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You’re probably sitting somewhere wondering what a Salesforce KPI is.
We already know what key performance indicators (KPIs) are, but what are they in relation to the Salesforce platform? It’s basically the same concept, but Salesforce KPIs are specific to the CRM itself – and it turns out there are specific KPIs your sales team needs to track when using Salesforce.
We’re going to cover the most important things you should know when starting to track your Salesforce KPIs. They include:
In short, it’s a performance metric to help monitor, analyze, refine, and rework sales activities tracked within the Salesforce customer relationship management (CRM) platform. Salesforce metrics help sales teams optimize processes, prioritize activities, and allocate more attention, time, and resources to appropriate leads.
Editor’s note: Having a hard time tracking your KPIs? With Databox, you can automate performance alerts and make adjustments when they matter most, schedule automated snapshots of your dashboards to any Slack channel and more. Get started today.
Before building a dashboard for Salesforce reports for your sales teams, it’s important to recognize whether or not it’s useful for your team’s needs. If you’re interested in tracking things like growth, closed-won and closed-lost deals, and other smaller metrics to see how the team fares on a regular basis, you should absolutely implement a Salesforce metrics dashboard.
Data below shows that teams are split three ways (almost evenly) on how often they meet to review sales performance data. Many teams check on a monthly basis (38.5%). Others check on a weekly basis (30.8%).
But some check even more frequently. An astounding third of all sales teams (30.8%) – matching with the weekly statistic – meet on a daily basis to check performance data.
If this sounds like your team, you’ll probably find a Salesforce dashboard useful for you. Let’s go into the specific KPIs to include in your dashboard for maximum benefit and long-term results tracking for your team.
Related: Take a look at these 3 free Salesforce sales dashboard templates for tracking and improving your sales performance.
Your sales dashboard needs actionable KPIs to feature for optimal results, but there are some that are naturally more important and relevant for a sales team than others. Here are the top 14 Salesforce KPIs to start keeping track of:
Lead response time is the length of time it takes for a salesperson to follow up with a lead who has contacted a business for more information. Lead response time is contingent on two factors: the type of lead and the specific scenario/reason they reached out. These factors play into how quickly a salesperson should respond.
For example, if a lead reaches out for a demo or a sales call, you’ll want to respond quickly. If it’s something lower stakes, as a comment or response to a blog post or whitepaper, the response time can be longer without penalty.
Christian Velitchkov of Twiz LLC adds additional insight: “Lead response time and rate is a very important part of any team’s reporting efforts. Once you know your audience, just start searching for good leads as per your research. The lead response time and the rate will help you identify the loopholes in your approach. And once you fix them, you will see a rise in your leads.”
Velitchkov notes using lead response time as a key metric is important for identifying gaps in response times to leads, which can help with tightening up your sales response processes going forward in future communications.
Kristel Staci of Zutrix mentions a different reason for using the lead response time KPI: tracking how long it takes a lead to follow up with their salesperson. Staci notes: “Leads come and go all the time, especially when you have free and soft pre-sell leads in place. One of the most important metrics that we track is how long it takes for a lead to follow up or respond after that initial pre-sell lead takes place. More often than not, the faster they respond, the higher the conversion rate.”
This is an excellent reason to keep your eye on lead response time. Not only can you track how long it takes for your team to follow up with leads, but you can track how long it takes for them to continue engaging with your team. And as Staci mentioned, the sooner a lead reaches back out to a salesperson, the more likely they’re intending on converting, which is the end goal.
*Editor’s note: Use a Salesforce leads dashboard to keep track of all incoming leads, and monitor things like the source from which leads come, how many are new, and how many convert.
Follow-up contact rate is the number of follow ups (attempts) made by a salesperson per lead. In other words, this is how many times a rep follows up with a given lead or contact. This metric can be used to correlate the number of closed deals after X attempts made, or if a lead falls off after so many attempts.
Related: 36 Practical Tips for Writing A Great Sales Follow Up Email
Sales activity is the number of activities your salespeople are taking in order to adequately do their job well. This metric is based often on performance and results despite not having a distinction between which sales activities contribute to the overall “success” of a salesperson. Still, we can assume that salespeople spend most of their time on outreach, research, and closing deals.
*Editor’s note: Using a sales rep performance dashboard can help track individual salespeople’s wins, closed-won deals, emails sent and opened, calls made, leads converted, and revenue earned, among other things.
Quarterly performance tracks the overall performance of an entire sales team over the course of a business quarter (three-month time period four times per year). As the chart above showed, many teams meet even more frequently than on a quarterly basis. Depending on the frequency you check performance metrics, adding this to your sales dashboard is essential.
Yoann Bierling of International Consulting notes how their team uses this metric: “The quarterly performance is the most important metric we always have a look at from the Salesforce home dashboard as it gives not only the current business performance trend, but also allows to get a good understanding on current accomplishment and can drive individual project decisions to meet global company goals.”
What’s great about the quarterly view on Salesforce is that it’s general enough for an understanding of any high-level situation, but also specific enough for actual reporting and decision-making purposes.
Check out these free sales team activity dashboards here.
Average contract value is the value, on average, of all account contracts and agreements. This value may include things like one-off fees, recurring fees, or penalty fees as well. ACV will fluctuate based on whether a contract is short-term (one year) or long-term (two or more years in length).
ACV is a relevant metric to see if it differs based on various offerings, packages, or products, as well as what is or isn’t profitable in the long run. This metric also takes the per-salesperson contract value into consideration.
The average sales cycle length is the amount of time it takes to get through each stage of the cycle a salesperson creates per lead. Sales cycles are usually divided into four or more stages, and depending on the type of lead, the average cycle length can last anywhere from weeks to months – potentially longer – depending on individual factors.
An example sales cycle might contain the following stages:
Tracking the sales cycle length in your sales dashboard software is important to see which stage reps spend the most time in. If you notice, on average, reps are spending too much time prospecting, you can rework their strategy with them to spend less time at the beginning and more time as a prospect goes further in the sales process. This will help save time, and as any savvy salesperson knows, time is money.
Get high-level overview of all the leads in your funnel using this sales leads dashboard.
The email open rate is the number of cold outreach emails sent by a salesperson that actually are opened by leads. Since many people no longer answer phone calls, or at least not like they used to, tracking email open rates is important when cold outreaching to somebody.
Steve Vanthournout of Provisions Group notes how their team tracks the open rate and number of unique opens for specific email templates by using an HTML email status report.
Vanthournout notes: “If you’ve used email templates a lot within Salesforce, being able to look back and see overall metrics like this can help to understand what is attracting attention for certain clients. This data should inform the language used in future email outreach for both sales and marketing teams.”
Herein lies a good point: not only is your sales team using cold email outreach – so is your marketing team. You can use this metric to track both teams’ email open rates.
Outbound calls are cold phone calls made to prospective buyers. Tracking the number of these calls can identify how many calls it takes to get a prospect to agree to a meeting with the sales team.
This metric will tell you how many calls it takes for someone to agree to a meeting – if at all, as well as which days and times during the week are most successful for reps reaching out for the first time.
The outbound calls contact rate is the rate by which a salesperson is actually able to make contact with a lead. This means that a lead answered a call that a salesperson made, but does not necessarily mean that the call turned into anything more than a primary conversation.
Outbound call contact rate fluctuates by a variety of factors: the day of the week and time of day a salesperson reaches out, the number of contacts they cold call, the time of year (holidays, early summer workdays, etc.), and other situation-dependent factors.
This metric is good for determining discrepancies based on situations either brought on by the salesperson, the contact, or extenuating circumstances with an indeterminate cause.
The number of demos refers to the number of scheduled demos per cold calls made by a salesperson. The rate of success will likely be low, since many people won’t schedule a demo after the initial cold call, but after multiple follow-ups, a salesperson’s success rate will generally increase.
Jayakrishnan Jayasanker of B2B Data Partners notes “Salesforce enables the user to track all website form sign-ups for product demos or purchases through a form integration with Google Analytics. You can also track which leads come out as sales-qualified within the dashboard. This way, you can develop a solid idea about which campaigns or landing pages are generating qualified leads for your business.”
Not only can you track the number of demo sign-ups, but you can see which forms on what pages are performing the best, knowing where you need to improve and how leads are actually coming into the pipeline.
The total amount of inbound leads is the number of quality leads a salesperson generates. This number is usually a set metric determined over a course of time, either over a day, week, month, or quarter. This does not take further lead qualification into consideration.
A lead-to-opportunity ratio is the rate by which leads turn to opportunities for your sales team. It is indicative of how many leads are actually sales-qualified leads (SQLs) and have the chance of converting to a sale. You can track the likelihood of a lead becoming an opportunity with AI lead scoring software for optimum accuracy.
An opportunity-to-win ratio is the likelihood of a salesperson closing a deal with a SQL or opportunity. This metric is contingent on the beginning of the sales funnel, at which time leads are qualified or kept out of the sales process based on whatever criteria is specific to your team and their metrics for scoring leads.
The lead conversion ratio is the percentage of all unqualified leads that will convert to paid customers. Of all KPIs listed above, this is the most important as leads who convert will boost company revenue by becoming paying customers.
With so many KPIs to choose from for your Salesforce dashboard, it’d be silly not to commit to using one. Since pretty much every sales team around relies on Salesforce as a tool, it’s in your best interest to utilize the right dashboard software to manage your sales teams’ progress toward their goals.
Need a quick performance update on your most important Salesforce KPIs? Set Databox Scorecards and receive updates on your KPIs through email, mobile push notification, and/or Slack.
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is the Lead Editor and Guest Post Program Manager at G2. She also works as a freelance editor and writer for a few small- and medium-sized tech companies. Outside of work, Rebecca enjoys watching hockey, cooking, and spending time with her family and cat.
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