What are performance metrics for sales?
Sales metrics are data points that track and assess a person’s, group’s, or organization’s sales performance over time. In the big picture, sales metrics assist a business in evaluating the accomplishment of its sales initiatives as well as pinpointing potential improvement areas. Along with supplying other crucial company insights, they also monitor goals and objectives, track progress, and inform sales strategies.
Even within the same industry, not all businesses depend on the same sales indicator. Instead, a company’s aims determine the sales measurements it uses. Metrics that measure the percentage of deals each sales agent closes, for instance, might be helpful if a company’s objective is to have every sales rep reach their quotas. If the company wishes to close bigger transactions, it may monitor average deal size to determine whether its strategy is effective with bigger clients. Metrics can be added or removed when firms expand or enter new markets.
Examples of performance metrics for sales
Below, we’ll review some of the most important metrics your business needs to keep track of. We’ve categorized the list into the following sections:
- Sales Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
- Activity Sales Metrics
- Pipeline Sales Metrics
- Lead Generation Sales Metrics
- Outreach Sales Metrics
- Primary Conversion Metrics
- Channel Sales Metrics
- Sales Productivity Metrics
- Sales Hiring Metrics
- Sales Process, Tool, and Training Adoption Metrics
Key performance indicators for sales (KPIs)
For evaluating the performance of the entire organization, these sales data are crucial.
- Total revenue: Total revenue is the sum of all income from all operations and sales across all goods and services.
- Revenue per product or service: This is the amount of money made for each product or service.
- Market penetration: The ratio of your current consumers to all possible customers in the market is referred to as market penetration.
- Percentage of revenue from new business: This statistic reveals how much money you’re bringing in from new clients each month or every three months.
- Percentage of revenue from existing customers: This is the money made from recurring business, extending contracts, and cross-selling and upselling to current clients.
- Growth from year to year: This indicator contrasts the amount of money made from one year to the next.
- Average customer lifetime value (LTV) is the amount of money a firm can expect to make from a single user or customer throughout their relationship with the company.
- The Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures how likely a user or customer is to suggest your company to a friend or colleague.
- Several deals lost to the competition: This indicator, which is gleaned through a win-loss analysis or a customer survey, reveals how much business you are losing to the opposition.
- Revenue by territory: This is the sum of money made through sales in a certain region.
- Revenue by market: This is the amount of money made through sales in a specific industry.
- Cost of selling: The sum of money you and your sales representatives invest to sell the product is referred to as the cost of selling, which is also known as selling expenses. When expressed as a proportion of the revenue generated, this indicator is most helpful.
Sales Pipeline Metrics
Utilize these KPIs to assess the condition of your sales funnel. They assist you in determining what aspects of your integrated sales process are effective and ineffective.
The following metrics must be measured by a certain period, such as a month or quarter, to properly interpret the data. You should also have a look at the team and individual numbers.
- The average length of the sales cycle is the time it takes for a lead to move through the sales funnel and become closed, won the contract.
- Total open opportunities: The number of unclosed deals by a group or an individual.
- Total closed opportunities: This is the number of won transactions that have been closed.
- Weighted value of pipeline: As agreements progress through the pipeline, this measure displays their estimated worth.
- The total value of sales: This is the revenue derived solely and directly from sales operations.
- Annual contract value (ACV): The annual revenue that a contract brings in is referred to as ACV.
- Win rate: The ratio of deals won to total deals is known as the win rate. It can be gauged both on a team and an individual basis.
- The number of leads that convert at each level of the sales funnel is known as the conversion rate by stage. It can be gauged both on a team and an individual basis.
Lead Generation Sales Metrics
How well are your salespeople prospecting? Use these metrics to find out.
- Frequency/volume of new opportunities added to the pipeline
- Average lead response time
- Percentage of leads followed up with
- Percentage of leads followed up within target time range (for example, 8 hours)
- The percentage of leads dropped
- Percentage of qualified leads
- Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
Metrics for Sales Outreach
Some of the indicators in this category most likely won’t matter to your business. It all boils down to your particular sales methodology, process, and strategy: The average first-contact-to-meeting rate rather than the average email open rate would be a better indicator of your reps’ effectiveness if they only target prospects they’ve met at trade fairs.
Sales Metrics for Email
- Rate of open
- % of responses
- Rate of engagement (link clicks, webinar attendance, video plays, etc.)
- % of recipients who go to the next stage
Cellular Sales Metrics
- Call-backs
- Percent of potential customers who consent to speak with you
- Percent of potential customers who go to the next stage
Social Metrics in Social Media
- Percentage of connections on LinkedIn that are accepted
- Rate of InMail responses
- Percentage of social media-engaged potential customers that go to the next step
- Conferences, trade shows, events
- Number of meetings set
- Number of qualified opportunities generated
Basic Conversion Metrics
You’ll concentrate on opportunity metrics in this section.
- Opportunity closed/won percentage Opportunity lost percentage (no decision)
- Opportunities earned by lead source compared to opportunities lost to competitors
- Average talks for opportunities that were won
- The typical amount of chats about missed opportunities
Sales Channel Metrics
You may optimize your channel sales approach with the aid of these KPIs.
- Total earnings from partnerships
- Earnings by partner
- Partner’s margin
- Deal size on average by partner
- how many partners meet their sales goals
- How many new opportunities have partners added?
- Number of chances with merit that partners have contributed
- Number of opportunities in the pipeline with partners
- Average transaction velocity is the time it takes for a deal to be recognized as closed/won or closed/lost.
- Average partner customer retention rate
- The typical rate of cross-selling and upselling to partner customers
- Average partner customers’ customer satisfaction rating
- Number of partners overall
- Amount of recent months, quarters, or years’ worth of new partners
- How many partners were lost in the last month, quarter, or year
- The typical time it takes to recruit, welcome, and train new partners
Metrics for Sales Productivity
The frequency with which your salespeople meet their revenue goals is how you measure sales productivity. A salesperson’s sales productivity increases with the amount of time it takes them to reach their quota.
Use these measures to gauge your reps’ productivity:
- Percentage of time spent on selling activities
- Manual data entry time, content creation time
- The percentage of marketing materials used by salespeople
- Percentage of high-quality leads followed up with on a daily average basis
Hiring metrics for sales
Reaching your goals will be much more difficult if you lack a strong sales hiring plan. A high (or even mediocre) performer leaving abruptly pushes the team quota further out of reach.
Sales managers frequently settle for subpar candidates because they are under pressure to fill the position as soon as feasible. You can get around this problem by using data to determine when and how to hire.
You should monitor:
- Percentage of time spent recruiting by sales management
- Average hiring time
- % of new hires coming from different sources
- % of bids that were accepted
- The average number of years at your firm
- The average rate of turnover
- Cost-effectiveness of replacing a salesperson by role
- Measuring onboarding data is crucial as well.
Sales Ramp
The average time it takes for a new salesperson to reach peak productivity is known as the sales ramp-up period. Use it to create more precise sales estimates, establish expectations with new reps, and make recruiting and firing choices.
There are various methods for calculating it. CRMs frequently compute the duration until 100% of the quota is attained automatically, which you may use to determine the ramp. Your ramp-up period would be four months if, for instance, it generally takes a salesperson four months to reach 100% of the quota.
Although this approach is very straightforward, it ignores the fact that new sales representatives frequently take over established accounts or prospects, giving them an advantage.
The methodology would not credit a salesperson as fully ramped until they reached 100% of their quota, even though they have likely reached 98% of it.
As an alternative, Ideal CEO Somen Mondal has created a model that takes into account education, how long your sales cycle is, and prior work experience.
Ramp-up = length of training + length of the typical sales cycle + X
The salesperson’s experience, or X, is what determines how big or little this figure is.
Given that training lasts for 20 days and your typical sales cycle is six weeks, here is an example of an experienced sales representative.
Ramp = 20 days, 42 days, and 16 days.
It would take this salesperson 78 days to reach maximum productivity.