Sales reporting: What it is and why it’s important for every business

Understanding the performance of your sales efforts is crucial for sustainable growth and success in both your marketing and business as a whole.

This article explores what sales reporting is, why it’s significant in your marketing, and how it can transform your business strategies. We’ll examine the key benefits of sales reporting software and how it provides invaluable insights into your marketing performance.

What is sales reporting?

Sales reporting is a systematic process of gathering, analysing, and presenting data on sales activities and performance. It goes beyond simple revenue figures and offers a comprehensive view of the entire sales journey.

Sales reporting is particularly crucial for your marketing as it links revenue to specific marketing activities, showing you the whole journey that leads to a conversion. The importance of sales reporting cannot be overstated, as it provides actionable insights into how your marketing campaigns and channels are driving sales, and how you can optimise your strategies to increase return on investment (ROI).

What is included in sales reporting?

There are numerous sales reporting metrics and data points that offer insights into various aspects of your marketing and ROI. Some key elements included in sales reporting are:

1. Sales data: This includes revenue figures, the number of units sold, average order value, and sales by product or service category.
2. Conversion rates: Tracking how many conversions you have across your marketing campaigns and channels, which could include anything from a form fill to a phone call – depending on what you define as a desired action.
3. Website visitor journeys: Understanding how customers interact with your website before making a purchase to reveal valuable insights about user behaviour and preferences.
4. Customer acquisition costs: This metric shows how much you’re spending on your marketing efforts to acquire new customers, so you can assess the efficiency and ROI of your strategies.
5. Sales cycle length: Knowing how long it takes to close a deal can help you optimise your sales process, improve your marketing campaigns, and forecast more accurately.
6. Sales by channel: This metric shows which sales channels – such as online, in-store, or phone purchases – are performing best.
7. Customer lifetime value: Understanding the long-term value of your customers and how much revenue you’re likely to generate from them can inform your retention strategies and marketing investments.

Sales reporting platforms play a crucial role in gathering and analysing this data. This software will allow you to visualise complex data sets, track trends over time, and generate actionable insights. A platform like Mediahawk will give you a deeper understanding of your customer journeys to make more data-driven decisions, leading to improved sales and marketing strategies.

The importance of sales reporting

The importance of sales reporting is shown in its ability to give a holistic view of your marketing performance. By consolidating data from multiple activities, campaigns, and sales channels, sales reporting offers a complete picture of what’s working and what isn’t.

If you want to make the most impactful decisions in your marketing initiatives to drive leads and sales, then this level of visibility is crucial.

Sales matching software will reveal the interconnectedness of various marketing efforts, showing the true value of each activity in terms of driving sales. Marketing strategies are heavily reliant on multi-channel marketing, so you need the right sales reporting software to take advantage of these insights and stay ahead in your industry.

The importance of sales reporting also extends to performance evaluation and goal setting. You’ll be able to regularly review sales data, track your progress towards company targets, and have the right data to set realistic goals for the future.

3 key benefits of sales reporting

Here, we explore three significant benefits that underscore the importance of sales reporting for businesses of all sizes:

Sales reporting uncovers valuable insights

One of the primary benefits of sales reporting is the wealth of insights it provides to improve your marketing strategies. Analysing sales reporting metrics will give you a deeper understanding of your customers, products, and market trends.

Sales reporting reveals which products are selling well and which are underperforming, which can guide product development strategies. From a marketing perspective, you’ll see the conversion path for each sale to give you a more in-depth sales analysis and accurate attribution for each sale. You’ll then have a clearer idea of where and how to adjust your campaigns to increase leads and sales.

Sales reporting also uncovers hidden patterns in customer behaviour. For example, you might discover that certain products are often purchased together, which you can then use to create campaigns focused on cross-selling and packaged products. Or, the real-time data from your software might indicate a spike in certain products or services, allowing you to optimise your marketing efforts to take advantage of the trend.

Improved forecasting drives better decision making

Another crucial benefit of sales reporting is that it improves forecasting accuracy. Your software will analyse historical sales data and identify trends, enabling you to make more accurate predictions about future sales performance.

Accurate sales forecasts are invaluable for decision-making across various aspects of a business. They improve:

• Resource allocation: Knowing when to expect peaks and troughs in sales will indicate how you should allocate staff and resources more efficiently.
• Campaign effectiveness: A clear idea of campaign performance will direct how you adjust areas of your marketing to increase leads and sales, and address issues or sales cycle bottlenecks.
• Financial planning: Sales forecasts are crucial for budgeting, cash flow management, and setting realistic financial goals for the future.
• Strategic planning: Long-term business strategies will be heavily informed by sales forecasts, so your company can plan for growth or prepare for potential challenges.

The importance of sales reporting in improving forecasting accuracy cannot be overstated. It provides the data foundation for you to build reliable predictions and make confident decisions about your marketing and overall business future.

Sales insights deliver smarter marketing budget distribution

Another one of the most significant benefits of sales reporting is its ability to inform and optimise your marketing budget. To maintain success in your marketing, you need to ensure each campaign delivers the expected ROI.

Linking sales data with your marketing activities will reveal which activities are driving revenue and which aren’t delivering the expected returns. Not only will you see which campaigns are directly generating sales, but you’ll also gain detailed reports that show which channels and activities are indirectly impacting sales.

For instance, a customer might follow a link on your social media ad and land on your website, before making a purchase on a phone call. In this instance, the sale will be attributed to each touchpoint in the journey, so you can see the true value of your social media channels.

These insights enable you to continuously refine your budget allocation and direct resources where it matters. This ensures your marketing efforts are always aligned with sales goals and driving business growth.

Leveraging Mediahawk’s Sales Matching feature

To unlock the full potential of sales reporting, Mediahawk’s Sales Matching provides the perfect solution to drive growth and ROI across your business. This powerful feature addresses many of the key challenges in marketing, such as understanding the complete customer journey across multiple touchpoints, automating insights and reports, and predicting future outcomes with precision.

Mediahawk’s Sales Matching connects all customer interactions – including phone calls, web visits, pay-per-click activity (PPC), and more – with your sales data, for a holistic view of what’s really driving your revenue. Some key features of Mediahawk’s Sales Matching include:

1. Multi-channel attribution: Track customer interactions across various channels and get a clear picture of how all your marketing efforts are contributing to sales – leading to more informed decision-making.
2. Revenue attribution: Link marketing activities directly to sales revenue and quantify the ROI of different marketing campaigns to improve the efficiency of your marketing budget.
3. Customer journey visualisation: See the entire path a customer took before making a purchase, including all touchpoints and interactions, to reveal the most effective customer journey for the highest value sales and better ROI.
4. Offline conversion tracking: Mediahawk tracks both online and offline conversions, such as phone calls, delivering a more complete picture of the sales process.
5. Detailed reporting: Sales Matching provides in-depth reports that break down sales by various factors, including marketing channel, campaign, and the products or services sold.

These capabilities directly address the benefits we discussed earlier, and Dick Lovett took advantage of this when implementing Sales Matching in their car dealerships. They had little understanding of what marketing activity was driving these enquiries, and were almost certain they weren’t capturing several leads.

Mediahawk’s call tracking platform provided them with full visibility of where their calls were coming from and how their marketing activities were contributing to revenue. They were also able to fix their ‘leaky bucket’ by automating their lead management.

Taking your marketing to the next level with sales reporting

As we’ve explored throughout this article, the importance of sales reporting is more prominent than ever if you want to optimise your marketing strategies and maximise growth and ROI.

We’ve highlighted how sales reporting delivers:

1. Comprehensive insights for a holistic view of your business performance.
2. The accurate reports and insights needed for data-driven decision-making.
3. Improved forecasting for improved resource allocation and financial planning.
4. Key sales reporting metrics to optimise your campaigns and channels to generate leads and sales more effectively.
5. Complete customer journey tracking for a comprehensive view of marketing performance and its impact on sales.

Sales reporting remains a powerful asset that can transform your entire approach to marketing and sales. Take control of your marketing and sales performance and request a demo with Mediahawk today.