previous week(s).”
In sum, measuring and reporting on these metrics on a weekly basis with a business dashboard software will allow you to spot trends, get in front of any potential problems before they blow up, and help you close more deals.
If you are in need of creating more comprehensive sales activity reports, we recommend trying out a business reporting software like Databox. With Databox, you can significantly cut time on reporting and seamlessly track data from all the different tools you’re using. Sign up for a free trial now.
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Jessica Malnik is a content strategist and copywriter for SaaS and productized service businesses. Her writing has appeared on The Next Web, Social Media Examiner, SEMRush, CMX, Help Scout, Convince & Convert, and many other sites.
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