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Sales metrics you should be measuring across your sales cycle

It is crucial for your business’s success that your measure metrics such as your return on investment (ROI), lead conversion rate, using key performance indicators (KPIs) and more. If you cannot see how your business is performing, you will not be able to adequately manage your processes which will affect your performance. In this article, we will look at the sales metrics you should be using in your business, and why they are so important to the success of your business.

What are sales metrics?

Sales metrics are what a business use to track and analyse its performance in different areas. For example, sales metrics should be used to track all different areas of your business from your sales activity to your sales pipelines. All of these sales metrics are important to a business, however when thinking about the most important sales metric, opinions differ.

Is there a “most important” sales metric?

Matt Heinz, the founder of Heinz Marketing believes revenue is the most important sales metric.

Matt Heinz – “All performance metrics start and end with revenue. Why are we doing it and why does it matter? Revenue is the answer to both of those questions. A good ‘true north’ metric should be as close to revenue as possible.”

Tim White, director of demand generation and People.ai believes measuring customer response times and meetings booked are some of the most important sales metrics.

Tim White – “Setting goals and benchmarking activities, like the velocity of meetings booked and customer response times, against the team’s top performers can help drive and measure desired sales effectiveness and behaviours from the rest of the team.”

We have identified 4 sales metrics you should track, each of which will be broken down in this article:

• ROI – Find out the return on investment in different areas of your business, e.g., ROI of investing in loyal customers.
• Sales results metrics – Get insights into how effective your sales process is with the revenue you are generating, the deals you are winning and more.
• Sales pipeline metrics – Discover how your sales pipelines are performing, getting insights into the number of leads you are converting, your sales representatives’ performance and more.
• Sales activity metrics – Track the number of prospects you are connecting with, and the different ways that you are contacting them, e.g., emails, cold calls and demos.

The importance of using KPIs

Before looking at these sales metrics, the importance of KPIs must be identified. KPIs are an imperative part of tracking your sales metrics, as it is a great way to measure the success of each metric. A KPI is a performance measurement that businesses use to keep track of how they are meeting their goals. For example, you can set a KPI for:

• Monthly sales
• Monthly conversion rate
• Monthly Revenue
• Average conversion time

When you set KPIs and then track your sales metrics, you will be able to easily identify if you are meeting these targets and how your business is performing.

Track your ROI

The majority of the time, the end goal for a business is to increase its revenue and bring in more customers, usually driven by the marketing team. Your ROI will help you determine if the investment you are making into your business is helping you drive your revenue and profits. If your business does not have a good return on investment, it means it is necessary for you to adjust your strategy when trying to grow your business.

The most common method to calculate your return on investment is:

Two great ways to improve your return on investment are:

• Up-sell and cross-sell – Up-selling and cross-selling to your customers is a great way to boost your ROI as they will be making bigger purchases generating your business higher revenue. View a full guide about how to up-sell and cross-sell.
• Focus on customer retention – Returning customers can spend 67% more than new customers helping you generate more revenue and get a better ROI. Discover how to build a roster of repeat customers.

Embrace your sales results metrics

Your sales results metrics are key to understanding if your business is performing well and you are meeting organisational goals. Important sales results metrics you should be tracking on either a weekly, monthly, quarterly or annual basis.

• Revenue generated
• Profit generated
• Number of sales made

Track your sales pipeline metrics

Sales pipeline metrics will tell you how efficient and effective your sales process is, helping you get the data you need to evolve your process to drive your sales. Track these sales pipeline metrics:

• Monthly lead conversions
• Average conversion time
• Average lead response time
• Quote turnaround
• Negotiation time

Be aware of your sales activity metrics

Your sales activity metrics will give you great insights into how your sales representatives and marketing team are performing. Track these metrics to gain great data about your sales activity:

• Monthly number of prospects connected with
• Monthly number of calls
• Monthly number of demos
• Monthly follow-ups

Benefits of tracking sales metrics

By tracking sales metrics, your business will have substantial benefits such as:

Prevent potential problems – Tracking your sales metrics will help you identify potential problems that may arise and make insightful decisions to prevent them. For example, if you discover your client retention rate is not where you would like it, you can invest in customer loyalty schemes to boost retention and stay competitive.  

Forecast success – Sales metrics will help you spot patterns in your sales process helping you forecast the success you will experience as time goes on.

Improve your performance – Sales metrics will act as a guide and incentive to management and sales representatives on how to improve their performance.

Give you peace of mind – Stress and anxiety will be reduced when you have a full understanding of how your business is performing.

Make strategic investments – Use your sales metrics to identify what you can invest in to boost your performance while keeping a healthy cash flow.

Track your sales metrics with TEB

Want to see how many deals you are winning and losing, how your sales team is performing, what your best lead generation channels are and more? TEB, the sales automation CRM software, can show you all of this and more. TEB will transform the way you track your sales metrics with stand-out features such as:

• Generate custom reports – Generate reports about your business, e.g., lead qualification metrics, to gain great insights into how your business is performing.
• Use custom filters to export data – Target specific data to export with filters, e.g., opportunity or lead data.
• TEBs lead funnels – Organise leads with filters and funnels to view metrics on aspects such as your most successful lead generation sources.
• View sales teams’ performance – Track your sales teams’ performance seeing how many deals each sales representative is winning and losing.

Do not wait to learn more about your business, easily book a quick demo with us and we will show you how TEB can help you view the metrics you need to know.

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