Marketing Assignment Paper: Writing a Brief Sales Report

Writing a Brief Sales Report
Your name
August 30, 2016
Institution of affiliation
Writing a Sales report for a retail business
For every business running these days, a sales report is not only beneficial but necessary for its survival. Also, sales reports are very important since it lets the business manager to have a wider perspective of how the company is doing. More particularly, a sales report should have two important parts to it: (1) the description of the purpose of the report, analysis, and suggestions for further improvement based from (2) the quantitative information – statistical tools, graphs, metrics, and charts – written on it. Going down further it is said that the importance of metrics/statistics are also a fundamental element of the report since it helps the business owner to strategize methods to improve the company (Lavinsky, 2014). In terms of metrics, I believe that the following are critical statistics that should be included in a sales report: (1) Total sales by time period, (2) Sales by product or service, (3) Revenue per sale, and (4) Customer Satisfaction ratings per time period (or Net Promoter Score, if possible). Based on these four metrics given, let’s take an example where we apply this to a four-year sales report. For the succeeding sentences, the 'time period' refers to a series of quarters (four months), to avoid an overwhelming data while still providing a holistic and equally divided perspective of the activity that happened during the four years.
Fundamental metrics and statistics needed for a four-year sales report
For our first metric (Total Sales by time period), It is important to plot a graph where the total net sales (all products and services less the cost of production) is laid out versus the time period. This would give the manager and the other audiences a general overview of what causes certain fluctuations in the sales of the period. In a retail store, changes in this data might show a specific event, phenomena, disaster, or even the advent of the new competitor (which might ...