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Do you know what one of the biggest mistakes sales teams make is?
Trying to track and fit too many sales metrics and KPIs in a single dashboard.
Think of it like this – the simplest dish recipe usually works best. If you keep adding ingredients, flavors start to mix, consistency changes, and you lose track of what you want your dish to taste like in the first place.
Too many ingredients in a dish can muddle the flavors. Just like a well-chosen few can create a delicious meal, simplifying your sales metrics helps you create a better sales strategy.
For example, an executive dashboard will look very different than one designed for SDRs.
But how will you know which specific sales KPIs and metrics to track? In this report, that’s exactly what we’ll cover.
We’ll show you what sales KPIs are, how they work, which ones are the most important for sales reps to track, and explain how you can build a professional-looking sales dashboard for your organization.
Not only that, but we’ve also compiled insights and advice from some of the industry’s leading experts on the topic.
Let’s dive in.
Sales KPIs are measures that companies use to properly track and evaluate sales team performance and the performance of all executed sales activities.
These KPIs help businesses better understand the performance of their sales processes, set goals, and identify areas for improvement, but they can also ramp up your team’s efforts to hit their sales targets.
Common sales KPIs include sales growth, target achievement, average deal size, sales cycle length, and more.
The KPIs you choose to track will vary depending on the industry, company size, and sales strategy. But the general rule of thumb is that ‘less is more.’ Ideally, you should focus on 5-8 sales KPIs.
Sales KPIs are important because they provide you with direct insights into your sales team’s performance and help you pinpoint training opportunities, and pipeline issues.
With that information, you can work on maximizing your profit and optimizing your sales process and daily sales tactics.
They’re also crucial for strategic decision-making.
Once you understand which products or services are performing well, which sales strategies are effective, and which markets are lucrative, your business can make informed decisions about where to focus its resources.
Some companies even use them to motivate their sales team and boost morale by setting clear targets and rewarding achievements based on the KPIs.
You already know how important it is to track sales KPIs and metrics, but with dozens of different ones available, how do you know which to focus on?
The process starts with setting the specific goal you want to achieve and then seeing which KPIs will provide the most insight into your progress.
For instance, if your objective is to increase market penetration, tracking new customer acquisitions would be more relevant than focusing on repeat sales.
Another important aspect is to consider the timeframe for each KPI.
Some metrics, like daily sales, need to be monitored continuously, while others, like customer lifetime value, are more long-term.
That’s why you need to regularly review (and, if needed, make adjustments) your KPIs to make sure they remain aligned with your strategies and overall market conditions.
Did you know that 66% of the companies we surveyed have between two and five sales-related dashboards? Others mostly deal with only 1 sales-related dashboard.
And, while all survey respondents are using dashboards, 23% are new to using them.
The number of sales dashboards your company has tends to increase as your team grows.
This makes sense given that as your team grows, there are also more sales roles. And the KPIs for BDRs & SDRs are different from the ones for marketing, sales managers, or executives.
The majority of surveyed companies monitor and analyze their KPIs for Sales and Marketing, such as:
A large minority (approximately 40%) also monitors and analyzes sales KPIs for Business Development Reps, such as:
Lastly, about one-third of respondents monitor and analyze KPIs for Sales Development Reps, such as:
To get the most out of your team as a sales leader, it’s crucial to know which sales KPIs and metrics to track and why these metrics matter.
So, to uncover some unique KPIs that sales managers are tracking, we asked sales professionals to tell us about the KPIs they’re most focused on right now.
The sales KPIs we’ve gathered in this post span over the entire customer lifecycle—from first touch to retention—each with respondents’ thoughts on why tracking that KPI is useful and important for their sales dashboard.
Percentage of leads generated is a sales metric that measures the proportion of leads (potential customers) generated by a particular source, campaign, or effort about the total number of leads generated over the same period.
Alejandra Melara of Gray Group International says that “having an understanding of the percentage of leads your company is generating will not only keep your sales representatives motivated, but you will also be able to track and measure your team’s performance”.
“Are they reaching established quotas? Are quotas set too high—or maybe too low? Tracking the percentage of leads generated lets you make decisions based on your team’s performance.”
You can track this data easily by using a sales leads dashboard.
Number of qualified leads is a sales KPI that refers to the count of potential customers who exhibit a strong likelihood of purchasing a product or service from your company.
By focusing on qualified leads, sales teams can allocate their resources and time more effectively, concentrating on those that are more likely to convert into sales.
For Michael Richard of Whetstone Education, the “most important sales KPI to track is the number of sales-qualified leads you receive.”
“Receiving a lead is an exciting part of any sales manager’s day or week. However, understanding whether or not that lead has real value helps you determine how to allocate your time and energy. Working in a SaaS company with a year-long sales cycle means that I have to carefully choose the leads I follow up on so I don’t waste my team’s resources.
Typically, I can quickly test whether or not a lead is qualified by how much information the person provides—and by his/her email address.”
Lead response time refers to the amount of time it takes for a sales team or individual representative to respond to a lead after they make an initial inquiry or show interest in your products.
The quicker a sales team responds to a lead, the more likely they are to engage successfully with it.
Amanda Daume of Revenue River points out that “the insight that can be drawn from lead response time is three-fold.”
“Are your reps following up with leads in a timely fashion? Are they following up in a way that systematically follows the process they’ve been taught? Is there a bunch of unnecessary friction that should be eliminated from the lead routing process?”
Email open rate shows how many users open your emails.
It’s calculated by dividing the number of emails opened by the number of emails sent (excluding those that bounced), and then multiplying the result by 100 to get a percentage.
For instance, if a company sends out 1,000 emails and 200 of them are opened, the email open rate would be 20%.
It’s important to note that email open rates can vary widely depending on the industry, the type of audience, and the nature of the email (promotional, informational, etc.).
Roman Kniahynyckyj of LyntonWeb advises that you should “track emails sent, types of emails, and open rates” to gain a better understanding of your email efficiency.
He says “you want to see if prospects are engaging with your emails regularly. The more frequently they open emails from you, the more likely they are going to be to talk with you and ultimately buy from you.”
Expert Recommendation: Tracking your open rates is good – but what about other email metrics like unsubscribers, email CTR, new subscribed contacts, etc.? Unfortunately, keeping an eye on all of these metrics within the ESP can get far too complicated. But with our free Mailchimp Campaign Overview Dashboard, you can streamline the entire process. And if you use another ESP, don’t worry, we have 100+ integrations you can choose from.
Number of follow-up meetings is a sales metric that refers to the number of additional meetings a sales rep has with a potential client after the initial contact.
In some cases, it can also reflect the effectiveness of the initial meeting. A need for numerous follow-ups might suggest that the initial meeting didn’t fully address the client’s needs or concerns (but that’s not necessarily always the case).
In fact, Oliver Lopez of Structsales says that “if you bring enough value to the first meeting, the client is more likely to want to meet with you again!”
The call-show rate is a KPI that refers to the percentage of scheduled sales calls that actually result in the prospect showing up and participating in the call.
This KPI helps evaluate your appointment-setting process and the quality of leads your team is pursuing.
Brandon Fargo of Brahvia Consulting emphasized the importance of this KPI and asked – “how often are your booked sales presentations showing up for the call?”
“This is important because sales are a numbers game. If your show rate is lower than 50%, then you have an issue and should dig into why people are not showing up. Is it a problem with the salesperson? Are people not sure about your company or solution before they even hear about it? These could all be issues.”
Last contact is a metric that shows the most recent point of communication between a sales representative and a potential or existing customer.
This metric is great for helping you track follow-up activities. When you know when a customer was last contacted, you can plan follow-up actions, ensure regular engagement, and avoid over-contacting.
“Activity is incredibly important, and tracking last contact/activity ensures that leads are being contacted and deals are being followed up on,” says Tim Parkin of Parkin Consulting.
“If the sales team is taking action, the opportunities and deals will follow suit. This is why tracking sales activity (last contact) as a KPI is so important.”
Conversation drip is a data point that tells us how many “winnable” prospects the sales team missed out on or couldn’t close.
Marc Bernstein of Balto Software goes into detail on how this KPI works:
“Here’s a quick summary: let’s say that your sales team closes 30% of their calls—a super respectable number. We know that this means 70% of their calls didn’t close. Where did 70% of your business go?
“We’ll start with a conservative scenario. Let’s say that out of the 70% of calls that didn’t close, 80% of them were ‘unwinnable.’ This means that for whatever reason, for 80% of your lost calls, there was no way the buyer would have moved forward with your solution no matter how good the pitch was.
Here, the unwinnable calls represent 56% of all calls: 70% of all calls didn’t close, and 80% of those calls were unwinnable. 70% x 80% = 56%.
Here’s where the math gets a little frightening. Even though you closed 30% of your calls, which for many sales teams is a feat in itself, and even though 56% of all the calls that came your way were unwinnable, you still left 14% of your calls on the table.”
This is the chunk that was winnable—but lost. Fourteen whole freaking points.”
Brand mentions refers to the number of times a brand is mentioned across various platforms, such as social media, websites, blogs, news articles, and other sources.
It’s primarily used in marketing, sales, and brand management to assess overall brand popularity and visibility.
Jonathan Mentor of Successment says that this is “one of the most important sales metrics marketers and sales pros should be tracking.”
“In an increasingly social market, brand mentions online are often overlooked as an important sales metric. If people are discussing brands online, it indicates that they are contemplating a sale, voicing an opinion about a sale, or expressing dissatisfaction with a sale.
By carefully curating brand mention data and aggregating it, the sales and marketing pipeline can become more targeted and agile.”
Expert Recommendation: To stay on top of brand mentions – and all the other relevant social media metrics – you can use our free Social Media Awareness & Engagement Dashboard. You can set it up in a matter of minutes and track all key social metrics like Twitter followers, Facebook Page likes, social media sessions across platforms, and more.
Visitor-to-lead conversion rate is a KPI we use to measure the percentage of visitors on a website who take a desired action, such as filling out a contact form, signing up for a newsletter, downloading a brochure, or similar.
To calculate the visitor-to-lead conversion rate, you divide the number of leads generated over a certain period by the total number of visitors to the site during that same period, and then multiply the result by 100.
For example, if a website had 1,000 visitors in a month and 50 of them filled out a contact form, the visitor-to-lead conversion rate would be (50 leads / 1,000 visitors) * 100 = 5%.
“For any business that has a strong online presence, track the ratio of the number of visitors to your site in relation to how many of them become leads,” says Jared Weitz of United Capital Source.
“This KPI is a strong indicator of your website’s conversion rate optimization. Be sure to have a clear definition of what a lead is (i.e., signing up for a product or subscribing to an email list) to best capture this metric.”
Leads to opportunities is a sales metric that refers to the process and rate at which potential leads (prospective customers) are converted into opportunities.
In sales, an “opportunity” is a lead that has been qualified and is now considered to have a realistic chance of becoming a customer.
Businesses can use this metric to evaluate how efficient they are in moving prospects further down the sales funnel.
COFORGE’s Eric Melillo adds that this metric also “allows a sales manager to monitor inbound lead flow versus actual opportunities.”
“It can also help evaluate when there might be trouble with lead quality or missed opportunity advancement from your sales reps.”
By tracking and analyzing competitor pricing, you’ll have a better idea of how to position your own offers in the market.
You can also benchmark the prices to make sure you’re products aren’t priced too high or too low compared to similar offers.
With this data, you can choose to position yourself as a cost leader (offering lower prices) or as a premium brand (higher prices but presumably better quality).
David Finch of Purple Frog recommends tracking competitor pricing as “sales teams need to fully understand the price of competitors to understand where their value lies.”
“You can be more expensive, so long as you understand what extra value you deliver for the premium. But if you don’t know the premium, you cannot ascertain the price you need to justify the value. In my experience, so many sales teams regard competitor pricing as something they need to beat as opposed to explaining away.”
Number of deals on the board shows the total number of potential sales deals that a sales team (or a single rep) is currently managing or pursuing.
You can use this metric to gauge the volume of your sales opportunities at any given time.
Martin Shervington of Plus Your Business advises us to “track the number of deals on the board along with a pinned note explaining why it’s a deal”.
“For example, it’s a deal based on a sales rep’s conversation with a prospect. Then at ‘Qualified Sales Deal,’ for example, there will be one in three conversions to ‘Customer,’ verified at the end of a sales cycle for accuracy of the salesperson’s judgment.”
Deals by stage is a sales KPI that tracks the progress of potential deals through different stages of a sales pipeline.
In a typical sales process, a deal moves through several stages before making a purchase. These stages often include initial contact, qualification, proposal, negotiation, and closure, among others.
AJ Alonzo of demandDrive points out that “organizations traditionally look at their sales pipeline like a funnel, but we’ve started to see a different shape emerge for us – a bell curve.”
“Pipelines with more deals in the middle tend to be healthier than the traditional pipeline with more deals on the top. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great to see a pipeline full of deals at 0% (so much opportunity), but reps tend to be more motivated to work the deals that are in the 50-75% range due to their propensity to close.
Each activity in those accounts holds so much more weight, and reps know it. Having a bunch of those deals floating around in the middle gives us more motivated and excited reps, and that feeling trickles into the 0-25% bucket.”
Expert Recommendation: Want a comprehensive, birds-eye overview of your sales pipeline? Download our free Pipeline Performance Dashboard and see how easy tracking can be. All you need to do is connect your pipeline CRM, choose the metrics you want to track, and then visualize them with a few clicks of a button.
Sales stage conversions measure the effectiveness with which potential sales opportunities are moved through different stages in your sales pipeline.
In other words, it tracks how well your team converts leads into prospects, and then into customers
Michael Maynes of CIENCE recommends tracking sales stage conversions and “not just from opportunity open to closed, won or lost, but also the stage-to-stage movement, i.e., Disco to Evaluation, Evaluation to Validation, Validation to X, etc.”
Duration per stage refers to the exact amount of time a potential deal spends in each stage of the sales process.
Shorter durations might indicate that our sales strategies are on point, while longer durations could suggest bottlenecks in the process.
Andrea Lechner-Becker of LeadMD says that “duration per stage is a great metric, regardless of your go-to-market strategy.”
“After creating the opportunity, optimizing the amount of time to move through the funnel becomes paramount. It’s low-hanging fruit to take people already in the sales cycle and feed them content that expedites their current or future stages.
It’s also a great way to create sales and marketing alignment because marketing acts in service of improving the experience for people sales is already in conversation with, thus avoiding the classic demand gen issue of bad leads.”
Deals by acquisition channel is a sales metric that refers to the categorization of business deals based on the channels through which the customers were acquired.
It helps in identifying which channels are most successful at acquiring customers who eventually make a purchase. Common channels are social media, email marketing, referrals, direct visits, SEO, and PPC advertising.
Foundation Marketing’s Josh Gallant mentioned how “there are plenty of great metrics B2B sales managers should be keeping tabs on—close rates, calls scheduled, average deal size—the list rolls on forever. But the thing with these metrics is they’re all focused on the bottom of the funnel.”
He says that “this is where the disconnect between sales and marketing always seems to fall.”
“One of the best ways to measure top-to-bottom performance and keep your sales and marketing teams motivated is by tracking deals closed by acquisition channel. You’ll start to learn where your best customers are coming from, which marketing can then use to double down on your best sources of leads.”
Repeat sales per channel is a sales KPI we use to evaluate the effectiveness of different sales channels in generating recurring business.
This KPI specifically measures how often customers make repeat purchases through the same sales channel.
“Repeat sales per channel is an essential sales KPI,” says John Donnachie of ClydeBank Media. “A lot of focus is put on new sales and reaching more customers, which is important, but if we’re letting the customers that will be easiest to sell to stagnate and go without attention, then we’re leaving money on the table.”
“Repeat customers are the best customers, and they require less effort to sell to. Additionally, it is unsustainable to only acquire new sales without tapping into our existing sales base.”
Per-session value refers to the average value a business generates from each session on a website, app, or during any customer interaction.
This KPI helps businesses understand how much value, typically in terms of revenue, each session to their platform contributes on average.
To calculate the per-session value, you take the total revenue generated within a specific period and divide it by the number of sessions during that same period.
“Per-session value makes it easy to compare traffic sources with vastly different amounts of traffic,” says Branko Kral of B King Digital. “Many times, a small channel or landing page may be getting overlooked even though it’s powerful in closing sales whenever people do visit your site through it.”
“One way in which this metric enables comparison is by benchmarking to click cost. Imagine you advertise for direct response sales on Facebook, Google Ads, and AdRoll. You get different amounts of sessions (clicks) from each of the three. And the three traffic segments behave differently, too.
A thorough analysis of the differences in behavior may be helpful. But you can also just look at per-session values and see how much in sales each click brings you, on average.
Imagine this: cost per click is $4 on Facebook, $8 on Google, $0.50 on AdRoll. Per-session value is $3 for Facebook, $16 for Google, $0.30 on AdRoll. Google is the only one making you money via direct response website sales, even though clicks there cost you the most.”
Pipeline velocity is a sales KPI that measures the speed at which deals move through a company’s sales pipeline.
It’s typically calculated by multiplying the number of opportunities (deals) in the pipeline by the average deal value and the win rate and then dividing this product by the average length of the sales cycle.
Dan Liska of AutoVerify says that “if sales leaders have to focus on a single KPI, it should be pipeline velocity. Pipeline Velocity takes into account the way a sales team prospects (active opportunities), demos (average sales size), move the deal through the stages (sales cycle) and closes.”
“It’s also very useful for forecasting as pipeline velocity can be multiplied by the number of selling days in a month,” adds Mobials Inc.’s Samantha Kohn.
The opportunity pipeline multiplier KPI is essentially used to evaluate the health of your sales pipeline.
You can calculate it by comparing the total value of opportunities in the sales pipeline to the sales target for a given period. This ratio helps in assessing whether there are enough opportunities in the pipeline to meet sales targets.
For instance, if the sales target for a quarter is $100,000 and the total value of opportunities in the pipeline for that quarter is $300,000, the Opportunity Pipeline Multiplier would be 3. This means that the pipeline has three times the number of opportunities needed to meet the sales target.
SocketLabs’ Keith Hontz recommends tracking your opportunity pipeline multiplier because “sales reps should maintain a 3-4x pipeline multiple of their revenue target.”
Average time to conversion refers to the average amount of time it takes for a potential customer to convert into an actual customer after initially engaging with your business.
Naturally, a shorter average time to conversion suggests a more efficient sales process, whereas a longer time might indicate there are some issues that you need to resolve.
Bernard May of National Positions points out that “depending on your business model, it may take multiple touchpoints and nurturing for leads to convert. Understanding how long it takes to convert a lead (on average) will help you set expectations for your sales team.”
Average time to lose refers to the average amount of time it takes from the initial engagement with a potential customer to the point where it becomes clear that the sale will not be successful.
Analyzing the reasons for lost sales and the time taken can help in identifying weaknesses in the sales process. This could be in terms of initial qualification, pitch effectiveness, follow-up strategies, or understanding of customer needs.
Kiite’s Joseph Fung says that a lot of companies “track time to win, but few track the time it takes a deal to be marked ‘closed-lost’.”
“The status quo lets reps get away with poorly qualified leads: letting a deal linger in your pipeline doesn’t show up.
However, if you start reporting on time to lose—and make it clear you want that number to be low—it’ll make sure deals are getting disqualified earlier in the process and will give you a pipeline report that’s much more reliable.”
This KPI measures the proportion of salespeople in a team who are achieving or surpassing their individual sales targets or quotas.
Knowing how many team members are hitting their quotas can serve as a motivational factor. Teams may strive to improve their performance when they see a certain percentage of their peers succeeding.
Best Company’s McCall Robison mentions that this KPI is important “because it lets you know whether or not your quotas are realistic.”
“If less than 60% of your team is hitting quota, you likely need to reevaluate your goals. You want your quota to be difficult but not unreachable. Also, if more than 90% of your team is hitting quota, you likely have the opposite problem: your quota is too easy. Each quarter, take a look at your percentage of the sales team hitting quota and base your new numbers on that. Re-evaluate every quarter to ensure you have realistic and up-to-date numbers.”
Expert Recommendation: Are you tracking your sales team’s performance manually for each sales rep? If so, you’re probably flushing countless hours (and nerves) down the drain. You can simplify the process by getting our free HubSpot CRM Sales Rep Activity Dashboard. Track metrics like meetings, notes, and calls for each of your sales reps in a single place.
Conversion rate measures the effectiveness of your sales process, marketing strategy, or product offering.
It’s calculated as the percentage of potential customers who take a desired action. This action could be making a purchase, signing up for a service, subscribing to a newsletter, or any other measurable activity that reflects a successful outcome of the sales or marketing efforts.
Greg Schraff of Digetry advises that businesses should “look closely at the leads that are converting: do they have themes, traits, or user behaviors in common? Clues like this allow you to target the best prospects for your products or services.”
He also says that “sales managers should also track conversation rates associated with existing customers. This measures the percentage of existing customers who have renewed their business or have been upsold on additional products.”
“This metric is also important because it indicates success in increasing customer lifetime value, which ultimately shows a successful product through satisfied customers. Renewing existing customers is beneficial for any company because it doesn’t entail additional customer acquisition costs.”
The client acquisition rate KPI measures the rate at which a business gains new clients over a specific period. It provides insights into how well a company is expanding its customer base.
To calculate the client acquisition rate, divide the number of new clients acquired in a given period by the total number of potential clients or leads, then multiply by 100.
For example, if a company had 100 potential leads in a month and successfully converted 25 of them into clients, the client acquisition rate would be 25%.
Thumbprint’s Morgan Lathaen says that we should “compare client acquisition rates to the number of prospects a rep reaches out to. If you find that conversions decrease after a certain number of touches, use that number as a benchmark to prevent your reps from getting burned out or stretched too thin.”
“Lastly, use client acquisition rates to compare different outreach methods, such as emailing or cold calling versus pursuing face-to-face interactions.”
Close rate percentage measures the effectiveness of your sales team or individual representative.
It’s calculated by dividing the number of sales closed (i.e., deals that have been completed and resulted in a sale) by the total number of sales opportunities (leads that could potentially turn into a sale), and then multiplying the result by 100.
For example, if a salesperson had 50 sales opportunities in a month and successfully closed 10 of them, their close rate percentage would be (10 / 50) × 100 % = 20 %.You can monitor any changes with a SaaS Sales (CSO) Dashboard Template, which offers tracking this and other valuable sales metrics.
Avidly’s Henri Pallonen says that the “close rate percentage is by far one of the most important KPIs a sales manager should track.”
“Every sales team should be able to have a clear sales process and corresponding steps to follow based on where the customer is in the sales pipeline. If a business is having a problem getting a clear number for the close rate, it’s a signal that there is a problem with the previous steps.
“You want your close rate to provide valuable info so you can actually enhance your score and get great insights on lost deals and what should be done differently. When you backtrack close rate, you’ll be able to enhance your sales a lot,” Pallonen says.
Revenue per deal is a sales metric that measures the average amount of revenue generated per sale.
We calculate it by dividing the total revenue generated within a certain period by the number of deals closed during that period.
Jonathan Aufray of Growth Hackers says that this metric is crucial because “a lot of sales managers focus on the number of deals they close but forget about how much revenue they bring per deal.”
“If you close 30 deals per month and the average of each deal is $200, it means you bring in $6,000 in revenue. In that case, it might be interesting to focus on larger accounts and only close five deals at $2,000 each. This is not about the number of deals a sales manager closes but the quality of these deals.”
It is always important to keep an eye on your growth rate, and by using an accurate growth rate percentage calculator, you can get more insights on how your business is performing.
Monthly sales growth is a sales KPI businesses use to measure the increase or decrease in the company’s sales revenue over a month.
It’s calculated by comparing the total sales revenue for a particular month with the sales revenue from the previous month.
Maxburst’s Andrew Ruditser recommends tracking monthly sales growth because it “keeps you aware of if your sales are increasing or decreasing each month.”
“It’s important to track your monthly sales growth because it will help you identify which strategies are increasing your revenue—and which are not. If your sales increase one month but then decrease the next, you know you must change your strategy to make it increase again.”
A Financials Overview Dashboard Template can help you keep an eye on your sales growth and take action in real-time if something needs to change in your strategy.
The average profit margin refers to a financial ratio that shows the percentage of profit a company makes for each dollar of sales.
Premium Joy’s Hassan Alnassir points out that a “business is ultimately all about the bottom line, and the key metric to evaluate that is the profit ratio for the offerings.”
“Profit margins help you know how much you can reduce pricing without losing money. By knowing net margins, you can judge whether you should increase the prices—and by how much based on the selling rates.
To make things simple, you should find the average profit margin across all your products or services. You can then utilize the average net margin along with the average number of monthly sales for one year to figure out how much you’re earning roughly every month.
If you’re selling using Shopify or WooCommerce, all the sales data needed to calculate the profit margins should be available in the online dashboard, ready to be exported.”
Customer lifetime value (CLV) metric measures the total revenue a business can reasonably expect from a single customer account throughout the business relationship.
In other words, it estimates the total amount a customer will spend over their lifetime as a customer. This isn’t just a single purchase but includes all future transactions.
Hima Pujara of Your Team in India says that “every sales manager should measure CLV at regular intervals to maintain business sustainability.”
“There are a couple of methods for measuring CLV:
Keeping track of the churn rate (the number of people who cancel their subscription in any given month) with a sales dashboard software is essential while calculating CLV. Furthermore, the CLV/CAC ratio reveals the health of the business. If CAC is higher than CLV, businesses struggle to grow. Lead nurturing campaigns are a great way to reach out to existing customers and increase the lifetime value of your customers.
Focus on optimizing this ratio so that your business can grow at a healthy rate. The ideal LTV/CAC should be 3:1. If the ratio is 1:1 or 5:1, it means you are spending too much or too little, respectively.”
Tracking LTV in general, is important and Stripe SaaS Key Revenue Metrics for Decision-makers Dashboard Template offers this and other relevant metrics to help you decide what your next steps should be.
Customer retention refers to the ability of a business to retain its customers over a period of time.
It measures the percentage of existing customers who continue to buy from your business over a specific period.
Naturally, higher customer retention means customers are satisfied with the service and are more likely to make repeat purchases.
“I think the most important sales KPI should be existing customer/client retention,” says Rachael Jessney of Atelier.
“Everyone knows that it takes much less effort to retain and upsell to an existing customer than it is to acquire a new one. Despite this, sales teams tend to be focused solely on acquiring new customers, with much less effort centered around client satisfaction and retention.”
Churn by rep is a sales metric that measures the rate at which customers stop doing business with a company (churn), broken down by individual sales representatives.
Text Request’s Kenneth Burke points out that it “takes a lot to bring in new customers, but it doesn’t matter how many you bring in if they all stop working with you after a few months.”
“Look at churn by rep (and lifetime value of those churned accounts), and use that information to guide your sales process. Are reps asking the right questions? Are they setting the right expectations?”
Smart Sales Managers know that to achieve your monthly and quarterly goals, you have to monitor your team’s sales performance on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. To do that, you need an actionable dashboard that summarizes both team and individual sales rep metrics and allows you to:
If you use the HubSpot CRM, you can benefit from the experience of our sales experts, who have put together a plug-and-play Databox template showing some of the most important metrics for monitoring your sales team performance. It’s simple to implement and start using as a standalone dashboard or in sales reports, and best of all, it’s free!
You can easily set it up in just a few clicks – no coding required.
To set up the dashboard, follow these 3 simple steps:
Step 1: Get the template
Step 2: Connect your HubSpot account with Databox.
Step 3: Watch your dashboard populate in seconds.
“All sales reps should do is sell” – well, that’s not true.
Straight-on selling and talking to prospects is usually just one part of their day. There are a lot more activities that (should) take place.
From writing emails and researching leads to cleaning and adding data, these tasks help them close more deals.
But there’s one more key thing here – tracking KPIs and measuring the impact of these activities.
If you’re sales reps aren’t tracking their performance, they won’t know which strategies are working, how many deals they’re closing, where the best leads are coming from, and miss out on a ton valuable insights.
The question is – which sales reps KPIs should they track?
Below, we’ve compiled insights from industry experts on what they think are the best indicators to keep an eye on.
Sales qualified leads (SQL) refer to potential customers who have been researched and vetted by both the marketing and sales teams and are considered ready for the next stage in the sales process.
Put simply, not all leads are equal. They are usually categorized into different stages based on their readiness to buy. An SQL is a lead that has moved beyond the initial stages and is ready for direct sales engagement.
Ashley Sterling of The Loop Marketing explains why SQLs should be a KPI your sales reps should monitor:
“While leads are important, quality over quantity is where your company will see revenue and overall company health increase. Communicating clearly from sales to marketing when a qualified lead is in progress will enhance your company’s capability to narrow the top of the funnel and expedite closing.
Having clear communication to recognize and identify those leads is a key way to make sure your sales and marketing teams are working together to launch the company into higher YOY earnings.”
Sales volume by location is a sales KPI that tracks the quantity of goods or services sold in different geographical areas.
It helps businesses analyze which locations are performing well and provides insight into market penetration in different regions.
Eloah Manzoli of Shophysio says that “sales volume by location is a big one for me – especially when we’re targeting such a large geographic region (the United States) with our range of physical therapy and health equipment, we’re keen to see how the sales are doing across the whole of the US but also on a state-by-state level.”
“Whilst we may rely heavily on some regions, we need to ensure we’re not falling too far behind in others. This lets us keep a tight level of control on not only my sales but also from other members of our team.”
Minutes on the phone refers to the amount of time a salesperson spends talking to potential or existing customers on the phone.
San Diego Team Building‘s Jeremy Cross thinks “sales reps should be tracking minutes on the phone to close a deal. This timing metric is a common one for customer service agents, to spend less time fixing any one issue.”
“For sales reps, the lowest possible time may not be ideal. In some industries, spending more time will make the lead more invested and therefore more likely to buy from you. As a rule of thumb, if your product is $250 or less, you should probably be aiming for quick calls. Higher ticket sales can be longer but still aim to be internally consistent between sales periods and sales reps,” Cross summarizes.
However, DealBloom‘s Justin McGill adds that you can expand this to “the key activity you want reps making. Obviously, revenue generated and deal flow should be in every report, but it’s the activities that lead to those deals that should be tracked.”
“Whatever it is in your business (ie, # of calls, # of emails, # of voicemails, etc). Maybe it’s a mix, but the actions taken are what lead to the results you want.”
Expert Recommendation: If you’re using CallRail to track your team’s call activities, you’ve probably experienced first-hand just how complicated gathering data can be within the platform. Luckily, you can now compile all of your most relevant call metrics in one place – using our free CallRail Overview Dashboard.
This sales KPI measures how effective sales reps are in converting leads into actual customers through sales meetings or demos.
You calculate it by dividing the number of successful sales (or the number of customers who agree to purchase the products) by the total number of sales meetings or demos held.
For example, if a salesperson conducts 100 meetings or demos and makes 25 sales as a result, the meeting/demo conversion rate would be 25%.
David Haar of Hubbard Radio PHX says that “if I had to pick just one KPI, I would pick the percentage of meetings or presentations that turned into closed/won clients.”
“Being able to know how this part of your pipeline works is paramount to achieving your monthly/quarterly/annual sales goals.
For example, If 50% of your meetings turned into new clients and you think you need four new clients a month to hit your goal, then you need to make sure you have eight high-quality meetings or presentations a month.
From there you can build out how many prospects you need to have in your pipeline and get to eight meetings or presentations that will, in turn, lead to four new clients.”
Haar summarizes that “the salesperson can reverse engineer the entire process to make attaining their goals measurable and attainable!”
The follow-up conversion rate measures the proportion of potential customers or leads that are converted into actual customers after follow-up interactions.
This could include follow-up calls, emails, meetings, or any other form of engagement that occurs after the initial contact.
The follow-up conversion rate is typically calculated by dividing the number of sales achieved through follow-up efforts by the total number of follow-up attempts made.
Beekeeper‘s Alexandra Zamolo thinks that “every sales rep should track how successful their follow-ups are.”
“Unfortunately, we can sometimes lose track of potential customers who didn’t say “yes” immediately. It’s important to not only follow up, but to keep track of how successful your strategies are. This way, you can easily change things up when the need arises.”
This KPI specifically measures the proportion of potential deals or opportunities within the sales pipeline where multiple contacts or decision-makers from the client’s side are actively involved in the sales process.
Ed Marsh of IntentData.io explains why this KPI is important to track:
“You will fail if you’re only engaging with a single deal champion. Whether you lose to competitors or to the status quo doesn’t matter. It’s still a loss.”
“I heard some organizations talk about the 2nd lead disease. Companies most often get excited about the first lead from a new logo, and then the 2nd is less of an event. That’s backward! The 2nd one is when you start to know there’s a real opportunity. So using a wide variety of first and third-party intent data, outbound prospecting, ABM marketing, and social selling are critical to surround the account.
As a sales manager, I wouldn’t allow qualification of the pipeline beyond the first funnel stage if opportunities didn’t have at least three people from key roles associated and in contact.”
The approach to presentation-ratio specifically focuses on the ratio of initial sales approaches (like cold calls, emails, or meetings) to the number of them that successfully lead to a formal sales presentation.
The ratio is calculated by dividing the number of presentations by the number of approaches.
For example, if a salesperson made 100 approaches and these led to 10 presentations, the Approach to Presentation Ratio would be 1:10.
According to Paul Davis of Paul Davis Solution, “one of the most important and overlooked KPIs for sales reps is the approach to presentation ratio.”
“Through proper qualification and rapport building, the approach becomes necessary for closing clients. If sales reps are not approaching the right leads or are not building rapport with those leads before moving forward in the sales process, closing at the end of the presentation or demo becomes that much more difficult.”
Monthly revenue refers to the total amount of income generated by a business from its sales activities over a month.
It usually includes income from all sources, such as product sales, service fees, and any other revenue streams, but only within the specific monthly timeframe.
“I think monthly revenue is an important KPI for every sales rep to track,” says CommuteStream‘s Shane Younan. “This metric is what will lead to an annual increase in revenue, which is the objective of most businesses.”
“This KPI can be broken down further by having the sales rep track weekly growth to be sure they are on track to reach their monthly goals.”
In fact, this weekly growth could fit in with the 40%+ of experts who think sales reps should monitor their KPIs weekly:
Average revenue per account (ARPA) is a KPI companies use to measure the average amount of revenue generated per account (or user) over a certain period, typically monthly or annually. It’s particularly popular for subscription-based or service-oriented businesses.
ARPA is calculated by dividing the total revenue in a given period by the number of accounts during the same period.
For instance, if a company earns $100,000 in a month from 1,000 accounts, the ARPA for that month is $100 ($100,000 / 1,000 accounts).
Lauren Gast of Truck Drivers Institute explains that sales reps should track this KPI because it “shows a pattern of growth over time and is also lower than your acquisition costs.”
“You can utilize ARPU to calculate how well your company is doing in comparison to your competitors. If you want a revenue forecast, you can use your ARPU to get a more accurate number than you would otherwise with only customer acquisition and retention assumptions.”
Number of appointments booked refers to the total count of appointments that a sales team or an individual sales rep schedules with potential clients over a specific timeframe.
Tyson Group’s Lance Tyson thinks that “the most important KPI to track with a sales rep from a B2B perspective would be appointments.”
“That manifests itself into asking for somebody’s time, which is probably the hardest sale they’re going to make. And having time, whether it be to do a needs assessment and evaluation discovery, would manifest itself into an opportunity to ultimately pitch.”
However, Tyson adds that you can use this concept for another sales rep KPI, pitch-through rate:
“Depending on your sales process, if you need a second appointment where the first appointment you were using discovery or to submit a needs assessment, then you set up an opportunity to ultimately pitch, and you’re looking for that pitch through rate from meeting one to meeting two would probably be the second single most important KPI.
Ultimately, measuring appointments is going to tell us how much work they’re doing because right now if you look at any kind of facts that lead up to an appointment, whether it’s face-to-face that appointment or some kind of technology that actually would show how much activity a person would have.
So, right now we know it takes about 6 to 8 touches to get in contact with the decision-maker, and then it takes about 6 to 8 contacts to yield an appointment. So the appointment in and of itself measures several other things like the number of touches the rep has made such as phone calls, emails, LinkedIn Connects, etc.”.
Okay, so now you know which sales KPIs are essential to track, why they’re so important, and how you can choose the ones most relevant to your specific business.
But there’s one more thing we need to address – dashboards.
Instead of collecting, cleaning, analyzing, and reporting your KPIs manually, you can simplify the process by combining your most relevant data points in a single sales KPI dashboard.
Want to know which sales KPI dashboards are common in other businesses? We’ve compiled some popular examples below:
If you want to get a birds-eye overview of what’s happening in your sales pipeline, the Salesforce Sales Pipeline Dashboard is an ideal solution.
From expected revenue and opportunities won to converted leads, you can check out precisely which areas of your pipeline are performing well and which need to be optimized.
You can also track where your leads are coming from, which marketing channels are generating the most (and best) opportunities, and monitor revenue from closed deals – all in one place.
Don’t just take our word for it, here’s what Brenton Thomas of Twibi Agency had to say about it:
“The Sales Pipeline Dashboard is an irreplaceable sales KPI dashboard that provides our company with a clearer perspective on the progress of our company by providing a detailed analysis of growth metrics like open leads, lead sources, lead conversion, and total pipelines by stage.”
“For example, if our goal is to have $500,000 in our pipeline to allow our team to hit the $150,000 target revenue, the sales pipeline dashboard analyzes and determines whether we have sufficient volume in our pipelines to help attain our target. It also helps identify an underperforming pipeline. Through visual reports generated from this dashboard, we can take proactive steps that guarantee our teams meet expectations and deliver required results.”
The Marketing and Sales Overview Dashboard is a sales dashboard where you can combine your HubSpot Marketing and HubSpot CRM to get all of your most relevant ToFu and BoFu metrics in one place.
You get an instant snapshot of where you’re losing clients in the funnel, progress toward set targets, monthly activity comparisons, live opportunities and deals, and much more.
To make the dashboard even more understandable (both for you and shareholders), you can also take advantage of Databox’s easy-to-understand visuals and give life to your dry data.
For tracking the activity of your sales team and individual sales reps, there’s no better solution than the HubSpot CRM Sales Rep Activity Dashboard. You can monitor each stage of your funnel and immediately spot issues that need to be fixed.
Furthermore, you can track all of your most relevant sales rep activities such as calls by rep, emails by rep, meetings by rep, notes by rep, and much more.
With all of this data in a single place, you won’t have to scramble for individual rep data anymore and spend countless hours compiling all the metrics – you’ll be able to do it in just a few minutes.
Another great option for tracking individual sales rep efforts is the Pipedrive CRM Activities Effort Dashboard.
Some of the key metrics you can add here include count and amount of started deals, won and lost deals, activities completed, new contains added, and more.
You can also see which team members had the most won deals and compare their month-to-month efforts.
Here’s what Werner Jorgensen of Heatxperts had to say about this dashboard:
“This is a highly effective dashboard that has helped our managers and executives monitor and track the performance of our sales efforts. With this dashboard, we’ve effectively been able to monitor the progress of our sales department and all of our KPIs for sales representatives.
It visualizes every aspect of our sales portfolio and thus provides a holistic view that enables us to make strategic decisions to improve our sales cycle and sales funnel.”
If you want an all-in-one overview of your CRM sales analytics and a place where you can precisely gauge what’s currently working in your sales strategy, you can download our free HubSpot CRM Sales Analytics Overview Dashboard.
Some of the things you’ll learn with this dashboard include:
And more…
Erin Neumann of Be Aligned Web Design added that this dashboard “gives an overview of your organization’s sales performance, making it easier to develop new and effective strategies.”
“I can compare my previous marketing campaigns with the latest ones to see differences in consumer behavior and buying trends. As a result, it allows my sales and marketing team to collaborate and build a campaign that not only attracts potential customers but improves conversion rates.”
The Outreach Prospects Overview Dashboard is a free and easy-to-use dashboard that helps you pinpoint your prospecting efforts in real-time and track each touchpoint your reps had with prospects.
How many prospects did your team contact today? How many of them received their last email? Which subject lines get the most engagement?
These are just some of the things you’ll be able to track.
Some of the key metrics include mailed prospects, opened prospects, opportunities by stage, bounced prospects, created prospects, replied prospects, and more.
Staying on top of your sales team and their performance is much more than just checking which sales rep made the most sales.
To properly assess your strategies and your team’s efficiency, you need to track individual rep performances, and outreach efforts, and analyze each pipeline area… and this is just the tip of the iceberg.
And while, technically, you could do these things manually… why go through all that unnecessary trouble?
There’s a much easier way to keep track of your sales performance – Databox.
With Databox Dashboards, you can build an easy-to-understand sales dashboard that compiles all of your most relevant metrics and KPIs in one place.
This way, you’ll have all of the most important information and insights at a glance and keep an eye on any relevant changes as they occur in real-time.
The best thing is, our dashboards are super easy to build – all you need to do is connect your data source, pick the metrics you want to add, and then turn them with a few clicks into professional-looking visuals.
And once you’re ready to share your data with sales management and other C-level execs, you can use Databox Reporting. No more sleepless nights trying to scramble understandable reports.
There’s a cherry on top as well… Benchmark Groups.
How will you know whether your sales performance is on par with your competitors and whether it’s objectively good?
Sure, some industry reports can shed light, but they’re not sufficient.
But with Benchmark Groups, you have real-time insight into your competitor’s performance and you can instantly see how you stack up.
So, are you ready to streamline your sales performance with Databox? Sign up for a free trial and start taking your strategies to the next level.
Filip Stojanovic is a content writer who studies Business and Political Sciences. Also, I am a huge tennis enthusiast. Although my dream is to win a Grand Slam, working as a content writer is also interesting.
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