Sales teams care about numbers.
From revenue to growth, from conversion rate to customer lifetime value – sales metrics that matter help us understand what’s going on and what we need to accomplish. After all, “what gets measured gets managed.”
Still, even though today’s sales and marketing technologies are enabling us to collect as much data as we can, we’ve got a different problem — too much data!
Many sales managers are trying to measure anything and everything without a clear sense of what’s really driving business. Meanwhile, salespeople are drowning in metrics and getting lost in the noise.
The real challenge in utilizing data to drive sales is identifying the right key performance metrics (KPIs) so you can focus on activities that have a high impact on your bottom line and profitability.
What are Sales Metrics
Metrics in sales are numerical indicators of how well an individual, a group, or an organization is doing. They’re useful for monitoring development toward objectives, planning for expansion, modifying sales compensation, handing out incentives, and spotting strategic problems.
Perhaps you’re asking at this point what different kinds of sales metrics there are and which ones you should be monitoring.
Some of the most crucial measures for your company’s success are discussed here. The list has been broken down into the following groups:
General Sales Performance
When it comes to the health of your business as a whole, these high-level measures are crucial in determining whether or not you’re producing enough money.
And, more importantly, do you feel that your successes are meaningful?
You should track them to appease the board and the bank management, but they won’t tell you much about the efficacy of particular salespeople or strategies.
Specific Activity Metrics
Utilizing these KPIs, you may gain insight into the specific activities of your sales team on a daily or weekly basis.
How efficient is their time management? Are enough people being reached by their efforts?
If a sales rep isn’t making enough calls or sending enough emails, it’s the manager’s responsibility to encourage them to do so.
Pipeline Metrics
Pipeline metrics, in contrast to activity metrics, are concerned with the future, typically within the next several weeks or months.
Even if things seem great right now, ask yourself if you’re prepared to keep expanding at the rate you’ve been.
Lead Generation Metrics
These indicators, like your pipeline, are focused on forecasting future performance.
Even if you’re successfully closing every single chance that comes your way, it might not be enough if you’re only producing one opportunity every month.
Even if you’re sending hundreds of emails per day and have a full pipeline, it won’t matter much if you’re not closing the deals.
Because of this, it’s important to evaluate a variety of measures to get a complete picture of your sales success.
Customer Satisfaction Metrics
Among all the cold, hard numbers, there’s a dimension that adds depth beyond the immediate transaction: customer satisfaction.
This metric, while seemingly intangible, holds the key to understanding the longevity and health of your business relationships. After all, a satisfied customer is not just a repeat customer but also an ambassador for your brand.
Why does customer satisfaction matter so much?
Competition is fierce in sales, and the options for consumers are endless, so the differentiation often boils down to the experience.
Customer satisfaction scores give you direct insight into how your customers feel about their interactions with your business.
This includes everything from the initial contact through the purchasing process to post-sales support. High satisfaction levels indicate customers who are more likely to return, recommend your services or products to others, and exhibit higher lifetime value.
To measure and quantify customer satisfaction, you can use various methods, including surveys, sentiment analysis tools, feedback forms, and follow-up calls or emails after a sale has been completed. Metrics such as Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), and Customer Effort Score (CES) are popular and effective ways to gauge customer sentiments.
These tools can help you understand whether your customers are satisfied and how intensely they feel about their experience.
How to Identify Key Sales Metrics
A KPI-driven sales approach provides the focus a sales team needs to grow a business in the right direction. For such an approach to be productive, you first have to identify what needs to be measured, and here’s how:
1. Start with the Big Picture
First and foremost, you need to define the primary business goals you want to focus on in a specific timeframe.
Do you want higher revenue or more growth?
Do you want to increase customer acquisition or improve customer retention?
The KPIs you measure need to support the achievement of your goals. Otherwise, your sales teams will be doing a lot of busy work that isn’t aligned with the company’s vision.
2. Look for Leading, Not Lagging, Indicators
The most important question you need to ask is, “What activities are really significant?”
To get a good answer to that question, you need to identify the leading indicators.
Leading indicators measure the proactive steps required to create long-term success. Examples include the number of sales calls made per period, total opportunities added/lost, compliance with the sales process, and weighted pipeline value.
On the other hand, don’t get overly distracted by lagging indicators.
This data shows what’s already happened – total sales, average deal size, close rate, renewals, acquisition costs, etc. – and your sales team can’t change the past.
Measuring lagging indicators is important; it lets you know if you’ve achieved your goals. However, only focusing on lagging indicators doesn’t allow you to change outcomes – you can only use the information to change behaviors for the next month or quarter.
If you’re monitoring leading indicator KPIs, you can correct them during the period to reach your sales goals (lagging indicators).
3. Understand What Makes Your Customers Tick
What would you do if you knew what triggered your customers to buy? You would do more of it, wouldn’t you?
To find out what makes your customers proceed further down the purchasing path, you need to deconstruct your sales funnel by examining the different stages: prospecting, qualifying, advancing opportunities, closing, and post-sale.
Look at each stage from the customer’s perspective – what happened during the purchasing path that triggered them to move closer to conversion?
Was it a phone call from your sales team?
Did an email elicit a response?
Maybe a social media message piqued the prospect’s interest.
At what point in the sales cycle did these actions take place?
Identify the triggers and evaluate their effectiveness. Try A/B testing scripts, emails, and other messaging to improve effectiveness.
Analyze your sales and marketing activities and their impact at different phases of the buyer’s journey. Use this information to help formulate some of your leading indicators to ensure your team consistently takes actions required to generate sales.
4. Get the View from the Frontline
Your salespeople interact with leads and customers every day and are a valuable source of information to help identify the right triggers and activities.
Don’t just interview your top performers. Instead, talk to sales reps with different track records so you can compare and understand what activities correlate with sales success.
Your sales reps are on the frontline and have insights about customers that management isn’t aware of.
Listen to them, enjoy the front-row seat, and do your best to understand what makes your customers tick and how you can best equip your sales representatives to address the pain points and needs of potential customers.
5. Assess Information to Identify Trends
After gathering input from many sources, it may feel like you have a lot to measure.
However, tracking too many KPIs can make things too complicated and dilute your team’s focus.
Sometimes, it’s easy to spread yourself too thin. To avoid this trap, Identify commonalities and trends from all the information you’ve gathered and choose three to five KPIs to focus on. Keep track of the results so you can fine-tune what and how you measure.
6. Measure the Right Things, and Only the Right Things
Ultimately, you’re measuring KPIs to help your sales team sell more, faster, and more efficiently.
Before you measure anything, remember the end goal. How is your sales team going to improve sales performance?
Measure the things that help your team achieve their goals. Identify what activities drive sales as well as what activities and behaviors negatively impact outcomes, and focus on improving the former and minimizing the latter.
Don’t measure KPIs that don’t contribute to this goal. This creates confusion, causes your team to focus more on data collection than taking action, and makes it difficult for them to identify what really impacts sales performance.
Make the Metrics Work For You
Gathering and measuring KPIs is just the beginning. You must also communicate their impacts and implications to the sales team clearly and improve the visibility and transparency of sales with the organization at large.
Use sales tools that allow organization-wide access to these metrics and encourage salespeople to chime in with their insights.
Summarize and visualize the data using dashboards, scorecards, and reports to make the data easy to digest. Use role-based access to make sure team members can get the appropriate type and amount of information.
Of course, KPIs aren’t set in stone, and they can change as a response to market trends and customer preferences. Revisit these steps periodically to validate you’re tracking the SDR metrics that matter to help you stay on top of your game.
