Sales teams and leaders use key performance indicators (KPIs) to track their progress toward goals and to identify trends and patterns in their sales efforts. By closely monitoring sales KPIs, these teams ensure that they are taking the right actions to achieve their goals and identify underlying causes of challenges they may face. Sales KPIs also provide visibility into the performance of individual team members, allowing managers to identify areas for improvement and ensure team members are maximizing their efforts. Overall, using sales KPIs helps provide clarity and direction for sales teams, ensuring they can effectively track their progress and make informed decisions about their approach.
It is essential to select the right KPIs for your sales carefully. The most effective sales KPIs are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely (SMART). Identify the most impactful sales KPIs by focusing on critical metrics closely tied to your primary goals.
Once you have established your sales KPIs, use a CRM, like HubSpot, to create dashboards that allow you to monitor your metrics in real time. These dashboards will provide a clear and visual representation of your sales data, helping your team track progress toward goals and stay focused on core priorities.
The following KPIs are ideal for sales managers:
Current Opportunities
What it tracks: Current opportunities estimate the value of your active sales pipeline based on the likelihood of deals closing. Prospects are organized into different stages, such as qualified, decision-maker brought in, proposal sent, and closed won/lost. Each stage is assigned a specific weight or value. The sales opportunity metric is calculated by multiplying the stage's weight by the lead's estimated value.
Why it is important: This process helps sales teams prioritize their efforts and allocate resources more effectively. They will focus on the leads most likely to result in a successful sale. An increasing pipeline value indicates the potential for higher sales figures, while additional sales efforts are needed when the value decreases.
New Leads
What it tracks: The number of new leads entering the sales pipeline in a given period, usually tracked monthly or quarterly.
Why it is important: You may need a certain number of leads based on your conversion rates (e.g., three deals closed for every ten leads) to reach your sales targets. If your marketing team is generating leads below the target, it may be necessary to focus more on prospecting to bring in enough opportunities to meet your goals. By tracking this KPI, you will identify potential issues with lead generation and take steps to address them, helping to ensure that you have a steady flow of potential deals in the pipeline.
Average Age of Leads in the Pipeline
What it tracks: How long, on average, your active leads have been in the pipeline.
Why it is important: Sales reps need a full pipeline of leads. It is essential for these leads to be actively moving toward a sale. If leads are not making progress, it can drain the time and resources of reps, who could focus on more viable deals instead. A trend of stalled leads indicates that you may need to examine your workflow and ways to streamline your sales process.
Average Sales Cycle
What it tracks: How long it typically takes for a sales team to close a deal.
Why it is important: This metric helps understand how long it takes for a lead to move through the sales process, from initial contact to closing the deal. By tracking the average sales cycle length, teams identify bottlenecks or inefficiencies in their sales process and take steps to improve their speed and efficiency.
Lead Response Time
What it tracks: How long it takes your team to contact a lead after an inquiry or sales lead qualification.
Why it is important: When the marketing team qualifies a lead, it is vital to respond promptly to capitalize on the opportunity. To ensure that reps follow up on sales-qualified leads quickly, you should benchmark response times and encourage reps to improve their speed. Responding to leads quickly catches the prospect while they are still thinking about their problem, increasing the chances of closing the sale.
Number of Demo Calls
What it tracks: How many demo or sales calls are scheduled in a given period.
Why it is important: Leads in the demo phase (meaning they are actively considering a product or service demonstration) are more likely to convert to sales compared to leads at earlier stages of the sales process. This metric is a strong indicator for gauging a sales rep's success in winning deals and the overall health of the sales pipeline. By monitoring this metric, sales teams can identify which reps are most effective at moving leads through the pipeline and can provide additional support or resources as needed to help them close deals.
Quote to Close Ratio
What it tracks: A measurement of the number of deals won compared to the total number of quotes sent to prospects.
Why it is important: The quote-to-close ratio measures the effectiveness of sales reps in converting quotes into closed deals. This conversion ratio can be used to analyze the performance of individual sales reps and compare it to historical trends and current targets. By tracking the quote-to-close ratio, you can also determine if there is a bottleneck you need to adjust.
Conversion Rate
What it tracks: Deals won in a given period, compared to the number of opportunities.
Why it is important: This metric indicates the sales team's effectiveness in converting leads into paying customers. This KPI can also be used to identify which marketing channels are most effective at generating high-quality leads and evaluate the lead-to-sales process's efficiency. By setting a lead-to-sales benchmark and tracking this metric, sales managers can assess the team's pipeline's strength and identify improvement areas.
Average Contract Value (ACV)
What it tracks: The average value of a new deal over the course of a period.
Why it is important: By tracking ACV, sales teams can identify opportunities to increase revenue and adjust their sales strategies accordingly, potentially through upselling and cross-selling. A low ACV may indicate a need to acquire new customers to drive revenue growth. This KPI can help the business achieve its revenue goals and sustain long-term growth.
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
What it tracks: CLV measures the total value of all purchases made by a customer over the lifetime of their relationship with the company. This includes upsells, cross-sells, renewals, and the initial purchase.
Why it is important: CLV is an important metric for businesses because it helps to identify the potential value of a customer and can be used to guide sales and marketing efforts. By understanding the CLV of a customer, companies can target their efforts toward retaining and increasing the value of their customers, contributing to long-term revenue growth.
Using Dashboards to Track Your Chosen KPIs
You can customize your dashboards to meet the specific needs of the sales team and managers, allowing them to focus on the KPIs that are most relevant to their success. Users can review their metrics daily to keep up-to-date on their progress toward quotas and adjust when they need to get back on track. Managers can also identify underperformers who may need help and which tactics high-performers use to increase conversion rates. Overall, tracking sales KPIs with dashboards is an essential process for sales teams looking to drive growth and achieve their goals.
If you would like to discuss setting up dashboards for your team, schedule a call here.
