A Google sheet is a free and incredibly powerful tool to create sales reports dynamically. It is used by various businesses for sales growth and performance.
Here, you will get to know how Google sheets can be turned into a functioning solution so that an advanced sales report can be made. What’s best is that the system can be set up only in some hours at no cost.
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How can sales data be structured in sheets?
The major trick behind developing a robust sales report sheet is to ensure that the structure of the data is in a correct manner and optimally for all your reporting needs.
Decide what has to be reported and then include them in the model. These are some entities:
- Organizations: The companies with which your business works
- Opportunities: Clients contract. It is better to create an opportunity once you have contacted a client. The opportunity means getting a single contract for a particular project.
- Sales reps: It is the major key as you will have to run certain reports on sales reps.
- Contacts: This is an option as you might not be interested in the individuals who are working on the contracts.
Data model development in Google sheets
During this stage, you can start building the tables which are necessary for Google sheets. They will be interconnected and used to make tables and charts. To keep everything in an organized manner, it is recommended to create each table on its sheet.
You can take help from the sales report template in case you are confused and unable to understand.
The simple one is sales rep so first know about it. In this scenario, you might include geography, team, and any information which is essential using in the report.
The second table is the organization’s table. This comprises the list of companies with which you are dealing. These are the fields:
- Creation data
- ID
- Name of the company
- Country
- Marketing channel
Another table after this is the contacts. The 3 fields come under this, ID, company, and name. You are done creating this.
Fill in the tables with necessary data
The tables which are created are the database. During this stage, start filling in the tables with historical data. This needs time which entirely depends upon the complexity, age, and organization level of the company.
Google sheets are perfect while building your database that can be used to create historical sales reports. There are various benefits of using the sheet as it is free and after setting it, you just need to fill in the information.
There are certain disadvantages of using this tool though. The biggest one is that it needs a screenshot and if some variables change throughout the sales process, your historical data will be lost. This will lead to frustration and a massive degradation in reporting.
If you have a budget, you can invest in tools. If you don’t have the budget for expensive CRM’s, sheets offer more than enough value.
