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Sales aren’t just about closing the deal and making conversions. A lot of effort goes into each successful sale, and each step in the funnel is important.
As sales methods are constantly evolving and adapting to the current technology and trends, data can help a lot when it comes to identifying the right way to optimize the sales process.
There’s no shortage of data points when it comes to sales — from reps’ activity and productivity to financial results. Given the many ways to measure performance and success, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the raw information and all the metrics available.
And each of these sales metrics could be important depending on the company type and focus.
In the previous years, we’ve run more than 50 sales-related surveys and talked to hundreds of different companies in an effort to assemble a list of sales statistics that would make sales monitoring and reporting easier for you.
As a result, we identified sales stats that you can use to benchmark your sales performance and use as a starting point toward developing a better sales strategy in 2023.
During our research, we’ve gained insight into:
And much more.
Jump to the section you are most interest in:
These are the brass tacks, the information your sales campaigns will be based on. By tracking the right metrics and KPIs, sales teams can gain insights into their sales process and make informed decisions to maximize their success.
Here’s what we learned:
While all sales metrics are important to some extent, they’re not all equally important. Deals closed won provides a clear measure of the effectiveness of a sales team in terms of their ability to close deals successfully and generate revenue for the company.
Over 75% of our respondents said they tracked Deals Closed Won, and Deals Created in HubSpot.
This is closely followed by Closed Won Amount, Meetings, Emails logged, and Calls.
PRO TIP: Tracking actual sales is a must. It’s easy to get caught up in email responses, leads, and other activities and forget to keep the bottom line in mind. Without conversions, other metrics don’t really matter much.
Setting sales KPIs is always a balancing act. Set them too rarely, and you’re not flexible enough to react to changing market conditions. Set them too frequently, and you might get misled by momentary swings that don’t reflect broader trends.
The largest share (around 50%) of our respondents said they set new sales KPIs on a monthly basis, while just over 20% said that they set them quarterly.
PRO TIP: Make sure your KPIs are suitable for the frequency you’re tracking and setting them at. While you’re unlikely to need to set them weekly, some may require a more touch-and-go approach that will let you fine-tune all the details.
At least according to the largest share of our respondents. Having a large pool of qualified leads is essential to developing a healthy sales pipeline.
Other important metrics that were identified are win rate, average deals size, and total pipeline value (by stage).
PRO TIP: Attach a relevant action to each KPI you’re monitoring. That way, you’ll know what affects it and how to adjust it. Once you’re familiar with the numbers, you can start implementing your sales process, which will build the sales pipeline and adjust things along the way.
It’s really not surprising to see conversion rate holding the first place on this list. It’s easily one of the most important top-of-the-funnel conversion metrics. Around 70% of our respondents agree with that, and they identified lead conversion rate and monthly sales growth as essential sales metrics.
Sales opportunities and customer lifetime value follow at just over 50%.
PRO TIP: Tracking lead conversion rates can do more than just tell you how effective your sales efforts are. If you see a sudden drop or a spike that doesn’t match what you’re expecting, it can help you discover anomalies elsewhere in your pipeline.
It’s not easy to decide what are the right metrics to monitor and how many should be tracked. Tracking too few means you might miss some important detail, while tracking too many risks drowning you in superfluous information.
Over 50% of our respondents said they monitor 6–10 sales performance metrics, while 37% think that the sweet spot is somewhere in the 1–5 range.
Sales happen every day, and if you have an active sales team, they’re busy setting up appointments, making calls, creating and nurturing deals, and closing them to generate new revenue. It’s your job to monitor their performance and work with your team to improve it. To do that, you need up-to-the-minute information at your fingertips, including:
Now you can benefit from the experience of our sales experts, who have put together a great Databox template showing all the most important KPIs for your sales team’s 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 this Sales Manager KPIs 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.
Measuring sales enablement performance is important if you want to ensure your sales tools and resources are being used in the right way. Most of our respondents said that finding the length of the sales cycle is crucial for the process.
PRO TIP: Sales enablement content that’s not usable isn’t really helpful. Focus on useful sales enablement that’s planned, created, and measured by both the marketing and sales teams working together.
The sales team should have access to resources based on the real-life experiences of sales leaders in the team. That way, you’ll ensure it provides content that sales reps need and that resonates with the target audience.
When it comes to finances, you really can’t beat revenue. It’s by far the most tracked metric across the board, and the only surprise is that not everyone is tracking it.
As it stands, an overwhelming majority of our respondents (well over 75%) track revenue. This is closely followed by sales generated and customer acquisition cost.
More than half also track profit margin, sales by rep, customer lifetime value, and sales by channel.
PRO TIP: While revenue is an excellent indicator of growth, other metrics can be just as important. Tracking CAC allows you to pinpoint which channels convert the most qualified leads and can dramatically improve profitability.
In order to make the most of their metrics, sales teams need to have up-to-date and streamlined reporting that will help them do their jobs.
Here’s what our respondents think of reporting:
If the sales reps track their KPIs on a weekly basis, they can be sure they’re on the right track to reach their monthly goals.
Over 40% of our respondents agree with this assessment, and they believe that sales reps should monitor KPIs weekly.
PRO TIP: More frequent monitoring is generally better than less frequent, as it allows for better insight and provides more granular information.
Sales teams can then use that additional information to see if they’re on the right track and if any of their strategies need adjusting.
When it comes to sales pipeline analysis, more frequently tends to be better.
An overwhelming majority of our respondents said they analyze their sales pipelines at least once a month. Specifically, 43.14% analyze them on a monthly basis, 39.22% analyze them weekly, and 11.76% analyze them daily.
To decide which goals meet the SMART criteria, sales managers need to look at sales analytics for their teams and monitor sales KPIs, for example:
Based on these metrics, and in light of other revenue-based and activity-based goals, you can identify and set desired goals for future performance, but how to get this information?
Now you can benefit from the experience of our sales experts, who have put together a great Databox template showing an overview of your sales team’s performance. It’s simple to implement and start using as a standalone dashboard or in sales reports, and best of all, it’s free!
To set up this Sales Analytics Overview Dashboard, follow these 3 simple steps:
When it comes to tracking their sales teams’ performance and the tools they use, over half of our respondents rely on interactive dashboards like Databox for sales reporting, while others prefer static reports or embedded analytics.
PRO TIP: Dashboards are definitely the way to go. They simply provide an unmatched level of versatility, and they’re very easy to update and modify.
A good dashboard template optimized for sales allows you to visualize, analyze, and report on sales performance in one place.
Monthly reports seem to hit that sweet spot in reporting frequency where they both provide enough context for the metrics and enough flexibility to adjust the sales strategy.
Over three-quarters (78.3%) of the companies we polled practice monthly reporting, while 69.6% practice weekly reporting.
In addition, 43.5% create quarterly sales reports, 39.1% use yearly reports, and 30.4% have daily sales reports.
PRO TIP: Using multiple reporting frequencies can be the way to go here. You can use weekly sales reports to keep track of your customers and the progress you’re making. Then, with these weekly sales reports, you can make a sales report for the whole month, consolidating the data.
In order to be successful, sales teams must have a clear set of goals and strategies to achieve them.
Here’s how our respondents set goals and deal with challenges:
Qualifying leads saves time and resources. Being clear about defining sales-qualified leads fills the pipeline with good prospects that the sales team will have a much easier time converting.
Almost 70% of companies we polled have teams with clearly defined criteria for SQLs.
PRO TIP: Define the criteria for lead scoring that reflects the specifics of your industry or your company.
Start with thinking about what criteria are important for you, in particular, which criteria would make a perfect sales lead. Then continue with assigning a number of points that would cumulate. Design a system and get down to testing to check out how it works in practice, then iterate.
Setting specific timelines for sales goals allows sales teams to plan and budget effectively and proactively track progress toward the goal.
Just under 50% of our respondents set goals every quarter, while around 25% set them monthly.
PRO TIP: No matter how you set your goals, ensure they are achievable instead of based on where you are relative to your overall team targets.
While it’s important to be ambitious, you should also be realistic. It’s highly unlikely you’ll make up for a year’s shortfall in the final month, so plan accordingly.
In order to set sales goals, people need to be able to both see the bigger picture and have enough hands-on experience to identify realistic and achievable targets.
For the largest share of our respondents (just under 40%), sales managers create sales goals. Around 30% said that’s the job for VPs of sales, and a bit over 15% said sales goals are created by their CEOs.
PRO TIP: Involving your entire sales department (within reason) can be a good idea, and sales goals should definitely be set with the entire team in mind.
Give individual sales goals to each team member, and create a collective goal. This way, each person is responsible for their own portion of the goal, and will react accordingly.
There are many ways to calculate the conversion rate. About 35% of the companies we talked to divide the number of sales by the number of qualified leads to get their conversion rate. Another popular method used by 32% of the respondents is dividing the sales made by total leads.
PRO TIP: When it comes to leads, focus on quality instead of quantity. Sales and Marketing should work closely together to ensure you’re getting the right kinds of leads who are going to be most likely to convert.
With that information, they can identify the reasons behind peoples’ purchasing decisions and create marketing campaigns that will target those points.
If marketing and sales teams are aligned, companies can grow faster, tackle and solve challenges more effectively, and have more efficient systems and processes in place.
If they’re not, quite a few bad things can happen. Over 53% of our respondents identified missed opportunities as the most significant downside of marketing and sales misalignment.
PRO TIP: Break down the silos. Marketing often focuses on branding and developing creative projects, while Sales demands better quality leads and marketing support.
Integrating both ends and creating shared KPIs can ensure better cooperation and improve mutual understanding, leading to proper alignment and increased bottom line.
Most people will not make a purchase after being outreached only once. Almost 60% of our respondents said it takes 3–4 continuous follow-ups before their prospects say yes, and a large majority contact their prospects at least once a week.
PRO TIP: Personalize, personalize, personalize. It’s not just cold prospecting 101, it’s a necessity.
Researched your prospects online to better understand their company’s needs and the challenges they might be facing. That should give you enough information to send emails that grab attention by addressing pain points, getting them interested in your solutions, or simply starting an interesting conversation.
In order to maximize their productivity, sales teams must have the right tools in place to track and automate their tasks and processes. Tracking and automation software can help sales teams stay organized, monitor progress, and make sure their efforts are aligned with their goals.
Here’s what we learned from our respondents:
With CRM software, sales teams can easily monitor the progress of their sales process and review performance metrics in real time. This allows them to quickly identify areas where improvement is needed and make changes to improve productivity.
According to the sales professionals we surveyed, HubSpot and Salesforce are the most used tools for measuring sales activity and productivity.
PRO TIP: Even the best CRM can’t help if you’re not tracking the right metrics. It’s important to set KPI expectations and then do regular checkups.
While all metrics should be tracked at least on a monthly basis, also include quarterly or annual reviews. This allows you to account for peaks and valleys that can happen from month to month due to industry-specific reasons.
Good tools can make any process more efficient, and this is no exception. If they’re integrated into the workflow, that’s even better. Dashboard software can be very helpful for gauging your current sales performance because it combines all the data from the tools you’re using in one place.
So it’s not surprising that 43.14% of our respondents use dashboard software to monitor their sales pipelines.
PRO TIP: Focus on targeting and connecting with the customer. It’s unlikely you’ll be able to keep attracting new customers in greater and greater numbers, so focus on keeping existing and potential customers engaged while they’re keeping your brand on their minds.
Staying on top of communication can also help you monitor some key pipeline metrics, giving you more data to benchmark your efforts against.
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!
To set up the dashboard, follow these 3 simple steps:
Automation software is incredibly useful for any sales department. It includes tools that help automate the processes of order processing, contact management, customer management, sales forecasting, or just about any task that salespeople perform.
According to our respondents, it’s most frequently used for scheduling calls and meetings, maintaining email lists, workflow management, assigning leads, and responding to customer calls.
PRO TIP: Automate the follow-up sequence. An automated follow-up process ensures that every salesperson on your team follows the established protocol, allowing greater opportunity to turn an engaged shopper into a customer.
In addition, salespeople will spend less time chasing down leads that weren’t interested, saving them time and energy to pursue leads that are willing to buy.
There’s almost no reason not to use software to automate sales tasks. Almost 70% of our respondents said they use between one and three tools to handle all of their sales automation tasks, while the remainder use more.
PRO TIP: There’s no reason to use a single tool if the multiple functionalities you need are scattered across different ones.
For example, you can significantly reduce the average sales cycle by combining automated calendar booking, an automated activation sequence of emails and landing pages, and proposal creation tools to get sign-offs during the sales calls.
Dashboards make everything easier, especially if they allow you to visualize your data simply. However, if you have too much information, a single dashboard might not be enough to present the data cleanly.
According to our research, 66% of the companies surveyed have between two and five sales-related dashboards, while most of the others use only one sales-related dashboard.
PRO TIP: Set up a clear framework for the dashboards, such as data sources, metrics, and visualizations, so that everyone on the team can access and understand the information easily.
Be sure to review the dashboards regularly to ensure that the data is still being presented cleanly and that you’re tracking the right metrics.
While all sales channels are important they’re not all created equal. Their relevance and usefulness ebbs and flows and sales teams need to adapt to make the best use of them.
Here’s our respondents’ take on channels and content:
While there are many ways to get in touch with prospects, the largest share of our respondents opted for email.
Nearly 40% of companies we polled identified email as the channel with the best sales conversion rate. Almost 30% picked phone, while the next runner-up is social media at 15%.
PRO TIP: While email is the most popular channel, others don’t lag behind too much. With proper planning, multichannel can be an excellent way to go.
Leverage email, social, display, mobile, search, and content to drive maximum engagement and get the most conversions.
Sales enablement content helps sales teams close more deals. This is why picking the right type of content is so important.
Almost 25% of our respondents produce informative blog posts, making it the most represented content type. This is followed by customer testimonials at around 17%.
PRO TIP: Detailed and informative blog posts provide can provide excellent ROI if done right. Publishing a pillar page on a specific topic allows the article to rank organically for search terms an ideal buyer is already searching for.
Additionally, they’re an excellent sales asset that can be sent out to prospects to demonstrate authority on a specific topic.
If any sales campaign is to be successful, the sales team needs to be a well-oiled machine. Team members need to be knowledgeable and the processes need to be aligned with other departments.
Here’s what we learned from our respondents about sales teams:
Team size varies greatly depending on company size and specific goals.
Most of our respondents said their teams have between two and ten sales reps. Around 50% stated they had two to five, while 38% said they had six to ten. Larger teams are very rare.
PRO TIP: If you have a larger sales team, establishing a well-defined hierarchy with clear roles and responsibilities is a must. This will help ensure that everyone is on the same page and that everyone’s efforts are focused on the same goal.
Also, having someone with an oversight role to coordinate the activities of the team can help create accountability and maintain a high level of productivity.
Tracking sales rep activity seems like a no-brainer. It’s a good way for a company to ensure that its sales reps are meeting their targets and performing at an optimal level. In addition, it makes it easier to identify areas for improvement and make changes to its sales strategy to increase productivity and boost revenue.
While most of our respondents measure sales rep activity, a surprisingly large percentage don’t. Over 90% measure sales rep activity, 6.6% don’t, and 3.3% aren’t sure.
PRO TIP: Using automation tools, CRM software, and goal setting can make tracking sales rep activity fairly easy.
While you may not want to put every action they make under a microscope, having at least a broad understanding of their activities can help the whole team to stay on track, while providing valuable insight into individual performance.
Sales is where everything comes together. All the marketing efforts, lead nurturing, outreach, product development, and many more factors.
It’s possibly the lynchpin of the entire process; without it, nothing makes sense.
In order to reach their full potential, sales teams need access to the right tools and processes that will help them make sense of all the data points and turn what looks like simple sales performance statistics into actionable information.
There’s no single way a sales department needs to be run, and there’s no one-size-fits-all strategy that will win every time.
But there is a way to stack the odds in your favor.
You guessed it, it’s data.
It’s tracking the right sales metrics the right way.
Databox can help sales teams put the pieces together and assemble disparate data points into a cohesive and useful whole.
You can use many customizable Databox sales dashboard templates to monitor performance and keep track of metrics and KPIs you’ll use to build reports.
Databox makes it incredibly easy to assemble a dashboard and it supports over 70 one-click data source integrations and over 7,000 metrics. It allows you to visualize your metrics in just a few clicks.
This, in turn, makes it easy to build your report. You just need a dashboard and you can automate periodic reporting to stakeholders with just a few clicks. Simply add the dashboard(s) you want to showcase, emphasize specific metrics, and/or provide broader context, and you’re done.
Finally, you can use Databox Benchmark Groups to compare the performance of your company with other similar ones. You can keep a finger on the pulse of the industry and stay informed about current trends, patterns, and sales statistics, allowing you to stay ahead of the curve.
All you have to do is sign up for Databox free and you’ll be able to take your sales performance to the next level.
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Davor is an English literature graduate and an avid reader with a passion for languages. Working as a translator, editor, and writer has allowed him to learn about a wide range of topics — making him something of a jack-of-all-trades when it comes to content. In his spare time, he reads, plays video games and boardgames, and runs/plays tabletop RPGs.
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