How to Create a Monthly Sales Report in Looker
A monthly sales report is one of the most powerful tools for understanding the health of your business, highlighting what’s working, and flagging what isn't. This guide walks you through not just the metrics to include, but also the step-by-step process of building a dynamic, shareable monthly sales report inside Looker.
First, Decide What Your Sales Report Will Measure
Before you touch a single button in Looker, you need a clear plan for what you want to measure. A report filled with vanity metrics is useless, a focused report that tracks progress against key goals can transform your strategy. A great monthly sales report blends high-level outcomes with an understanding of sales team activity.
Here are some essential sales Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to consider including:
Total Sales Revenue: The most obvious and important metric. This is your top-line number showing the total value of sales closed during the month.
Revenue vs. Target: How does your actual revenue stack up against the goal you set for the month? A simple gauge chart or percentage is perfect for this.
New vs. Recurring Revenue: This is especially vital for subscription-based businesses. It helps you understand where growth is coming from - acquiring new customers or upselling and retaining existing ones.
Top 10 Deals by Value: Highlighting your biggest wins can reveal patterns in the types of clients that provide the most value.
Average Deal Size: Calculated by dividing total revenue by the number of deals won. Tracking this tells you if you're moving upmarket and closing larger contracts over time.
Sales by Product/Service: See which of your offerings are the most popular and driving the most revenue. This is invaluable information for marketing and product development teams.
Sales Rep Leaderboard: Track individual performance by measuring revenue closed, deals won, or progress toward quota for each salesperson. This fosters healthy competition and highlights top performers.
Lead-to-Win Conversion Rate: What percentage of leads that enter your pipeline this month eventually become paying customers? This KPI measures the efficiency of your sales and marketing funnel.
Sales Cycle Length: How long does it take, on average, for a deal to go from initial contact to closed-won? If this number is increasing, it might point to friction in your sales process.
You don't need to include all of these. Pick the 5-7 metrics that are most important for your business goals right now. The beauty of Looker is that you can always add more later.
The Foundation: Understanding Looker Explores and Models
To build anything in Looker, you need a solid data foundation. This foundation is built not by you, the report builder, but by your data analysts or developers using a language called LookML.
Think of it like this: your raw sales data from sources like Salesforce, HubSpot, Stripe, or your company's database is the jumbled collection of ingredients. A data analyst uses LookML to create a clean, organized recipe called a "Model." Within that model are pre-defined starting points for reports, called "Explores."
An "Explore" is simply a dataset designed for a specific purpose. Hopefully, you have an explore called "Sales," "Deals," or "Opportunities" that contains all the related fields you need: dimensions (your categories, like Rep Name, Deal Source, or Date) and measures (your numbers, like Sum of Revenue or Count of Deals).
Before you continue, confirm with your data team that you have an Explore ready to go with the sales data you need. Your report can only be as good as the data available in its underlying Explore.
Step-by-Step: Creating Your Monthly Sales Report in Looker
Once you know your KPIs and have a data Explore, it's time to build the report. In Looker, reports are built piece by piece. Each individual chart or KPI is called a "Look." You'll create several Looks and then assemble them together on a "Dashboard."
Step 1: Create Your First "Look" for a KPI
Let's start by creating a chart for Total Sales Revenue by Week.
Navigate to the Explore section from the main navigation menu in Looker.
Select the appropriate sales-related Explore (e.g., "Opportunities" or "Deals").
You'll see a field picker on the left side of your screen. This is where you choose your data points. Fields are split into Dimensions (blue) and Measures (orange).
Dimensions are the attributes you use to group your data. For this chart, find a date dimension like "Closed Date" or "Created Date."
Measures are the numeric values you want to calculate. For this chart, find a revenue measure like "Sum of Deal Amount" or "Total Revenue."
Click on your date dimension and your revenue measure. As you click them, Looker will automatically start building a data table on the right.
Click the Run button to see the results.
You now have a table showing total revenue for every single day. Let's make it more useful for a monthly report.
Step 2: Apply Filters to Focus on the Month
Your report is for a specific month, so you need to filter the data accordingly.
Find the "Filters" section at the top of the Explore page.
The fields you selected (Closed Date and Total Revenue) will already be there. We want to filter by the date.
Click on the Closed Date filter. You'll see a dropdown with many options. Select "is in the past" and then type "1" and choose "complete months" from the next dropdown. This dynamically sets your report to always show the last full month. Alternatively, you can choose "is in range" and pick a specific month.
Click Run to apply the filter. Your data table now only includes sales data from last month.
Step 3: Visualize Your Data
A table of numbers is hard to interpret. Let's turn it into a visual chart.
Above your data table, click on the Visualization tab.
Looker provides a variety of chart types like Bar, Column, Line, Area, and Pie. For tracking revenue over the course of the month, a Line Chart or Column Chart works best.
Select one of these chart types. Looker will generate a preview. You can use the "Edit" menu next to the visualization options to tweak things like colors, axis labels, and trend lines.
Once you're happy with your chart, it's time to save it.
Step 4: Save the Look to Your Dashboard
Click the gear icon in the top right corner and select Save.
From the dropdown, choose To a Dashboard.
A dialog box will appear. Give your chart a clear title, like "Monthly Revenue Trend."
In the "Dashboard" field, you can choose an existing dashboard or type a name for a new one. Let's type "Monthly Sales Performance" to create a new one.
Click Save to Dashboard. Congrats, you've added the first tile to your report!
Step 5: Repeat for All Your KPIs
Now, repeat the process for the other KPIs you identified earlier. For each one, you'll go back to your Explore, select different dimensions and measures, choose the right visualization, and save it to your "Monthly Sales Performance" dashboard.
Here are some quick examples:
For a Sales Rep Leaderboard:
Dimensions: Sales Rep Name
Measures: Sum of Revenue
Visualization: Bar Chart
For Total Revenue:
Measures: Sum of Revenue
(No Dimension Needed)
Visualization: Single Value
For Sales by Product:
Dimensions: Product Name
Measures: Sum of Revenue
Visualization: Pie Chart or Table
Step 6: Arrange Your Dashboard and Add Context
Once all your Looks are saved to the dashboard, you can arrange them for clarity. Go to your dashboard and click the settings button to enter Edit mode. Now you can drag, drop, and resize each tile.
A good layout tells a story:
Put your most important, high-level KPIs (like Total Revenue and Revenue vs. Goal) at the top.
Group related charts together. For example, put your sales rep leaderboard next to a chart showing average deal size per rep.
Use Text Tiles to add headings, descriptions, and analysis directly to your dashboard. Instead of making people guess what the charts mean, add a text box that says, "We saw a 15% increase in revenue this month, primarily driven by strong performance from the Enterprise team." This turns a data dashboard into a clear, actionable report.
Automate and Share Your Sales Report
The biggest benefit of a Looker dashboard is automation. You built it once, and now it will update with fresh data automatically. To make it even more efficient, set up a schedule for it to be delivered to stakeholders.
On your dashboard, click the settings icon and select Schedule delivery.
Here, you can have Looker email a PDF or a visualization of the dashboard to anyone you want on a set schedule, like the first business day of every month. You can also send notifications directly to Slack channels.
Final Thoughts
Building a monthly sales report in Looker involves defining your KPIs, creating individual Looks for each metric, and assembling them into a coherent dashboard. By setting up filters and scheduled deliveries, you can automate your reporting and spend less time pulling data and more time acting on it.
While powerful, building reports in Looker often depends on your data team's availability to set up the necessary data models before you can even start. If you're looking for a faster way to connect your data sources - like Salesforce, HubSpot, or Shopify - and get answers instantly, that’s where we built Graphed. We turn hours of complex dashboard building into a simple conversation, allowing you to create comprehensive, real-time reports just by describing what you need in plain English.