Tracking sales is an essential part of most businesses. Effectively recording your data helps to build accurate forecasts to make sensible plans. It also lets you stay on top of your inventory and tax requirements.
But, sales tracking software is often costly. A cost that many beginning entrepreneurial endeavors can’t afford. The answer to this issue is to use a Google Sheets sales template. In this guide, we will cover how to make your own from scratch and provide a few templates. Read on to learn how to build a spreadsheet sales template.
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A sale report collects specified information from a CRM like Salesforce, HubSpot, and other related applications. Your sales team’s performance is evaluated using the data, which you can also utilize to assist teams and managers in making appropriate adjustments in their project management plans to boost sales.
A sales report demonstrates the effectiveness of your sales staff so that you may improve the sales cycles, tactics, and business projects. You don’t have to add all sales metrics to your activity reports to get valuable data and insights. Rather than overwhelming massive data dumps, focus on essential data points. When building your spreadsheet, consider what you need to collect and why.
You can use your CRM software and platforms where the sales data is gathered and stored to build weekly or monthly reporting statistics. Your sales team and its reps can use the roadmap given by a sales report that emphasizes the most important factors that will improve performance and continue with ongoing analysis by updating the reports.
When constructing a sales tracker template, it’s essential to make an outline and add some of the following factors that you deem to be most valuable to your business:
Here are some essential KPIs to consider when building a sales tracker:
Teams of any size can use Google Sheets for sales templates. You’ll gain a lot from using them, whether you’re a startup company or an established enterprise firm.
They can support other tools, even if you don’t use them as your primary tool for doing business. You might, for instance, use a free CRM to keep track of customer data before using a Google Sheets invoice template to generate bills and invoices for each client quickly.
The Google Sheets templates can be used for any purpose and are free. This saves you from paying a ton for a subscription for another tool or Excel enterprise costs. Just ask everyone to create a Google Workspace account, so they can access the sales templates on Google Sheets.
You don’t need excellent spreadsheet skills to use a Google Sheets sales template. The fields and calculations are already included in the templates. If they’re already present, you don’t need to create complex formulas and functions. The document will generate a report or compute a total once your team enters the numbers.
Your team may collaborate using Google Sheets templates with little gatekeeping. They will have access to the file when you click the “Share” button in the top right corner of the document. You can also restrict the feature of collaboration to only viewing or commenting. This is a smart choice for private documents that a select group should only edit.
Even when using a template, you’re not forced to use its style. With Google Sheets’ built-in tools, you can simply alter the fields, colors, and fonts. Once you do, the template will seem exclusive to your company.
It is difficult to lose data when using Google Sheets templates. Google Sheets has a version history feature that allows you to return to a prior document version if your sales template is damaged.
All modifications are saved in the cloud. If you lose your internet connection, Google Sheets just freezes the copy until you can reaccess it. Google Sheets also freezes the copy if your laptop breaks down. You can access the copy on another device easily. Besides that, you should still take certain safety measures, like enabling offline editing and downloading a file copy to your local storage.
If you’re looking for an easy way to create and use a template for sales tracking in spreadsheet, you can use one from Google’s template gallery. However, if you wish to create one that suits your needs, you may need to create one from scratch.
The Google Sheet sales template you create for your business depends on your needs, which is why your sales tracker may vastly vary from the one we create in this example. For this example, we will create a simple quarterly tracker containing a few charts to visualize the sales. Feel free to add or remove elements.
Before we start entering sales data, we need to add the categories to the spreadsheet. This can be done manually by entering the data into the spreadsheet. Alternatively, you can also link your CRM software for integration. The data will then be automatically added to your spreadsheets.
For this example, we are going to presume you don’t have such software and are entering your data manually.
We will be creating a yearly sales data template for this spreadsheet. To do this, we must create four sections representing all four quarters in a year. Dividing this requires careful planning to determine how many sales you need to add to each section.
We are going to assign ten cells for each quarter. To do this, select the cells in column A, then click on Format, and then on Merge cells. There, click on Merge all. Do this for all four quarters.
You’ll notice that we also horizontally merged the OPPTY, ECONOMICS and PIPELINE subheading cells. You can also do this.
Once the data has been added, you can add borders and colors to the cells by selecting the cells and then clicking on the Borders icon in the toolbar and selecting the type of border you wish to apply to the cells. To add color to the cells, click on the cell and then on the Fill color icon. There, select your desired colors for the cells.
To calculate the totals for a lot of the sales data in your spreadsheet, you will have to utilize formulas in some of the cells. The formula we will use to add up the values in the cells is SUM. Here is the syntax for the formula:
=SUM(data1, [data2, . ])
We will add the cell references for the cells for the Size of Deal from Q1 to Q4 to forecast the sales for the entire year.
Let’s take a look at the steps you need to follow to do this:
You can repeat this formula in the Total Projected Revenue cell by taking the cell references from the weighted forecast section and using the SUM function.
You may also want to add quarterly totals using a similar process. Customizing the template depends on the needs of your business.
To make your spreadsheet look a bit more interesting, you can add charts and graphs to your Google Sheets sales tracker. Thankfully Google Sheets allows you to easily add some with just a few clicks. In this example, we will create a line graph to compare the performance in the four quarters.
Here are the steps you need to follow to add a chart to your Google Sheets sales dashboard template:
E3:E10,E15:E22,E26:E34,E38:E46
Although the fundamental part of your chart is complete, you can still customize it to make it look the way you want it to. To do this, head to the Customize section in the Chart editor.
If you want to have the charts in a separate sheet to make a dashboard, you can easily do this, just:
Sheet1!E3:E10,Sheet1!E15:E22,Sheet1!E26:E34,Sheet1!E38:E46
This lets Sheets know it has to search the first page for the data.
You could also add appropriate titles and sections using formatting, as shown in the first section.
To create a Google Sheet sales tracker spreadsheet, first, you will need to title the columns that will contain your data. You can also add colors, borders, and fonts to better visualize the data. Then, add formulas into specific cells to perform calculations. Usually, the SUM function is enough to collect totals. Finally, add charts to finish up your sales dashboard template.
Currently, Google does not have its own Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform. However, because of the flexibility Google Sheets provides, you can create a similar experience by making a sales pipeline template Google Sheets. This will help you keep track of ongoing deals and manage contacts. These spreadsheets are customizable, so you can make one that suits your business needs. Many CRM services also provide their CRM templates for Sheets.
You can automate your data capture in the spreadsheet using Google Sheets Apps Script. Although this requires some coding knowledge, you can automate almost everything in the spreadsheet and even process and email the final report and the end of every month.
As we mentioned, one of the strong points of using a Google Sheets sales template is how customizable they are. You may want to use one of our premade templates, but make sure you add or take away the right parts to make it the perfect fit for your business.
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