How to Build an Actionable Weekly B2B Sales Report

As a sales manager, you need to report on the success of your sales team, and a weekly B2B sales report allows you to share information with your company and help the sales force learn about their own performance. Your CRM captures all kinds of information from activity to outcomes. Your weekly sales report, however, should do more than count activities and outcomes. It should help you improve your sales reps’ overall effectiveness and their sales results. 

To create a sales report, you must start with a purpose: helping you improve your results by examining the data. If you do nothing more than look at the data, there is no reason to create the report. You need to act on the insights the report provides, which is important to keep in mind as you prepare to write. As you write, consider whether the data you include provides deeper information about your sales effectiveness. Uncover the key insights and specify what they mean in your final report. Based on the data, how can the sales team improve in the coming weeks?

The recommendations in the report should be specific and actionable so the sales force understands significant performance trends and how they impact sales effectiveness. Building an actionable weekly B2B sales report that will help you improve your results is worth the time and effort. 

What Should You Include in Your Sales Report? 

Include key performance indicators (KPIs) and other data that reflects your sales force's performance. If you are sharing your weekly B2B sales report with leaders, you may need to add other sales KPIs to inform their interpretation of the report. 

SEE: The Seven Basic Elements of Sale Performance Management

Most sales reports include sales activities and sales outcomes. Sales managers who only count and report activities believe the only way to improve sales volume and win rates is by increasing activity. This is rarely true, as greater activity only solves problems related to activity. Your report should provide you with information that improves outcomes. 

Tracking Activities on Your Sales Reports

The only reason to track sales activities is to measure a salesperson's results. Measuring the number of cold calls doesn't tell you very much. If you include cold calls in your report, you also need to include the number of conversations and the number of meetings that were secured from those efforts. 

The number of cold calls shows the salesperson's effort. While that is important, your sales report needs to show more. For example, the number of conversations a salesperson has reveals something more important, their effectiveness in engaging their contacts in a conversation. Knowing that a salesperson who made 20 sales calls and had five conversations is a more important sales datapoint. What you should care most about is the number of first meetings a salesperson is able to book. If a salesperson is only able to book first meetings for 20 percent of their calls, they need a better approach, one that trades value for the client's time. This is how you increase a salesperson’s effectiveness.

First Meetings

The more mature your sales force, the more time you can spend on outcomes without spending a lot of time reporting. The first outcome you should include in your weekly sales report is first meetings, which are a critical outcome for a B2B sales organization. Too few meetings mean your future is bleak. More first meetings indicate a brighter outlook. 

Second Meetings

I will share a secret with you: When a salesperson books a first meeting, they will log the client as an opportunity in your CRM. You might already have a sales pipeline stuffed with "opportunities" that are old enough to have a driver's license. By imposing a rule that no salesperson may add an opportunity into your CRM until they have a second meeting, you will have more reliable information. This is good opportunity management. It also tells you about the value your salesperson creates and their effectiveness in creating opportunities. A salesperson who converts their three first meetings to second meetings is highly effective. The salesperson who had three first meetings and only converted one needs help with their sales approach. 

Net New Opportunities 

As a sales leader or sales manager, you have sales goals to achieve. Those goals are measured in revenue. The number and value of the net new business provides an idea of how you are tracking. To use this information, you need to ask several questions and review an additional metric. 

All opportunities are not created equal. You can use your sales report to ask questions that prove the opportunity is real. To act on the information included in your weekly report, you must first determine each salesperson's win rate. The average win rate of your sales force can mask problems on the individual level. By looking at each salesperson's win rate, you can adjust your sales forecast and get a sense of the effectiveness of your sales strategy. You can also better understand how effectively your team is able to implement your strategy, and whether or not it is working.

Advancing Sales Opportunities 

Your B2B sales process has several opportunity stages. It is worth recording the number of deals that moved from one stage to the next, and the potential revenue of each one. A client who moved from discovery to consensus is moving that deal toward buying. If the client will spend $80,000 when they execute at the end of your sales cycle, factor that into your report of progress. 

When opportunities don't move forward, your weekly sales report allows you to act by assessing each salesperson's stalled deals. Using a sales team meeting to review each deal can help you get the opportunities back on track. You can also use your individual coaching session to review any challenge the salesperson might experience. 

Won Deals

The last three columns on your sales report template might include the salesperson's current opportunities, the revenue they have secured, and their sales goal. This will help you see how each salesperson is doing. Some will be ahead of their sales targets and others will be behind. 

Sales reports not only help you measure results, but they also allow you to identify areas for development and changes that would improve the sales organization’s results by improving each salesperson's sales effectiveness. 

How to Get Started on Your Weekly Sales Report 

Creating a weekly B2B sales report that provides actionable insights and helps to improve sales results requires more than counting activities and outcomes. The report should include key performance indicators and measure sales activities and outcomes. It should also track the number of conversations and meetings held by sales reps, including the number of first and second meetings. 

It should also include net new opportunities, advancing sales opportunities, and won deals. By including these metrics, sales managers can gain better insights into their team's performance and the effectiveness of their sales strategies. With this data, they can improve sales results.

1. Set a purpose for the report: Identify what insights you need to improve sales results.
2. Select KPIs to track: Determine the metrics that will be most helpful for tracking performance.
3. Gather data: Collect and organize data from your CRM that captures activities and outcomes.
4. Create the report: Create a format for the report and use the data to create it.
5. Analyze the data: Review the report and identify opportunities for improvement.
6. Share your insights: Share the report with key stakeholders and communicate the insights and recommendations it supports.
7. Act: Use the insights from the report to improve sales results and improve sales force effectiveness.