Sales reporting: how to create interactive sales reports that drive business decisions
A practical approach to sales reporting that leadership teams rely on
Rob Porter Head of Sales & Success at Flourish
Sales reporting is meant to support better decisions, but too often, it turns into a time sink that slows teams down.
Between cleaning data, chasing updates from different teams, and formatting reports, most of the effort goes into preparing the numbers – not understanding them. That leaves very little time to step back and ask the most important question: what is actually happening behind the data?
I’ve spent over 15 years in sales roles at LinkedIn, Meta, Amazon, and now as Head of Sales at Flourish – and in this article, I’m sharing practical shortcuts for sales reports that actually cut through.
What you’ll learn in this guide
- What is sales reporting?
- Dashboards vs sales storytelling
- Why visualization matters for sales teams
- 5 steps to creating sales reports
What is sales reporting?
At its core, sales reporting is about turning data into clear insights and actionable plans that guide smarter business decisions.
Historically, however, most of the time spent on sales reporting has gone into the wrong areas: formatting spreadsheets, cleaning inconsistent data, or chasing team members to log information correctly. When that happens, reporting becomes backward-looking and slow. Decisions get delayed, conversations lose focus, and teams often end up stuck in a kind of decision paralysis.
Good sales reporting starts with good data hygiene.
For me, that means making sure sales teams log information consistently in CRMs or databases, and that everyone is working from standardized data definitions. Without that foundation, even the best visualizations won’t help.
Once the data is in shape, the goals of sales reporting are remarkably consistent across industries — whether you’re in SaaS or FMCG. Sales data is used to make decisions on how to best support your customers, invest in marketing efforts, and build business cases for leadership when asking for more resources.
My approach to reporting differs by timeframe.
Rather than focusing only on day-to-day numbers, I look at how reporting ladders up to broader strategy.
On a weekly basis, sales reporting supports one-to-ones with the team. This is where we focus on forecasting, expansion, net new acquisition, lead generation, and customer retention. These reports need to be quick to read and easy to discuss.
Quarterly reporting looks very different. This is where we step back and run deeper retrospectives, combining metrics like ARR growth, customer satisfaction and net dollar retention, average contract value, new customer growth, productivity and P&L impact, product usage, and monthly active users. The goal here isn’t just to see what happened, but to understand why it happened and what needs to change next.
Here are two examples of what sales teams often visualize in weekly or monthly reporting (left) versus quarterly reviews (right):
Dashboards vs sales storytelling
Dashboards are useful, but they have limits.
I think of dashboards as a snapshot in time – like looking at a waterfall. You can see the volume, but you don’t know where the river is heading or whether the currents have changed. Many dashboards are static, visually dense, and difficult to engage with. When people don’t immediately see the point of a chart, they tend to disengage and assume it isn’t important.
Sales storytelling takes a different approach. Instead of showing everything at once, it focuses attention on the question you’re trying to answer. Interactive and animated charts, clear color choices, and intentional emphasis help guide the viewer through the story.
To get someone to pause and engage, your sales reports need to be interactive, visually appealing, and explicit about what matters.
Why visualization matters for sales teams
I think of dashboards as a snapshot in time – like looking at a waterfall. You can see the volume, but you don’t know where the river is heading or whether the currents have changed.
We’re living in an information-rich environment, with more data available than ever. The challenge isn’t access – it’s knowing what to focus on. For me, investing time in charts pays off in three ways:
Spot what really matters
Visualizations make it easier to see patterns and understand what’s actually happening. Without them, it’s easy to lose time debating inconsistencies instead of discussing insights.
Cut through the noise
Attention spans are shorter, including inside businesses. Visuals are faster to understand than written explanations, and if the goal is to move a decision forward, it needs to be visual.
Maintain a competitive edge
SaaS moves fast. Teams that use visualization to guide decisions can react and innovate more quickly – those that don’t risk falling behind competitors who are already doing this well.
My 5 practical steps to creating interactive sales reports
1. Start with your hunch and frame it as a clear question
Begin with the question you’re trying to answer. This should guide both the data you look at and how you choose to visualize it.
For example: “Our net dollar retention has been growing – at what point does it stop growing and start to decline?”
The hypothesis: more customers with fewer people resources leads to less time per customer, which directly impacts growth and retention. What’s the critical point at which you need to hire more customer-facing representatives?
2. Zoom out first, then drill down
Start with the big picture and use interactivity to guide people toward the detail.
Click-through hierarchies are particularly effective here. They let you take stakeholders on a tailored journey that builds to a conclusion quickly, without overwhelming them upfront.
A simple three-step structure for understanding customer distribution might look like this:
- Region: EMEA vs US (for example, a 40–60 split)
- Pricing tier: enterprise vs scaled customers
- Revenue per customer: segmenting enterprise and scaled customers by revenue
This approach helps answer questions such as:
- Are we spread across many customers in a region?
- Do we have a small number of customers generating a large share of revenue?
- Where should we invest next – by customer type, geography, or distribution?
3. Use bubble charts to visualize where to invest
When the goal is to understand scale, dynamic bubble charts are often overlooked – and very effective.
Flourish templates like the Data Explorer make it easy to see how customers compare in proportion to their investment. They work especially well for showing the distribution of customers by geography and industry, with bubble size representing revenue.
To build this view, you’ll typically need:
- A list of customers
- Revenue per customer
- Industry per customer
- Geography per customer
4. Build business cases with animated line charts
Animated line charts are a powerful way to frame long-term decisions for senior leadership.
Instead of presenting a single forecast, use click-through views to show different growth scenarios over time. This shifts the conversation from short-term performance to long-term opportunity.
For example:
- Investment X: 18% year-on-year growth
- Investment Y: 35% year-on-year growth
Seeing these trajectories side by side helps leaders understand the trade-offs behind each option.
5. Use color intentionally to guide attention
Flourish charts are designed to be simple and readable by default. With just a few extra minutes, you can make them even clearer by using color to direct attention.
A useful technique is to highlight a single bar or line in color while muting the rest in gray.
For example, when tracking customers by industry:
- First view: show the largest volume of customers by industry, highlighting the top sector
- Second view: switch to average contract value by industry, and notice how the highlighted sector moves lower
That contrast often reveals insights that aren’t obvious in a static table – and it naturally prompts discussion.
Turning sales reports into decisions
When sales reporting works well, it makes it easier to see what’s happening and have better conversations about what to do next.
Using charts and visualizations helps bring focus to those conversations. Patterns are easier to spot, trade-offs are clearer, and it’s simpler to build business cases for different audiences, rather than just reporting on outcomes.
Flourish makes it easy to explore different ways of presenting the same data – you can upload a dataset, try a few chart types, and quickly see what communicates the story best. And when I’m working in Canva, having Flourish built in means I can add interactive charts and visuals directly into reports and presentations without switching tools.
