B2B Sales Benchmarks to Help You Understand Your Sales Teams’ Performance in 2024

Are your sales targets being met? What is the average sales cycle duration? How many deals did your team close last month? How many new leads are in the pipeline?

These are just some of the questions you should ask when evaluating your sales team’s efficiency.

But here’s something that many businesses overlook – when evaluating your sales department, it’s not just your performance you should analyze… you also need data on how your competitors are performing and what numbers they’re seeing.

This way, you’ll have an objective perspective on whether your metrics are up to par with the rest of the industry or if you’re falling behind in certain areas.

For this report, we’ve pulled some B2B sales benchmarks from our product to help you do just that.

These specific benchmarks came from our Sales Benchmarks for B2B Companies group – which you can join for free!

Let’s dive in.

• Sales-Related Marketing Metrics
• Lead Generation Metrics
• Sales Funnel Metrics
• Sales Activity Metrics

Sales-Related Marketing Metrics

Sales-related marketing metrics are used to understand how effective our marketing efforts are in generating sales. They typically provide insights into how well specific marketing strategies in the business are in both generating leads and converting them into customers.

And based on the data, you can then fine-tune your strategies further, see which areas aren’t up to par, and if there are any burning issues you should see to immediately.

Now, the best practice with this metric type is to analyze each of your marketing activities and channels individually to see how they contribute.

Run a lot of PPC ads?

In that case, you need real-time data on how many leads you’re getting, how much they cost, what’s your customer acquisition cost, click-rate, and so on.

If email marketing is one of your main channels, then you need to assess how many sales you’re getting from it and whether you need to optimize your copy, automations, or any other element.

What about your landing pages? If you’re generating a lot of traffic to them but aren’t seeing many conversions, there could be an issue with your copy or messaging. In that case, you’ll want to experiment with new hooks and angles.

The point is, that all of these channels can be great in getting you more leads – but you can’t optimize them for better results until you understand what’s going on data-wise and have a clear picture of your sales-related marketing metrics.

And to help you do that, we compiled some sales-related marketing metrics from our Sales Benchmarks for B2B Companies group (data for December 2023).

Seeing that the landing page views-to-submission rate is relatively strong (5.83%), it indicates an effective landing page design and content that resonates with the target audience.

Expert Recommendation: Want a clean and comprehensive overview of both your sales and marketing performance at a glance? You can download our free Marketing and Sales Overview Dashboard and set it up in a matter of minutes. From top-of-funnel metrics like unique visitors to deals closed, you can track everything you need to stay on top of your sales and marketing performance in a single view. Simply connect your data source(s), pick the metrics you want to track, and build professional visuals in just a few clicks of a button.

Lead Generation Metrics

Lead generation metrics are specific measures you can use to assess how well your business is performing when it comes to generating new leads.

Which channels are generating the most leads? Where do your best leads come from? How much are you spending on lead generation?

These are just some of the questions you can answer when you’re closely monitoring your lead gen metrics and indicators.

Now, when it comes to lead generation metrics, some of the most insightful ones are those that show you how each online channel contributes to lead gen.

For example, whether your websites are effective in collecting visitor information, how many leads can be attributed to SEO, and how well your PPC ads attract leads directly to landing pages.

Each channel has its own role and they can all be effective – but there’s no one-size-fits-all channel that can be the ideal choice for all businesses. Each channel targets potential customers differently. That’s why it’s so important to closely track the metrics for each one. Top of Form

Here are a few lead generation metrics from our Sales Benchmarks for B2B Companies group (data for December 2023) that you can use for comparison:

Expert Recommendation: Once you have a steady flow of B2B leads coming from your SEO, content marketing, or PPC efforts, you can use email marketing to nurture them and secure more conversions. The keyword here is personalization – and you can achieve it through proper list segmenting. You can do this based on various criteria, such as demographics, interests, behavior, etc. Once you have your different cohorts ready, you can then build autoresponders and automate your nurture sequences to further build a relationship with the leads and nudge them over the “customer fence.”

Sales Funnel Metrics

A sales funnel is essentially the journey a potential customer goes through from first learning about a product or service to making a purchase.

And sales funnel metrics are specific measurements we can use to track how well we’re moving customers through that journey.

Russell Brunson, one of the industry’s most popular online marketers, says that everyone is just “one sales funnel away from never having to work again in your life.”

True or not, there’s one thing for certain – you won’t be able to build a profitable funnel unless you’re tracking sales funnel metrics and optimizing different areas based on that data.

One of the main things businesses focus on in the funnel is the average time they need to close a deal. Naturally, you’ll want this process to go as quickly (and smoothly) as possible.

That’s why we pulled the average time to close a deal and a few more relevant sales funnel metrics from our Sales Benchmarks for B2B Companies group (data for December 2023) that you can use to see how you stack up instantly.

Based on this data, we can see that the average time to close a deal is approximately 69 days. This suggests a complex sales process, which is fairly common in B2B industries.

As for the balanced deal closure rate, with 9 deals won and 7 lost, the win-loss ratio is relatively balanced.

Expert Recommendation: One of the best ways to stay on top of what’s happening in your funnel is to have a comprehensive sales pipeline report you can refer to in real-time. And here’s one best practice you can follow when building your report – analyze each segment of the funnel separately. So many marketers rush to the job and try to break down the funnel as a whole, but you’ll get a much more comprehensive overview of what’s going on if you take each segment separately and start from the micro level.

Sales Activity Metrics

Sales activity metrics refer to the specific targets we use to track and assess the actions taken by both the sales team and individual reps.

When you start tracking sales activity metrics, you’ll be able to identify how efficient your team is in generating deals, closing them, how many calls they make on average, how much time they need to close on average, and much more.

In a nutshell, one of the main things we’re analyzing here is how direct (human) interactions influence sales outcomes.

Building relationships, understanding customer needs, handling objections, and simply communicating with customers in the right manner are all pillar stones of an effective sales team.

Below, we prepared a few sales activity metrics that we pulled from our Sales Benchmarks for B2B Companies group (data for December 2023). Use them to see how you compare to others when it comes to sales team efficiency:

A total of 102.5 calls and 63 meetings indicate a high level of engagement with prospects, which is more than positive for relationship building and understanding customer needs.

Expert Recommendation: Tracking the activity of both your individual reps and your team as a whole can get quite messy if you’re still doing everything manually and in the old “spreadsheet manner.” Luckily, there’s a way to simplify this by downloading our free HubSpot Sales Activity Dashboard. With this dashboard, you can track everything from meetings to deals closed for each of your sales representatives and then visualize the data to make it more understandable.

Stay On Top of Your B2B Sales Performance with the Help from Databox

Tracking your B2B sales performance isn’t easy… in fact, it’s one of the most tedious processes in the organization.

And there are several reasons for this.

For starters, B2B transactions usually take longer. There’s more back-and-forth, negotiations, and layers of decision-making. So, tracking progress through these extended cycles can be a challenge.

Another factor is that, in B2B, you’re not just convincing one person. You’ve got to navigate through a maze of stakeholders, each with their own priorities and pain points.

Keeping track of who’s who and what they need is a task in itself.

So, what’s the solution then? Spend hours manually compiling all of your data and juggling around multiple spreadsheets.

Not if Databox has anything to say about it.

With Databox Dashboards, you can now easily compile all of your most relevant B2B sales metrics in one place and track your performance in real-time.

You connect your data source, choose the metrics you want to track, and use the built-in tools to visualize them – it’s that simple.

Then, you can later share your findings with shareholders and executives in a professional, simplified report using automated Databox Reports.  

But here’s the thing – even when you start tracking your performance… that’s still only your performance.

How will you know whether the numbers you’re seeing are on par with what others in the industry are seeing? Should you optimize your performance or is it in line with the competition’s data?

With Benchmark Groups, that’s exactly what you’ll be able to tell. Instantly get benchmarks for your most relevant metrics and see how you stack up against similar-sized competitors.

In fact, we have a specific Sales Benchmarks for B2B Companies group you can join right now. It’s completely free. 

If you’re ready to get all of these things today, sign up for a free trial and give Databox a twirl.