As a sales leader, your ability to navigate the complex terrain of market trends, team activity, and seller contributions hinges on a crucial tool: sales performance metrics.
This blog post explores why sales metrics are indispensable for effective sales management and how they serve as the guide toward strategic success.
How to Measure Sales Performance
Sales metrics are critical to good decision-making. Leaders need to complement their hard-won intuition with concrete evidence.
Beyond the traditional sales key performance indicators (KPIs)—such as revenue and conversion rates—lies a treasure trove of data.
This will help you begin to answer questions like: Are we engaging with the right people? Is there a sales process breakdown? Does a seller need different skills?
By understanding what works and what needs improvement, you gain the ability to optimize seller activities, allocate resources efficiently, and nurture a culture of continuous improvement within your sales team.
6 Sales Performance Metrics Examples
Whether you’re a seasoned sales manager fine-tuning your approach or a rising sales leader learning the essentials, sales metrics help you make more informed choices.
Setting benchmarks and tracking changes over time will uncover patterns, areas of weakness, and opportunities.
Think about the behavior you want to influence in your sellers, then assign your metrics that way. Think about quality over quantity. Don’t just drive the number of calls, number of proposals, and number of demos—also drive the actual quality of the outcome from those attempts.
Sales Metric #1: Conversion Rates
There are multiple steps on each buyer journey. Each of these has a rate at which people convert from lead to MQL to SQL and onward. You can only know if your sellers are moving prospects along the buyer journey by tracking each of these transition points on a weekly basis.
If conversion rates are low, there may be weaknesses in your sales process. Or your sellers could need targeted sales training on specific skills. Because leading indicators are measured on a daily or weekly basis, you can make adjustments and see impact quickly.
Use the data to know where the gaps are. Noticing a dip in conversions at any point will help you anticipate and prevent future pipeline issues.
Sales Metric #2: Conversation Quality
Getting people on the phone who don’t need or want your solution is a waste of everyone’s time. Make sure your sellers measure the quality of prospecting conversations, not just the number of calls made.
Coach them to focus on your ideal customer profile and look for the five characteristics of qualified prospects. Train them to use open-ended questions to build trust and uncover pains and problems.
Have them rate each conversation for quality and opportunity. First, you have to define quality. Ask your salespeople what makes a high-quality conversation. What happens in a conversation where the person who can buy from you says, “Let’s move forward”?
Know what good looks like, write it out, and agree on it. Have sellers listen to each other with a checklist to diagnose the quality. For a business-to-business sale, listen for collaboration, good questions, and good answers. If the buyer is asking a lot of questions, that’s a sure sign that things are moving forward.
Sales Metric #3: Prospect Engagement
Prospect engagement is a positive sign that the deal is progressing. This includes email opens, content downloads, comments on LinkedIn posts, and website clicks. You want your sellers to nurture prospects and give them information to get them interested in having a conversation with you.
Measuring how many things you sent—or counting clicks versus true engagement—is focusing on the wrong things. Look at how many people click through, how many times they click through, if they forward an email, and if they actually read the entire document or only part of it.
It’s good to see the number of followers on a seller’s social media grow. But are they commenting? Reposting? Clicking? Liking? Make sure sellers dig a little deeper to see whether people are responding and engaging.
Sales Metric #4: Quote and Proposal Timing
Track where in the sales process your sellers submit quotes and/or proposals. These are time intensive, so you need to make sure sellers aren’t sending them before they’ve proven the value of your solution.
Measure conversion rates to set a baseline. For example, if your team sent out 50 proposals last week but didn’t hear back from any of them, you need to figure out exactly what the issue is.
Figure out the right point in the process, coach your sellers on the ideal timing, and make adjustments as needed.
Sales Metric #5: Seller Activity
One other enlightening metric is time on task. For one week, ask sellers to track their activity. At the top of the hour, have them write down what they plan to do and, at the bottom of the hour, have them write down whether they did it or not and how long it took.
Then you can calculate how much time sellers spend on calls, meetings, entering info into your CRM, and other tasks. This will help start to benchmark seller activity.
Once you’ve benchmarked, you can see the ratio of selling to non-selling activity and reduce the time on tasks that keep sellers from closing deals.
Sales Metric #6: Selling Skills
One more metric you may not have considered is your sellers’ ability to sell. Measuring the capabilities of your sellers can help you diagnose issues that may be impacting results. Are your team members strong in presenting but weaker at negotiating price and protecting margins? Or do they seem to run into roadblocks at the end of the process?
Issues at the end of the deal may be a result of lack of skills “upstream.” If sellers don’t excel at asking probing questions, they may be surprised by objections when they expect to close.
Using a sales assessment such as The Brooks Group IMPACT Selling Skills Index® can help you measure and improve sales professionals’ fundamental selling skills.
Why Sales Performance Metrics Matter
While most sales organizations effectively measure revenue-related metrics, few track other important data points that impact sales effectiveness.
Because sales revenue is a lagging indicator, by the time you know that number, it’s too late to make any changes.
Many organizations aren’t sure what to measure, how frequently to measure, or how to use the data once they do track it. The key point is to find the balance between measuring too little (only revenue-related metrics) and measuring too much.
Look deeper and see what your salespeople need. Enable them to do what you’re asking them to do.
Watch on demand: Metrics that Drive Sales Revenue: How to Focus on What Matters.
Defining Sales Management Metrics
It’s important to measure both lagging and leading indicators to get a holistic view of performance.
Lagging indicators measure past performance. These include metrics such as revenue, average sales amount, average deal size, and length of sales cycle. They’re typically reviewed at the end of the month, quarter, or year.
Leading indicators help forecast future performance. These include metrics such as pipeline, number of calls made, and number of emails sent. They are reviewed much more frequently, as close to real time as possible, so you can make adjustments based on the data.
If the number of emails sent per day is a leading indicator for you, you can know, for example, that sending 50 emails a day gets you five responses—and that three of those turn into conversations.
At the end of the day, if you haven’t sent 50, you’re not going to be able to have the number of conversations you need to have. You’ve got to make those up the next day; otherwise, you will be behind at the end of the week.
You can use that information in the moment versus at the end of a quarter, when it’s too late to make up the difference.
Tips for Measuring Sales Performance
Be aware that metrics such as the number of calls and emails sent may not be as significant as you think. Some organizations punish sellers for not meeting email quotas and phone call quotas, even when the sellers are getting results. Remember: The goal is to measure quality over quantity.
Take the example of two very seasoned appointment setters, equal in talent in many ways and compensated the same as well.
Both of them were to call on a lead list that was from a trade show. One of them blew it out of the water and made more calls than anybody ever in the history of that company. Wow!
The other seller did not make anywhere near as many calls. But guess what he did? He talked to customers and booked appointments. He made fewer calls but actually got appointments.
The best strategy is to focus on your ideal customer profile (ICP), using intent data that tells us which prospects are more likely to buy.
Coach your sellers to send fewer emails of higher quality. Use an account-based approach in which you’ve strategically decided which companies (and which individuals at those companies) you’re going after.
Make sure seller messaging is relevant to each prospect. Their calls and voicemails should relate to the topics in the emails so potential customers start to understand your story and remember it.
A top performing seller at a client of The Brooks Group said, “I don’t think about the number of calls I’m supposed to make. I think about quality conversations. If I have good conversations and can qualify that opportunity, the number of calls takes care of itself. I hit my goal.”
You may learn your sellers’ need to update their skills because they’ve been trained to talk about price and objections or the old BAND (budget, authority, need, and timing). That is so 1980.
As a sales leader, you’re responsible for knowing what good looks like and for developing your team. Today we need to think about how buyers want to buy—and the signals they give us when they’re interested—and set up our metrics around that.
Sales Measurement: Making Data-Driven Decisions
So now you have the metrics. How do you use them? You want to drive behavior change. Look for data that helps drive behavior and gets results.
What if your salespeople had five conversations a day with someone who could buy from them, times five? That’s 25 conversations a week.
Most salespeople aren’t having one conversation a day with someone who can buy from them. Their days are filled with working on deals that are in their pipeline and moving them forward, administrative tasks, dialing, and emailing.
But are they really having great conversations every day? Whatever that number is, increase it.
Stop and think: What behaviors are we driving to get conversations? Once your sellers are meeting their conversation goals, coach to move the deals forward and to close.
- Identify current metrics. Are they leading or lagging?
- Decide what metrics you should remove or add.
- Set up a regular sales coaching cadence.
- Take action to resolve weaknesses and pain points.
- Hold sellers accountable.
Sales metrics are the heartbeat of a thriving sales organization, offering a comprehensive view of performance at every level. From tracking the overall health of your sales pipeline to scrutinizing the effectiveness of individual team members, these metrics provide invaluable insights that transcend mere numbers.
Find out how The Brooks Group can help your sales team generate breakthrough results with sales training, reinforcement, and assessments.
