How to Create a Sales Report in Looker

Creating a sales report in Looker transforms your raw CRM data into clear, actionable insights. However, getting started can feel intimidating. Looker is a powerful business intelligence tool, but its depth and unique data modeling language, LookML, often come with a steep learning curve. This guide will walk you through the essential steps to build a meaningful sales report in Looker, from understanding your key metrics to combining everything into an interactive dashboard.

What Every Great Sales Report Needs

Before you even log into Looker, you need a clear plan. A report is only as good as the questions it answers. Think about what a sales manager, an executive, or a sales rep needs to see to understand performance and make better decisions. A comprehensive sales report typically covers several key areas.

Core Sales Performance Metrics

Sales Revenue: The most fundamental metric. You’ll want to track total revenue and break it down by a specific time frame (month, quarter).
Deals Won vs. Lost: A raw count of how many deals are closing and how many are falling through. This is crucial for calculating your win rate.
Win Rate: Calculated as (Deals Won / Total Deals), this percentage tells you how effective your team is at closing opportunities.
Average Deal Size: Total revenue divided by the number of deals won. This helps you understand if your team is closing high-value deals or getting by on volume.

Sales Funnel and Pipeline Velocity

Sales Cycle Length: The average time it takes to close a deal, from initial contact to the final signature. A shortening sales cycle often indicates improved efficiency.
Lead Conversion Rate: The percentage of leads that convert into qualified opportunities. This helps measure the quality of your inbound leads and the effectiveness of your initial outreach.
Deal Velocity: This measures how quickly deals move through your pipeline. Slow velocity might point to bottlenecks in your sales process.

Team and Individual Performance

Revenue by Sales Rep: A classic leaderboard metric that shows who your top performers are.
Performance Against Quota: Tracking each rep's progress towards their sales target.
Pipeline by Rep: Visualizing the value of each rep's current pipeline helps with forecasting and identifying who needs more support.

Step 1: Get Your Data Ready

Looker works by reading data from a database you connect it to. For a sales report, this is almost always your CRM, such as Salesforce, HubSpot, or a custom internal database. Before Looker can visualize anything, your data needs to be structured and modeled properly.

The Role of LookML

Unlike some drag-and-drop BI tools, Looker uses its own modeling language called LookML. Think of LookML as a set of instructions that tells Looker how to understand your data. A data analyst or developer typically writes LookML projects to:

Define Dimensions: These are the "who, what, where" attributes in your data, such as Sales Rep Name, Region, Deal Stage, and Lead Source.
Define Measures: These are the calculations or aggregations you perform on your data. Examples include a SUM of Deal Amount, a COUNT of Won Deals, or an AVERAGE of Deal Cycle Length.
Establish Relationships (Joins): This explains how different tables in your database are related. For example, it illustrates how the Accounts table connects to the Opportunities table.

For most sales and marketing professionals, you won't be writing LookML yourself. However, it's crucial to understand that an analyst typically prepares these models for you to use. When you log in to build a report, you'll be working with the predefined Dimensions and Measures from the LookML model.

Step 2: Start Reporting with a 'Look'

In Looker terminology, a single report or chart is called a "Look." You create Looks in the 'Explore' section, which is the user interface for querying and visualizing your data.

Let's build a simple but essential report: Quarterly Revenue by Sales Rep.

Navigate to the Explore section in Looker and select the LookML model that contains your sales data (it might be named something like "Salesforce Data" or "CRM Analysis").
On the left-hand panel, you’ll see all the available Dimensions and Measures organized in dropdowns.
Select Your Dimensions: Under the 'Opportunities' or 'Deals' view, find and click on Sales Rep Name. Then, find the closing date dimension (e.g., Close Date or Closed At).
Select Your Measure: Find the measure that calculates total revenue from won deals. It might be called Total Won Revenue or Deal Amount (Sum). Click on it.
You've now told Looker you want to see the Total Won Revenue for each Sales Rep Name by Close Date.

Filtering Your Data

Right now, your query is returning data from all time. To make it meaningful, you need to add filters.

Find the Filters section at the top of the Explore page.
To see data for just last quarter, click on the Close Date dimension again. You'll see filtering options appear in the filter section. Choose "in the past" and select "1 complete quarter."
Your query is almost ready. Now, click the Run button in the top right.

Looker will process your request and display the results in a data table. You'll see a list of sales reps and their total revenue for the last complete quarter.

Step 3: Visualize Your Look

A table of numbers is useful, but a visual chart is much easier to digest. Looker makes it easy to turn your data table into a visualization.

Above the data table, click on the Visualization tab.
Looker provides various chart types. Icons for popular options like Bar, Column, Line, and Pie charts will appear. A Bar Chart is a great choice for comparing rep performance. Click it.
Looker will instantly generate a bar chart from your data. You can now tweak it to make it more professional.
Click the Edit gear icon next to the chart types. A panel will appear with customization options for Plot, Series, X-axis, and Y-axis.
Here, you can add axis labels (e.g., "Total Revenue" for the X-axis), change colors, and add value labels to the bars to display the exact revenue numbers.

Once you’re happy with your visualization, it's time to save it. Click the gear icon in the top right and select Save As a Look. Give it a descriptive name like "Revenue by Sales Rep - Last Quarter."

Step 4: Combine Looks into a Dashboard

A sales manager doesn't just need one report, they need a consolidated view of multiple KPIs. This is where dashboards come in. A Looker dashboard is a collection of saved Looks, arranged on a single page.

Now, let's create a new sales dashboard and add the report we just built.

Navigate to your personal or a shared folder in Looker.
Click the New button and select Dashboard.
Give your dashboard a name, like "Q3 Sales Performance Dashboard".
The dashboard will be a blank canvas. Click Add Tile to add your first report.
A window will pop up asking you to choose a saved Look. Search for and select the "Revenue by Sales Rep - Last Quarter" Look you just saved. Looker will place it on your dashboard as a "tile."
You can now resize and rearrange the tile by clicking and dragging.

Your dashboard is started! You can repeat this process to add more tiles. A strong sales dashboard might also include:

A Total Revenue Tile: Create a new Look with just the single 'Total Won Revenue' measure. Use the "Single Value" visualization to display it as a large number.
A Win Rate Pie Chart: Create a Look that counts 'Deals Won' versus 'Deals Lost'.
A Sales Cycle Trend Line Chart: Create an ongoing look that visualizes your 'Average Sales Cycle' by month to spot trends.

Step 5: Make Your Dashboard Interactive with Filters

A static dashboard is fine, but an interactive one is far more powerful. Dashboard filters allow you (or anyone viewing the dashboard) to dynamically slice the data without having to edit each individual Look.

Let's add a date filter to our new dashboard.

With your dashboard open in Edit Mode, go to the top toolbar and click Filters > Add Filter.
Give your filter a name, like "Date Range".
For the Field to Filter on, you need to find the LookML field that corresponds to the date. Search for and select Close Date from your sales LookML model.
Next, navigate to the Tiles to Update tab. Here, you'll tell Looker which tiles this filter should apply to. Select your "Revenue by Sales Rep" tile.
For that tile, you need to specify the "Field to Filter" again. Choose Close Date. This links your dashboard filter to the date field within that specific tile.
Save your filter.

Once you save the dashboard, you will see your new 'Date Range' filter at the top. Anyone can now change this filter to "this quarter," "last 6 months," or a custom range, and all linked tiles will update automatically. This turns your report into a flexible analytics tool for the entire team.

Final Thoughts

Building a powerful sales report in Looker involves a structured approach: modeling your data with LookML, building individual reports called Looks, visualizing them effectively, and finally assembling them into an interactive dashboard with dynamic filters. While the process has many steps, Looker provides the tools to create sophisticated, auto-refreshing reports from your core business data.

We understand that the learning curve for tools like Looker can be a significant roadblock, especially when your primary job isn't data analysis. That manual process of clicking, configuring, and consulting with engineers to answer a simple question is exactly why we built Graphed. Our platform connects directly to your sales sources like Salesforce and HubSpot and allows you to build the exact dashboards you need just by describing them in plain language. Instead of spending hours learning a new tool, you can create a comprehensive sales report in seconds, giving you back time to focus on acting on the insights, not uncovering them.