Sales Metrics & KPIs You Should Measure to Track Your Sales Performance

If you’re leading a sales team, you probably know the importance of tracking the performance of all its members. Surprisingly, many businesses have zero or limited means to actually measure how productive their sales teams are. Unfortunately, if you can’t measure it—you can’t optimise it. And this truly affects the effectiveness of your sales process in the long run.

That’s precisely why measuring the right sales metrics & KPIs is crucial. These metrics don’t only represent the overall performance of your sales team. They can also be used to measure progress towards set goals, decide on incentives and bonuses for your sales agents, and quickly identify any issues with the sales process.

In case you’re wondering: there’s no single list of sales KPIs that work for every business. Nonetheless, if you take a closer look at the most common metrics used by sales managers, you’re likely to choose the ones that feel critical for your company. Here’s what you can keep track of when measuring the performance of your team.

What are sales metrics and KPIs, anyway?

Before diving into the details, it’s worth knowing that KPIs, metrics and measures are not quite the same—even though it might seem like they are at first. How come?

• Measures are the unit-specific numbers or values that can be summed and/or averaged, such as leads, sales, or durations of any kind. KPIs and metrics, on the other hand, are often made up of multiple measures.
• Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), therefore, demonstrate how effectively your company is reaching key business targets. Basically, KPIs are evaluated over a specific period of time, and then compared against past performance metrics or set benchmarks.
• Last but not least: metrics are quantifiable measures used to track and evaluate the status of a specific process. They are much broader and can easily cover the entire spectrum of the sales process.

Speaking of the entire spectrum—it’s essential to track data at every stage of the sales process, both for managers and sales reps.

As a leader, you should be able to use the insights on the performance of your team to analyse everyone’s performance every step all the way.

Sales agents, though, should also understand the data deriving from the sales process they execute, as well as the metrics they are measured against.

What sales metrics & KPIs should you be paying attention to, then?

There’s an infinite number of metrics that could be measured, even on two levels: individual and team. There’s no need to track them all, though. Choose what KPIs work best for your business, and make sure you keep an eye on them regularly. Here are some exemplary KPIs that you might want to pay attention to:

Lead Response Time

It’s the amount of time between the initial inquiry and the sales rep’s answer. The shorter, the better—as first respondents are usually favoured by customers.

Customer Acquisition Cost

As the name suggests, is the total cost of acquiring a new customer, which basically includes all sales & marketing expenses (salaries, discounts, campaign costs, and so on). Then, you can measure CAC by dividing all these expenses by the number of acquired customers. Why is it relevant? Because calculating and comparing CAC for different channels can help you determine which sources are top-performing when it comes to attracting new clients.

Customer Lifetime Value

CLV is the total amount of money that the customer spends on your business throughout their entire lifetime. Yet again, the purpose is to see whether you’re spending your budget wisely on marketing and sales. In order for your company to grow, though, CLV should be higher than CAC. Determining it might be tricky, as it requires a full understanding of how the budget is allocated at your company. Nonetheless, it’s definitely one of the most valuable metrics you can take a look at.

Pipeline value

It represents the value of all deals in the sales pipeline, usually in a particular moment of time. It tracks the expected revenue from sales opportunities in a specified timeframe. Why is it worth tracking? Because you can easily check whether you’re on the right track to meeting your sales targets. Nonetheless, both managers and sales agents can use it to measure their performance and progress.

Average Sales Cycle

The average lenght of a sales cycle refers to the amount of time it takes for a prospect to go through all the stages of your sales pipeline before actually being won. This can easily indicate whether both your whole sales process and your agents are being effective. You can calculate it by dividing the total number of days to win the prospects by the number of closed deals to have an idea of the overall productivity.

Revenue

It’s usually a metric that needs no introduction. It basically represents how much money you’ve received within a specified period of time. Still, even though the concept is rather straightforward, it might be difficult to have a clear picture of your revenue stream. Many businesses choose to calculate the monthly recurring revenue—meaning the amount of predictable revenue expected on a monthly basis. This, however, depends on the specificity of your business, which is why you might have to dig deeper to measure your revenue properly.

Average profit margin

It’s probably what matters most for the growth of your company. It simply describes the average profit made across all products, services, and sales channels. By tracking this metric, you can identify which offerings are the best for your business. Plus, you can also use it to see profits generated by individual sales agents or by specific customer locations and demographics.

Customer retention & churn rates

Increasing sales is no longer only about bringing in new customers all the time—but keeping the existing ones around as well. That’s hardly surprising, given that the probability of selling to an existing customer is much higher than when selling to a new prospect. The only issue here is that there are many ways to measure churn (net churn, gross churn or month-to-month subscriptions, just to name a few). That’s why it’s definitely one of the sales metrics that are difficult to pinpoint. The easiest way to measure it, though, is to calculate the percentage of customers who leave your company in a given timeframe (i.e. one month). Make sure you keep it this number as low as possible.

Choose the best sales metrics & KPIs that fit your business

Sadly, sales metrics & KPIs are not a one-size-fits-all solution for every company. As a matter of fact—they can be very different, depending on your industry, niche, and even specific job position. In order to get the best insights possible, you have to tailor them to your specific goals. To help you find the best sales metrics & KPIs, we’ve compiled the list that can easily get you started.

Remember that calculating all those numbers can become a real challenge, especially when your data comes from many different sources. That’s precisely why many sales teams decide to centralise their information in one CRM. If that sounds like a good solution for you as well—see how Livespace can help you track and analyse your sales data.