How to measure the success of your sales process, the growth of your revenue, and the productivity of your sales team? The answer is it all comes down to sales metrics.
Sales metrics are what businesses and organizations use to track sales performance and identify what’s worked to capitalize on it and what hasn’t to improve. By powering your sales team with these pieces of information, you can help them know exactly where they stand and what exact next steps they need to take.
In this post, let’s discover some of the most important sales metrics for businesses.
What Are Sales Metrics?
Sales metrics are the key performance indicators, or KPIs, that empower a sales rep, team or organization to assess performance against goals and objectives, monitor progress and make necessary adjustments for continued sales success.
Sales metrics are meant for guiding your sales reps into doing the things they need to generate more qualified leads, close more deals, and increase revenue. Businesses should create a set of sales metrics that align with their business goals, sales process, and operations.
The Most Important Sales Metrics to Track in Revenue Team
As said earlier, sales metrics should be defined based on the nature of your business and sales activities. That said, companies often use the following sales performance metrics:
- Sales pipeline metrics
- Sales activity metrics
- Lead generation sales metrics
- Sales productivity metrics
The next section will dive deeper into these metrics.
Sales Metrics Examples
1. Sales Pipeline Metrics
Sales pipeline metrics are meant for evaluating the performance of your sales pipeline. They help you understand how your sales process is performing and how you can improve it for optimal outcomes.
Common sales pipeline metrics include the number of qualified leads, marketing qualified leads (MQL) to sales qualified leads (SQL) conversion rate, win rate, average deal size, customer acquisition cost (CAC), customer lifetime value (LTV), LTV to CAC ratio, and average sales cycle.
2. Sales Activity Metrics
Sales activity metrics are used to track your sales reps’ daily activities. They tell you what a sales rep does every day and how you can help them improve their performance.
Common sales activity metrics include the numbers of leads created, calls made, emails sent, follow-ups, meetings schedules, and proposals sent. Some businesses also attribute total open opportunities, total closed opportunities, and the ratio of leads to MQL to sales activity metrics.
3. Sales Productivity Metrics
Sales productivity metrics are metrics that help track the effectiveness and efficiency of your sales team. The goal of measuring sales team metrics is to help your sales reps make use of their skills sets and resources as well as boost their performance further.
Common sales productivity metrics include conversion rate, win rate, sales length, average deal size, retention rate, and customer lifetime value (LTV).
4. Lead Generation Sales Metrics
Lead generation sales metrics are useful to measure lead generation activities’ performance. By tracking these metrics, you’ll know if you’re doing right with capturing interest in your products and searching for qualified leads.
Common lead generation sales metrics include visitors to leads, leads to opportunities, click-through rate, cost per lead, lead acquisition by channel, and the number of qualified leads.
The Challenges of Tracking Sales Analytics and Sales Metrics
There are some reasons why tracking sales operations metrics isn’t easy. First, sales metrics should be monitored regularly, and if you do it manually, missing and inaccurate data can happen. This means you may not see the right picture of your business performance.
Another reason is that as your business grows, you may have an increasing amount of data to collect, making it hard to prepare the data in real-time. You’ll need an established system that automatically provides you with accurate data and insights into your sales activities on a regular basis so you can free up your time for developing strategies and execution plans.
That’s where a sales metrics reporting dashboard comes in.
How to Perform Sales Metrics Analytics With Sales Dashboards
A sales metrics dashboard is a quick, easy, and effective way to view your sales metrics during a specific period of time. It gives you a visual and detailed picture of which sales metrics drive revenue, trends, opportunities, and risks to act on quickly.
Every sales dashboard should be customized to your needs. It should be set up to quickly show key metrics that define the success of your sales team whenever you want to see them.
When implementing this step, you may also want to consider who will use the dashboard. For example, sales team leaders often care more about closed deals, win rates, and qualified leads. Meanwhile, a dashboard for frontline reps will look different with metrics focused on leads, opportunities, and schedule appointments.
If you’re looking to implement a sales dashboard system for your team, then try Revenue Grid — a revenue operations and intelligence platform that offers a wide range of revenue-focused tools, including revenue signals, pipeline visibility, sales sequences, and more.
Regarding tracking sales metrics, Revenue Grid gives you the Team Analytics tool which is powerful to evaluate your sales reps’ activities. With it, you can track what each rep is doing, how well they do their job, where you can help them improve their performance, and gain better control of your sales process.
The best part is Revenue Grid also allows you to create actionable signals to alert your team on critical steps they need to take immediately to close deals. This feature is great for optimizing sales reps’ performance and improving sales processes.
