If you’re a VP of Sales who relies on Salesforce.com as your CRM system, here are 10 must-have reports to include in your sales management dashboard. Put these reports in your dashboard and you will have instant visibility into how your team is performing and the critical information you need to effectively manage your salespeople on a daily basis.
Love them or hate them, these easy-to-create reports and charts are what I like to call the "idiot guages" on the sales management dashboard. Implemented as guage chart widgets, they look like old fashioned automotive gas guages and display your aggregate sales numbers in an easy-to- consume format. In Salesforce, the threshold for each of the color bands on the guage is easily configurable so you can adjust them to match your sales team’s specific quota numbers.
At a glance, this fundamental matrix report and bar chart instantly tells you the number of opportunities your team is closing every month, the reps who are closing the most opportunities, and the trend over time. As a sales manager you can quickly see who the top performers are and who needs your attention.
Need to determine if your team’s pipeline is growing or shrinking? This matrix report displays a chart with the state of the pipeline at the first of the month for the past 6 months. It is one of the most valuable tools to show you the trend in your team’s sales pipeline at the first of every month. It quickly answers these fundamental questions: What does your sales pipeline look like? Is the pipeline dollar volume increasing or decreasing over time? At what stage are the deals in the pipeline?
Wondering if deals are stuck in your pipeline? Are reps hiding closed deals to win a sales contest? This matrix report and stacked bar chart provides visibility into deals moving through the sales pipeline. With this report you can easily determine if deals are moving through the pipeline. How? As you move through each stage in the sales funnel (pipeline), the volume (qty) of deals at each stage should decrease. It is important to note that for this report to be truly effective, your sales team must provide accurate and up-to-date data on the stage of each opportunity in the sales pipeline. It is also important to accurately define the stages in your implementation in Salesforce. Not every organization has the same sales cycle length and the stages you define in your Salesforce opportunities should accurately model your organization’s specific needs.
This matrix report and stacked bar chart gives you immediate visibility into the health of your sales pipeline. It displays the total opportunities (dollar amount) by stage and by month. With this report and graph you can quickly determine how much business is expected to close this month and next month. You can also see the amount of business sitting at each stage in your pipeline.
Need to quantify the opportunities in your pipeline? This matrix report and stacked bar chart allows you to quickly determine: How many open opportunities are there? When where they created? Are they real? What is the trend? Are they increasing or decreasing over time? Which reps have the most opportunities? For example, if you know that on average it takes 120 days to close a deal for a rep on your team and you have a rep with a significant number of opportunities that are older than 6 months, you probably want to have a one-on-one pipeline review with this rep to assess the likelihood of these deals actually closing.
As Alec Baldwin likes to say in Glengarry Glen Ross: “Coffee is for closers.” So if you are wondering how to reward the closers on your sales team, this matrix report and line chart may just be your cup of Joe. It will tell you who the closers are if the close rate is increasing or decreasing on your team. All coffee jokes aside, incrementally improving an individual rep’s close rate can make a big difference on your team's overall performance.
Trying to figure out who’s landing the whales and who’s giving away the farm with discounts? This simple bar chart and report will tell you the average deal size per rep. Variants of this report should be created for various time periods such as by quarter and by current year. This will allow you to quickly identify performance trends for individual sales reps over time. 
Looking for a way to prioritize key accounts and opportunities? This simple list report will quickly help you keep your eye on the ball. You can set the number of account to 5, 10, 20, or whatever number is reasonable for your team’s situation. As a manager it will allow you to have quick top-of-mind access to the deals your team should be focusing on. 
In most sales organizations, activities are a key predictor of sales reps' future performance. If a rep is not calling and emailing the leads and opportunities, they are not going to be closing the deals. Closing requires hard work and this report measures the effort reps are putting into leads and opportunities. This matrix report and stacked bar chart quickly allows you to benchmark each of your reps' activities against other reps on the team and over time. If you see a drop-off in activities and corresponding downtrend in deals closed for an individual rep, you can intervene and make specific recommendations to help improve that reps' performance. 
Keep in mind, this collection of reports is just the beginning of building out a comprehensive dashboard of reports to monitor and track the progress of your sales team. In addition to these reports, you should also consider creating several variations of these reports that are filtered by month, week, quarter, year, and other criteria. Additional reports to add to your sales management arsenal should include:
One final tip: you should also create a Microsoft Excel version of each of the reports above so you can perform a what-if analysis on the data. For example, if you have the above data and charts modeled inside Microsoft Excel you can manipulate and experiment with the data to determine the goals for each sales rep on your team. If you would like assistance implementing any of these reports in Salesforce, check out our comprehensive Salesforce implementation services.