5 Steps for Creating a Sales Analysis Report: The Best Guide!

Analytics

When you are in the business of running a business, every figure and every feedback would make all the difference when it comes to your overall strategy, goals and plan of action. What happens when you run your sales and performance through a number of tools for the analysis of the same? You get the right insights to stay in track and even evolve with your strategy for more and more sales – that’s what!

This is also commonly known as sales analysis and it is highly recommended for any and every kind of business today. Before we understand how we can create a sales analysis report with the right sales analysis tool, let us understand why your business would need sales analysis in the first place. 

1. The very first reason would be to maintain transparency of operations. With the sales analysis report, you will be able to study and analyze the overall performance of the business as well as the sales team along with the individual performance of each of the resources that you have used and the team members too. This valuable tool would help you understand what exactly is going on in your business. Transparency would be guaranteed because the automated tool would share the sales analysis report with all the team members. 
2. The next reason would be to cultivate a culture of accountability. When you have a sales analysis report filed on a regular basis with the help of automated tools and parameters that have been set by you for your business and its growth, then you would ensure that each and every team member is accountable and does justice to his or her role. This is due to the fact that the numbers and automation would not lie. The right sales analysis tool would always help you understand where the gaps are and who is not responsible enough, or worse – who has to be replaced. No one would want to take on that risk. 
3. Another reason for turning to the right sales analysis tool would be to understand your market in a better manner so that you are able to appease your customers in a more efficient way. This would not only help you reach the right customers but you would also do a far better job of creating data driven campaigns that would engage them on a routine and more profound basis. When this happens, the customer would be more prone to make a purchase and also, would recommend you via word of mouth. This would help you cater to your market in a better way for more profits. 
4. You can also take stock of your inventory and learn how much you need to stock up on which item depending on the way your customer has behaved in the previous period during the sales analysis. This sales analysis can be done for a month or for a quarter depending on the kind of product that you are trying to push. When you have the right sales analysis tool, you would be able to get a careful look at your inventory and only hold on to the amount or quantity that you would be able to sell. Also, depending on the feedback and the nature of the after sales service, you would be able to understand which quality or version of the products or services you would want to sell for maximum profitability and to build brand loyalty as well.
5. With sales analysis, you would also be able to find new product opportunities so that you are able to tap into a number of markets with great ease. This would help you reach out to a much wider audience and also up sell or cross sell the new products to the existing audience with much ease. With the sales analysis report, you will be able to predict the buyer behaviour for a certain holiday or season so that you can stock up the specific products accordingly. This is especially helpful for businesses that are selling holiday based items, as well as seasonal garments and even real estate during an upswing in the market, among many others. 

Now that we have understood the main benefits of creating a sales analysis report with the right sales analysis tool, let us understand the steps that are involved and how you can generate and present such a report: 

• Analyze your Data: This would be one of the crucial steps and it would help you understand what kind of sales analysis report you want to generate based on the type of information you are looking to analyze. This can pertain to buyer behavior or conversion times, or the movement of the stock vis a vis the cost of warehousing and various other such elements. 
• Choose the Type of Sales Analysis: There are many kinds of sales analysis reports that you can choose from. While some are predictive, some are diagnostic and others are generic in nature. Do you want an overall sales analysis or do you want to fix a certain problem that you are facing in a certain department or with a certain step in the sales pipeline process? Or do you simply want to know what your audience may want in the coming season and whether or not your upcoming products and services would do well within your chosen demographic? These are the answers that you would have to get before you generate the sales analysis report. 

Present: In order to do something with the insights that you would have drawn, you would need to share the results with the relevant parties. You can derive pie charts and graphs from the right sales analysis tool so that the same may be presented in the form of a presentation. This can be shared with the various stakeholders including your boss or the head of the marketing and sales department as well as all the members of the various teams involved.