What is a sales pipeline report?
A sales pipeline report is an interface tool that consolidates data from multiple sources (e.g., CRM systems like Salesforce, HubSpot, or Pipedrive) to track and display key performance indicators (KPIs) (e.g., lead conversion rate, sales cycle length, deal value), enabling sales teams to monitor pipeline health and performance and create presentations for stakeholders and executives.
Sales pipeline reports are typically built using flexible tools like Google Looker Studio, Power BI, Google Sheets, or platform-specific solutions to enable high customization and integration of multiple data sources.
What to include in a sales pipeline report?
An actionable sales pipeline report balances context and specificity based on the audience (executives, managers, and analysts) and their use cases.
Executive sales reports
Executive reports for CEOs, Sales VPs, and stakeholders show sales performance and forecast. Reviewed weekly, monthly, or quarterly, they include:
- Sales performance analysis: by channel, using attribution for large deals.
- Unit economics analysis: CAC, LTV, payback, ARPU from sales-acquired customers
- Cohort analysis: retention, expansion, and LTV by customer cohort (sign-up period, acquisition channel)
- Add text for additional context to translate metrics for non-technical audiences. Present in slide decks and simplified Looker Studio reports.
Sales manager reports
Manager reports have cross-channel views with drill-downs to see performance by client, region, team member, pipeline stage, and deal. They help align teams, define tactics, and include:
- Cross-channel reporting: overall sales, product, client, or region reporting across channels
- Goal tracking: compare current performance vs objectives
- Audits for prioritization and spotting issues
- Competitive analysis for market and tactic mapping
- Lead, opportunity, and deal research
Operational Sales Reports
Operational reports for analysts and sales managers have granular, customizable KPIs to solve technical issues. Monitored hourly, daily, or weekly, they cover:
- Lead management: lead source, qualification, conversion rates
- Opportunity tracking: stage progression, win/loss analysis
- Deal management: deal size, close rate, sales cycle length
- Sales activity: calls, meetings, emails, follow-ups
Operational sales reports are highly customized, built in flexible tools like Google Sheets or Looker Studio to enable data cleaning, blending, annotations, and integrating multiple sources.
How to build a sales pipeline report?
To build a sales pipeline report, connect your data sources, choose a template on Looker Studio or Sheets, build your queries by selecting metrics and dimensions, choose charts to visualize your data, customize the report, design and share via link, PDF or email.
Here’s the breakdown:
Connect data sources
Define and connect the data sources to bring to your report. Common sources are CRM systems like Salesforce and HubSpot for sales performance, and Google Sheets for additional data integration.
To connect your data sources, go to portermetrics.com, choose the data sources to bring to your report.
You can follow these tutorials on connecting your data:
Choose a template
Choose from dozens of sales pipeline report templates in Google Sheets or Looker Studio, designed for use cases like lead tracking, sales forecasting, pipeline management, and deal analysis.
Learn to copy Looker Studio templates.
While templates are the starting point. Make them specific for your business or agency. Map your specific metrics, especially custom conversions, CRM contact data, and all the fields and metrics that you define as "deals" and "revenue".
Depending on your reporting tool—Google Sheets or Google Looker Studio, pick any of the dozens of templates created by our team and customers to solve your sales reporting use cases, such as lead tracking, sales forecasting, pipeline management, and deal analysis.
Select metrics, dimensions, and charts
Once your report template is downloaded, you may 1)modify it or 2) create a blank page to build it from scratch. Whatever the case, setting up a query always follows these steps:
- Select the data source and the account connected to it
- Choose metrics (e.g. Leads, Opportunities, Deals, Revenue, etc.).
- Choose breakdowns to segment your data (e.g. by date, sales rep, deal stage, etc.)
You can follow these tutorials on adding data to your reports
Design
To make your sales reports truly white-label you can add logos, colors, fonts, and styling to mirror your brand.
Follow these tutorials to design your sales reports:
Share
Share your sales reports via links, PDF, schedule emails, and control permissions.
KPIs to include in a sales pipeline report?
Sales pipeline reports should include a mix of funnel—lead generation, opportunity management, deal closure—, efficiency, effectiveness, revenue, and cost metrics and KPIs to fully understand the performance of sales activities towards business goals. They include:
Sales funnel KPIs measure the buying process (from the sales perspective), regardless of the channel:
- Lead metrics: new leads, lead conversion rate, lead source
- Opportunity metrics: opportunities created, opportunity conversion rate, pipeline value
- Deal metrics: deals closed, average deal size, sales cycle length
Efficiency KPIs compare your sales outputs to the cost, including:
- Lead generation: CPL (Cost per Lead)
- Opportunity management: CPO (Cost per Opportunity)
- Deal closure: CPD (Cost per Deal), CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)
Effectiveness KPIs compare the input with the output from one funnel stage to another
- Lead generation: Lead conversion rate
- Opportunity management: Opportunity win rate
- Deal closure: Deal close rate
Sales and cost KPIs show the bottom-line impact of your sales performance:
- Sales: revenue, new customers
- Cost: sales expenses, OPEX, payroll
- Efficiency: ROI, CAC
- Effectiveness: AOV, ACV
To analyze these sales KPIs, segment them by:
- Channel: direct, partner, inbound vs outbound
- Time: Hourly, daily, weekly, monthly
- Pipeline stage: lead, opportunity, deal
- Business: client, branch, region
- Sales rep: individual performance, team performance
- Product: product line, service offering
