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Cold calling, emailing, social selling, booking meetings, and closing deals. These are just some of the sales activities that take place in a single day.
No matter how good you may be at organizing, tracking the results of all these activities can be immensely time-consuming. In fact, Sales is one of the top 3 most monitored and reported operations, according to Databox’s state of business reporting.
This is why we incorporate sales activity reports.
Sales activity reports provide you with valuable insights into your overall sales process and let you see exactly how well your sales representatives are performing.
Making the most out of sales activities reports is one the repertoire of every successful sales executive and they can essentially make or break a sales department.
In this guide, we are going to walk you through what sales activity reporting is, what are its benefits, which metrics to include, and provide you with some of the best examples that you can use in your own company.
A sales activity report is a detailed document that showcases the performance of each sales activity that occurs within a company.
It provides sales managers with sufficient data and valuable insights into the activities that the sales team has completed in a specific time frame (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually).
With a sales activity report, you will be able to check on your most important sales metrics such as leads acquired, deals closed, revenue generated, sales pipeline, conversions, phone calls, and dozens more.
In case you motivate your sales representatives through competition, a sales activity report can also show you a detailed performance comparison between the sales reps.
Sales processes and activities are generally hard to comprehend, especially in larger companies.
This is why incorporating a sales activity report can make a huge difference. You will have an easier time making informed decisions, reaching milestones, and understanding the bigger picture behind the overall sales process.
Related: Sales Report Templates For Daily, Weekly Monthly, Quarterly and Yearly Statements (Sourced from 40+ Sales Pros)
As we said, sales activity reports carry a lot of weight.
No matter how big your company is, practicing activity reporting can provide an abundance of valuable data.
Even startups and SMBs that don’t have as many sales activities to track can use these reports to optimize the overall process and plan future growth strategies.
Some of the most notable benefits of sales activity reports include:
Related: 23 Tips for Tracking Sales Activity with HubSpot CRM
Now that you know what a sales activity report is and what its benefits are, we can move on to the actual reporting process.
Follow these next few steps to report on your sales activities faster and more efficiently.
Depending on the time frame, there are four different types of sales activity reports – daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual.
Each of these activity reports focuses on different information, so it’s crucial to determine which report you will be writing.
For example, a daily sales activity report tracks metrics such as the number of calls a sales rep made in a day or the number of meetings they attended.
However, if you want to focus on capturing the purchase patterns of your customers and see how effective your sales strategies have been, you should create a quarterly or yearly sales activity report.
A good sales reporting practice is to start off the writing process with the executive summary first in line.
Go over all of the numbers and data you accumulated in the specific time frame so you will have a clear overview of the most important pain points you will present.
Once you know which findings you want to communicate through the report, you will have an easier time focusing on them during the writing process and you will avoid any unnecessary improvisations.
Just remember, you should keep the summary as brief as possible. Of course, if you are writing a yearly report, the summary might end up taking up one whole page, which is completely reasonable.
The main thing is to avoid including unnecessary information that will make the summary unnecessary longer.
Including visual elements such as graphs or charts to simplify the numbers can go a long way with executives reading the report.
Not only does it make the report more understandable, but it also makes it looks better and adds a dose of professionalism.
Related: What’s the Best Chart Type for Your Dashboard Metrics?
The next thing you should include is the progress your sales department is making.
For example, if your generated revenue in a specific period is $5000, you should also explain that it’s a 150% increase compared to last month.
This type of information can help motivate your sales reps and show your investors that there is progress being made.
Even if there isn’t much progress, it’s still better to include this comparison. You can even add an explanation of what went wrong and develop strategies on how to fix it.
The purpose of a sales activity report isn’t just to present your shareholders with a random set of numbers.
You should always aim to include additional information about the numbers in order to explain them more granularly. This helps justify the figures you presented and in overall data contextualizing.
Sales happen every day, and if you have an active sales team, they’re busy setting up appointments, making calls, creating and nurturing deals, and closing them to generate new revenue. It’s your job to monitor their performance and work with your team to improve it. To do that, you need up-to-the-minute information at your fingertips, including:
Now you can benefit from the experience of our sales experts, who have put together a great Databox template showing all the most important KPIs for 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 Manager KPIs 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.
Creating a sales activity report just because it is useful won’t mean very much if you don’t plan it out to the last detail.
You have to have a clear strategy in mind before you start writing the report, and this includes knowing which metrics to focus on.
As we said, the metrics you will prioritize will mostly depend on the report’s time frame, but there are some key metrics that are considered to be universally useful to include.
Here is a list of some of the top metrics you should include in your sales activity report:
There are basically hundreds of metrics that you can choose from, but these stand out as the ones that provide the most valuable insights.
PRO TIP: If you are using HubSpot CRM, you are probably tracking metrics like calls, emails, logged new deals, and deals won, all by sales rep. But there’s one metric that isn’t easily tracked in HubSpot CRM — and that’s close rate by sales rep.
That’s where we can help! Combining Databox and HubSpot CRM, you can easily track and visualize Close Rate by Sales Rep. Watch the video below to learn how.
Considering the importance that sales activity reports have in a company, learning how to write them properly should become one of your top priorities.
No matter how much experience you may have in writing sales reports, having a useful tool by your side can only make things easier.
We are referring to sales activity report examples and templates.
Let’s check out some of the best sales dashboard templates that will help you overcome the difficulties of sales activity reporting.
To easily track all the stages in your sales funnel, you can download this free HubSpot Sales Activity Dashboard.
Since you will have data of each stage captured in one report, you will also be able to quickly identify problem areas and see to them immediately.
Some of the things you can learn through this report are:
The metrics included are calls, emails logged, meetings, notes, and many more.
For monitoring the most important outputs and outcomes of your sales team, you should consider using the HubSpot Sales Manager KPIs Dashboard.
This comprehensive dashboard includes a handful of metrics such as average deal size, the number of deals won, new deals created, amount closed, deals closed-won, and dozens more.
Additionally, the dashboard can provide answers to questions like:
The Monthly Sales Activity Dashboard is one of the best ways for you to track the most important monthly sales metrics and monitor your company’s progress.
You will gain insight into the rate at which sales reps are creating/closing deals, how their performance compares to last month’s, and see which reps have been hitting the most quotas.
The key metrics included in this dashboard are sales funnel, deal funnel, open deals by owner, closed deals by owner, and closed won amount.
You can use the HubSpot CRM Dashboard to efficiently track the overall productivity of your sales representatives and see which ones performed the best in a specific period.
This comprehensive dashboard includes an abundance of important metrics you can track, including:
To measure your sales team’s performance and see how each individual sales rep is performing, you can use the HubSpot CRM Dashboard.
The key metrics included in this report are emails logged, meetings booked, calls made, new deals created, close rate, closed won amount, and much more.
Sales activity reports are undoubtedly one of the best ways to track all the important metrics in your sales process, identify problem areas, and later optimize them.
However, as useful as they may be, creating a sales activity report is no easy work.
You will have to frequently gather data, organize it, analyze it, and then turn it into meaningful insights that your audience will understand. If you do all of this manually, the process becomes even harder and more time-consuming.
This is where advanced reporting tools such as Databox can step in and help out.
Databox grants you access to pre-built and customizable dashboards that will capture and track all of the important sales activity KPIs and metrics in one place.
No matter which type of sales channel you are using, you will be able to connect it to the dashboard and transform the data into a meaningful report.
This also simplifies the analysis process. Once you have all the KPIs in one comprehensive place, going over each of them will take much less time.
As a cherry on top, you will also gain access to our robust visualization tools. With them, you can transform the ‘dry’ numbers into beautiful and insightful graphs that will undoubtedly leave an impression on your shareholders.
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Filip Stojanovic is a content writer who studies Business and Political Sciences. Also, I am a huge tennis enthusiast. Although my dream is to win a Grand Slam, working as a content writer is also interesting.
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