How to create impactful sales performance reports and use them to shape your strategy

Whether you’re a sales manager, rep, or leader—or work in any role that’s even remotely related to selling—a sales performance report is a must-have.

It’s more than just numbers and graphs: an effective report helps you identify the strengths and weaknesses of your sales strategy, spot trends, and reach sales targets. But what does it take to build a great one? You’re about to find out.

This article covers

• A 4-step framework to report on (and improve) sales performance

• The 9 main types of sales performance reports

• 3 sales performance reporting mistakes

How to report on (and improve) sales performance

Learn how to easily build actionable sales performance reports, so you can spend more time spotting patterns and less time tweaking tables. Complete these four simple steps to create a sales performance report for your team. 

1. Define your essential sales performance KPIs to measure progress

Sales reports are an analysis tool that use a mix of powerful key performance indicators (KPIs) to track the success of various sales activities within a given period. These metrics help you see your sales strategy as a bigger picture so you can pinpoint places of friction and see what's working in your process.

Sales reports can be set to various frequencies, helping you monitor your success over time. The metrics you include and your reporting timeframe depend on your sales objectives and how frequently you need to update your team or management.

2. Diagnose the reasons behind the numbers

Once you’ve gathered the data you need to build a sales performance report, it's time to analyze it and pinpoint why your results look the way they do, for both strong and weak performances.

For example, a spike in the number of new opportunities might be due to a recent marketing campaign. Or, an unusual dip in the sales funnel reports might indicate issues in the sales process.

When you highlight why there’s an upward or downward trend in your data, you provide a roadmap for what your team can continue doing to achieve the best sales results—and where they can improve.

🖼️ Consider the bigger picture

As you break down the positives and negatives, make sure to take into account external factors that are not directly related to specific metrics but contributed to their cause (for example, the market or larger macro-economic environment, headcount changes, improved training, or new initiatives). 

For example, let’s say your web traffic declines, meaning that there are fewer users finding your site, and entering the top of your sales funnel. You could use a tool like Contentsquare Benchmarks to see whether your competitors have also experienced reduced traffic—if so, this may inform your response. 

Contentsquare Benchmarks shows you how your web analytics compare to your competitors

Use strategic tools to discover the strong and weak aspects of your sales performance

Having dedicated technology to track lead and customer data makes it easier for sales leaders to analyze team performance and identify areas for improvement.

Whether you want a simple daily sales report or are looking for more complex figures, using these types of performance reporting tools can streamline the task and help you quickly extract valuable insights from data: 

1. Salesforce Sales Cloud: Salesforce is a cloud-based CRM software company that equips you with the tools and technologies to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of your sales team. Use it to track sales opportunities as you automate tedious tasks and workflows for data-driven insights on your sales pipeline.

2. ClickFunnels: ClickFunnels is a sales funnel builder for non-programmers who want to build profitable sales funnels, no coding required. It enables you to collect leads, sell products, and create upsell offers using features like their drag-and-drop page builder. With pre-built funnel templates and opt-in forms included, you can quickly build funnels as simple or complex as you’d like.

3. HubSpot: if you’re on HubSpot’s Sales Hub, it offers a wide range of features that allow you to manage your entire sales reporting process in one place. HubSpot’s sales performance features include pipeline management, custom lead scoring data, and reporting and analytics, all available at an accessible price point (not to mention a free tier).

💡 Pro tip: manage your sales process and keep even better track of your leads with Contentsquare integrations.

Contentsquare integrates with HubSpot, ClickFunnels and many more tools to supplement your sales performance data with qualitative insights. This builds a complete picture of user behavior and enables your sales team to make the most of data.

• Integrate Contentsquare and ClickFunnels to build frictionless sales funnels that convert. Develop heatmaps, gather voice-of-customer (VoC) data such as survey responses, and watch session replays for the pages in your sales funnels to understand where customers get stuck and what moves them forward.

• Personalize interactions with prospects and customers using Contentsquare and HubSpot together. Save the contact on HubSpot and then add important information from surveys and session replays to your prospect’s timeline. Fun fact: we ourselves combine Contententsquare and HubSpot to analyze leads and opportunities.   

3. Establish your goals and improvement areas for the upcoming period

A sales performance report shouldn’t just be a post-mortem; it should guide future actions, breathing life into your sales strategy. Use your analysis to develop an action plan to improve sales performance:

• Identify patterns in your data: once you’ve carefully examined the data from your sales reports, find trends and patterns to understand why something is happening. Don’t just react when the numbers are negative. The true value of reporting lies in providing a deeper look into instances of success. By understanding why something went right, you will not only fine-tune your sales strategies but also find new opportunities that lead to business growth.

• Provide solutions to the problems: you can meaningfully present even the most concerning data if you determine an actionable, fixable root cause. Devise a strategy that offers solutions to the problems you’ve identified. For example, if sales call reports indicate that leads aren’t reaching the final stages of the sales funnel, suggest solutions to improve lead nurturing. Make sure your strategies are measurable and time-bound so you can track their progress.

• Highlight priorities instead of listing ideas: a great sales report helps you stay focused on productivity, so you don't get distracted by unimportant tasks or let your to-do list get out of hand. Develop clear hypotheses on what needs to be optimized first to meet customer needs and organizational sales goals. This will help ensure that you have time to work on the most important tasks, which in turn makes it easier for you to complete them faster. 

Leverage experience insights to sharpen your intent

User experience insights can be the foundation of many other decisions that impact your bottom line. Provide some background and a bigger picture of the figures by incorporating user insights into your sales performance reporting.

Use these tools to access meaningful, actionable insights about your prospects and customers with a few clicks. Turn the information you gather about user behavior into plans and strategies that generate more revenue for your business.

• Session replays: draw on user behavior to alert reps when prospects show signs of frustration. That way, they can follow up at the right time and with better context on their experience. With Contentsquare, you can even search your replays so that the sales team can view sessions from highly engaged prospects.

• Surveys: collect customer feedback with surveys, and analyze it to identify areas that could be optimized. With Contentsquare, you can get these built and launched very quickly, either using one of our templates, or our AI question writing tool. Use these insights to offer better support and close deals faster.

• Interviews: dive deeper with one-to-one chats with your customers and identify ways to improve your sales performance. Prioritize fixing the issue that keeps people from turning into leads, and make more sales in the process.

With sales data at your fingertips, you help guide your business to solid ground and scale what works best for your bottom line.

4. Tie it all together in a sales performance report

Like most performance reporting examples, presenting data itself is only half the work; you need to put words to your figures for it to have meaning to your audience.

Here are a few key aspects to include in your sales performance report presentation:

• Summarize your findings: present your findings in a customer-focused, data-informed way. Your written explanations should at once justify your data and be justified by your figures. Showcase what went well and what didn't, highlighting specific KPIs and the reasons behind them. Make sure to also outline fixes that your team plans to implement.

• Tailor to your audience: focus on the purpose of your presentation as well as who you are presenting to. Depending on your audience, the report format, depth, and granularity can be adjusted. For instance, while a sales rep might be more interested in lead conversion, a sales manager might look for insights into the overall sales performance of their team, and executives might need a more succinct summary.

• Use visual aids: sales reports should be more than lists of numbers. Include plenty of graphs and other helpful images to show vital sales trends and metrics, and help your audience make sense of these figures. For example, an annual report might call for a line chart to show revenues month over month. If you’re using Contentsquare, you can use the AI CoPilot to create this for you, using a chat-style prompt. Alternatively, your CRM software might be able to auto-generate these charts, or you can use Excel.

9 main types of sales performance reports

Every type of sales report provides valuable insights into your company’s sales performance. But what are some essential reports every sales leader needs to track? We've listed the most important ones below:

1. Sales forecasts: predict the number of sales your team will make based on current and past data. Use them to anticipate changes, adjust your strategy accordingly, and plan for issues that might affect business, like seasonal slowdowns.

2. Sales funnel reports: see how close a lead is to purchasing your product or service. Sales funnels help you understand how to best nurture leads and, ultimately, convert them into customers. Use them to identify weaknesses in your sales pipeline and assess your sales team’s performance.

3. Conversion reports: look specifically at the conversion stage of leads to customers. Use these reports to analyze data about customers, leads generated or qualified, and sales closings, while also assessing period-to-period change rates.

4. Upsell or cross-sell reports: detail the number and value of items upsold or cross-sold to customers. Review these reports to identify future opportunities or flag certain products and services as especially suited for those sales approaches.

5. Average deal size report: set expectations for each rep, create weekly and monthly milestones, and track their performance throughout. Use them to gauge the overall success of your company’s sales strategy and as the basis for your reps' quotas.

6. Opportunity score reports: rate leads based on the Einstein opportunity score, from one to 99. A higher score means a higher likelihood of a sales win. Use these reports to plan how to divide your team’s time pursuing leads.

7. Sales call reports: analyze calls placed to leads, prospects, and customers to encourage purchases. Use these reports to gain insights into your reps’ performance and identify the most effective tactics for closing deals.

8. Churned customers report: look at the number of customers you're losing in a predetermined time period. Use this report to closely monitor trends in churned customers so you empower your team to fix bad patterns throughout the sales process and improve customer experience.

9. Revenue report: offer a breakdown of new business and renewals, as well as the reps who contributed to each. Review these reports to help you and your team see how their work impacts the bottom line.

Remember: don’t feel like you need to build and analyze every single type of sales report. Instead, ask yourself what the purpose of capturing the data is and whether you have the resources to invest in that purpose. 

For example, a small business might not necessarily need a sales funnel conversion report, but a daily sales report could be essential to keeping customers happy and things running smoothly.

3 sales performance reporting mistakes—and what you can learn from them

It takes both talent and experience to be a great salesperson. You have to constantly practice, make mistakes, and learn from them. Below are three challenges you’re bound to run into while creating sales performance reports—and the practical strategies to overcome them. 

1. Jumping to conclusions 

❌ Mistake: only looking at high-level numbers and immediately jumping to conclusions about why your sales team hasn’t performed and where they should focus to improve.

When you make rash decisions—and fail to validate assumptions with hard data—you risk:

• Wasting time and resources: you can get caught up trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. Ultimately, you’ll need to start over, leading to disappointment and decreased morale.

• Poor product prioritization: nobody’s feelings matter more than your customers’, and ignoring their needs in favor of the internal team’s assumptions can seriously impact the customer experience (CX)

• Unhappy customers: poor CX creates a domino effect, affecting sales and conversions, increasing customer churn, and even harming your reputation

✅ Solution: take the time to diagnose exactly why some team members are doing better than others and the specific metrics that need to be developed.

Challenge assumptions by looking for data that disproves them. Go granular, take every factor into consideration that could influence trends, and use qualitative data to uncover the factors you hadn’t thought of.

💡 Pro tip: use behavior and web analytics tools to investigate and understand how your prospects and customers experience your site. This will help you avoid acting on assumptions, and find out the real reason for your team’s performance. 

For example, with Contentsquare you can:

• Record instances when users have a high Frustration score—that is, show signs of experiencing friction on your website, such as rage-clicking and filling in forms repeatedly. If your average frustration score is high, this is important context for your conversions with prospects. 

• Send out Net Promoter Score®  (NPS) surveys to find out how satisfied your customers are. Individuals’ responses will be especially useful to know if your sales team also deals with renewals: should a sales rep prepare for a hard conversation, or are they going into a conversation with a satisfied customer? 

NPS records how likely a customer is to recommend your product or service to a friend; it’s a useful metric of satisfaction and loyalty 

2. Focusing solely on quantitative metrics 

❌ Mistake: a singular focus on quantitative metrics won’t be enough to get your growth metrics to where they should be, since they overlook the qualitative aspects of sales performance. The quantitative needs to meet the qualitative for in-depth analysis to happen. 

✅ Solution: good sales reports start with insightful data. But the best ones go beyond the numbers, and dig deeper into how real prospects and customers experience your sales process. 

By incorporating qualitative data, such as session replay insights, customer feedback and sales team observations, sales performance reports can provide a more holistic understanding of effectiveness.

Data from session replays can provide the qualitative insights you need for a brilliant sales performance report. 

3. Losing sight of the sales team 

❌ Mistake: sales performance reporting can leave sales reps feeling off. Some will be overwhelmed when missing the target, while others will bask in their success, not analyzing why and how they got there.

Your team’s emotions affect their performance. If you’re not lifting people up and removing obstacles from the salesperson’s path, it leaves your team unproductive, unmotivated, and lacking energy.

✅ Solution: to tap into your sales team’s full potential, build a culture that inspires your reps and makes them enjoy coming to work.

• Motivate and inspire: leverage what inspires your team members to make them work harder. Monitoring and showing each team member's sales performance motivates them to do more and aim for the best outcomes.

• Offer training: people won’t want to pitch prospects something they can’t understand. Make sure your reps have the right sales skills by having them spend time with your product manager or marketing teams to learn about the features and benefits customers care about. 

• Celebrate the wins: don’t just point out what the team’s been doing wrong. Instead, identify what’s been going right and give employees positive reinforcement. People tend to work harder when they know that they’ve got a champion in their corner. 

• Provide context for improvements: your sales team needs context for the changes you’re proposing. Break down the metrics and support your team with understanding their performance and what to focus on moving forward.

Connect the dots between customer needs and sales performance

Understanding sales performance analysis helps you find areas to improve sales consistently. And making this an ongoing process lets you fine-tune your business model and adjust to market changes.

So, when it’s time to make important sales performance decisions, equip yourself with the right data. Use Contentsquare to get granular insights on your prospects and customers and remove the guesswork from the sales process.

With the right insights, you’ll confidently tackle sales performance challenges and achieve the results you need.

FAQs about sales performance reporting