Sales KPIs – key performance indicators – are your business’ superpower for success and growth. They deliver important intelligence about all aspects of your sales cycle, helping you and your team:
- identify your prospects
- qualify leads
- discover the best ways to connect with leads
- manage objections
- identify pain points and provide solutions
- deliver products and services
- manage your follow up and maintain relationships
Needless to say, keeping a close eye on your sales KPIs can mean the difference between a record year and closing the doors.
But what are the best KPIs to monitor? And how can you ensure your sales team is motivated to smash their goals? Here we’ll discuss the most important KPIs to measure for sales success.
Table of Contents
Top 9 sales KPIs to measure in 2020
1. New Leads or Opportunities
It’s an obvious but important KPI which needs consistent monitoring. Tracking new leads tells you:
- how many leads you’re getting
- where your leads are coming from
- when to focus your advertising activity
- how your sales team are contributing to the growth of the business
- who’s achieving their quota
- the percentage of your team meeting their quota
- if your quota is too high or too low
A sales dashboard in Cyfe is a highly-effective way to keep track of new leads (and many other KPIs). It uses real-time data and metrics from your business’ customer databases – Shopify, Infusionsoft, Salesforce, etc. – to monitor opportunities as they come in. No more trawling through reams of data, save time and money by streamlining and automating this task.
2. Sales Volume by Location
If you want to understand where the demand for your product is highest and lowest, monitoring Sales Volume by Location (in-store or online) is the ticket.
Comparing sales volumes across different locations sharpens your team’s activity. For example, your findings could tell you where to execute campaigns or which regions would benefit from new product enhancements. So you can supercharge sales by focusing on the best actions in the right locations.
As with tracking new opportunities, monitoring this KPI is much easier with a dashboard that can consolidate all your data in one place. That way you can easily compare Sales Volume by Location and share it with your team swiftly for valuable insights.
3. Lead Conversion Rate
The all-important question: how many leads are converting in sales? Tracking this metric helps you:
- measure the effectiveness of your pitches
- tweak your sales process to target more qualified leads
- understand more about the prospects who convert
- create a proven plan for future customer acquisition
- target your ideal customers
To measure Lead Conversion Rate, pick a period you want to measure and run a report of leads generated in that time. Next, run a report of leads converted within that period. Then divide the leads converted by the leads generated to get your conversion rate. How you complete this task may change depending on the CRM software you use.
4. Actual vs. Forecasted Revenue
This is actually two essential sales KPIs in one. Actual vs. Forecasted Revenue tells you how successful your business is (or isn’t) by identifying how close you are to meeting your forecasted revenue.
If you discover that your forecasted revenue is way below your actual revenue, it’s time to take action. Review more detailed sales KPIs to understand where losses may be occurring in your forecasting process or sales cycle.
To monitor and measure this KPI, start by setting up a specific time frame in which to review your revenue stream. This could mean year-over-year, but also quarterly, monthly, or weekly. No matter your decided time breakdown, you must get a handle on how much revenue you’re projecting vs. how much you’re really earning. Otherwise, your business decisions will be for naught.
5. Sales Cycle Length
Analyzing Sales Cycle Length for individual reps shows you how effective a rep is in comparison to their colleagues. This empowers you to provide extra training and goal setting for the right staff to improve their performance.
But a quick sales cycle might not always be good for business. For example, you may find that your shortest sales cycle is generating dissatisfied customers. In this case, you might consider how lengthening the sales cycle can boost customer happiness.
Using a dashboard to monitor Sales Cycle Length ensures all the data you need is in one place and is easily accessible. That way, you can quickly gain valuable insights and share what you’ve learned with the team in an easy-to-understand way.
6. Employee Satisfaction
Often overlooked, but critical as work-related stress has been deemed the health epidemic of the 21st century by the World Health Organization.
Poor employee wellbeing is as bad for the individual as it is for business. These are the people on the front lines speaking and working with your customers and potential clients. They are the face of the products and services you wish to sell, so keeping them pleased is in your best interest.
The good news is that employee motivation and satisfaction are measurable and entirely relevant sales KPIs.
One way to gauge employee satisfaction is through feedback. You could ask your employees to rank their job satisfaction from 1 – 10 and follow up with qualifying questions to find out what’s making them unhappy or happy. Comparing these results with your goals will paint a picture of your overall employee happiness while highlighting factors you need to work to improve your staff’s wellbeing.
7. Competitor Pricing
An awareness of your competitors’ pricing is a great asset for a competitive strategy. For example, if you discover that your prices are around the same, you could implement a price-match strategy that ensures your customers get the best deals, giving your business a competitive edge.
Price monitoring can be executed via a web scraping tool or a parser. They give you the ability to gather live pricing data at intervals of your choosing. All you need to do is identify your competition and products that would present the best data points. Then determine how frequently you’d like to monitor competitor prices for scraping.
Next, gather your relevant product URLs and import them into your scraping or parser tool. Then you’re all set to analyze the data to help you achieve that pricing sweet spot to encourage sales and customer loyalty.
8. Customer Engagement (after the sale)
Build customer loyalty and keep them coming back for more. This can be achieved by monitoring the Customer Engagement KPI.
Customer engagement metrics could be:
- Social engagement (number of likes, shares, reactions, retweets, etc.)
- Email engagement (open rates, click-through rates, etc.)
- Activity time (the total time a customer spends interacting with your service or brand)
- Visit frequency (how often a customer uses your service or visits your website)
Collaborating with Marketing will help you gather and understand this data. These metrics help you to familiarize yourself with the type of people who buy your products or services. So you can continually refine your offerings and engagement strategies to give your customers exactly what they want.
9. Customer Lifetime Value
Customer lifetime value (CLV) is one of the most important metrics to track for growing sales teams. It tells a company how much revenue they can expect from one customer through its business relationship.
Here’s a quick and easy way to calculate CLV for your business:
The longer a customer buys from a company, the greater their lifetime value becomes. You can use this metric to identify which customer segments are most valuable for the company.
Motivating your sales team like a boss
Okay, you’re the boss already. But do you know how to effectively motivate your sales team to meet their goals? Spoiler alert: you don’t need to be a dictator.
Here are our top takeaways on creating a positive work environment that fosters motivation as well as autonomy, commitment, and teamwork.
1. Ensure transparency
Keeping all your performance and sales data to yourself doesn’t create a sense of unity or teamwork. Instead, you need to adopt a transparent policy when it comes to sales and individual performance. This:
- Helps staff keep on top of their performance
- Helps them prepare for appraisals
- Creates healthy competition between your sales team
All of which boosts your team’s motivation organically.
We recommend creating a sales team dashboard which can be made accessible to all your reps. This tracks the most important sales KPIs for each of your reps.
You can then use the new Cyfe Goals feature (which you can learn more about on our website) to set the quotas for each salesperson. That way, your sales team can see exactly how close they are to reaching their quota or even their personal goals in real-time.
2. Use alerts
An Alert can be a notification text message or email that is sent to a salesperson once a certain threshold is met (such as X number of calls made) within your sales dashboard. This function is available at Cyfe and you can learn more about it in our article: Get More From Your Business Intelligence Analytics With Alerts.
Alerts are ninja motivators. What better way to let your team members know that they’re close to hitting their daily quota? Or that they’ve surpassed their quota? Alerting your team of their performance keeps their goals front-of-mind, encouraging them to work harder towards specific achievements.
3. Leverage contests
Sales contests are another great way to keep your sales team motivated and performing at their best. Here are a couple of ideas for contests that you can run utilizing your sales dashboard.
Simple daily sales contest
Set a target goal for all your team members and the first to reach that goal for the day wins. It’s important to set a realistic goal, but also one that won’t likely be reached until later in the day. You can monitor all progress directly from your sales dashboard.
First to reach their daily quota contest
With daily goals set up for each salesperson, you can make a simple contest for the first person to hit their quota for the day. They all need to get there (that’s the purpose of the quota after all), but if you can push them to reach their quota early, everything that they accomplish the rest of the day is just a bonus!
PRO TIP: Make sure to have a prize that your sales team actually wants to win. Nothing kills a contest faster than a reward that no one really cares about.
Using these sales KPIs for sales success
Become a leader that knows the best sales KPIs to monitor, how to set progressive goals, and how to effectively motivate your reps. The reward is a sales team who view you as a hero because you consistently help them smash their targets, get excellent feedback and have a positive impact on the business.
