5 Top Sales Team Performance Metrics You Should Be Tracking

“If you don’t know your numbers, you don’t know your business.”

“You can’t manage what you don’t measure.”

I’m sure you’ve heard these before. You’ve heard them over and over because they’re true.

A passive sales leader will look at their team’s performance and wonder why sales targets were missed. An active sales leader will step in at the root cause or issue and address it from the get-go.

To be an efficient and effective sales leader, you must consistently monitor key sales team performance metrics, provide feedback, and identify areas of opportunity.

You must know how your sales team performs if you want an advantage in today’s competitive marketplace. Then provide them with feedback to optimize their results.

Here are five top sales team performance metrics you should be tracking to help your team crush their targets.

Why Sales Team Performance Metrics Matters

Sales teams use metrics, also known as key performance indicators (KPIs), to measure how much progress they’re making toward their targets. Knowing your team has something to aim for helps to pinpoint weak points and optimize their process.

RELATED READ: How To Improve Sales Performance in 6 Simple Steps

You also incentivize your team to hit their targets and offer incentives and other rewards.

You’ll get critical insights into individual sales reps’ performance and the organization’s overall performance. Do their results align with your goals set at the beginning of the year, quarter, or month?

You can track sales metrics using several sales tracking tools. Whether it’s a sales system, pipeline platform, or CRM, you need to consolidate your crucial data and insights on your customers and prospects.

Be ruthless. Not every metric is worth tracking.

As a sales leader, you need the metrics that matter. Data helps you identify areas that need the most attention and what blockers or challenges your team might face.

We’ll start with the most crucial metric: close rate.

1. Close Rate / Win Rate 

The best gauge for sales effectiveness is your close rate. It measures the ability of your sales team to conclude negotiations, turning proposals into sales. Knowing your team’s close rate is essential, but measuring individual performance is more effective.

Formula: (Closed Won Deals / Number of opportunities, lost and won) x 100

If a salesperson closes five deals out of twenty, their win rate is twenty-five percent.

Before you blame individual reps, consider your processes. Understanding close rates help you create better-structured sales strategies. It makes personnel decisions easier and exposes flaws in your sales team performance.

Are you arming your team with the tools they need to close? A low close rate helps you identify which sales reps need the most training and can help direct your attention to other metrics of theirs that may indicate a lack of performance.

2. Number and Value of New Opportunities

To be successful, you need a lot of opportunities. Remember, you’re going to hear ‘no’ a lot. However, you don’t just want to pile up opportunities. You want your team to spend their time wisely.

Who on your team creates the most opportunities? 

Balance that number with the team member that creates opportunities of the correct deal size. Opportunities less than your average deal size still take the same time to close but aren’t as valuable.

3. Average Contract Value / Average Deal Size

How many leads do you need to hit revenue targets?

Your average deal size determines how many leads you need to fill your sales pipeline. Occasionally, your team might land a monster client that retires your quota for the year. But you can’t rely on deals like that. With nothing else lined up, you’ll soon find yourself with little revenue.

Are your salespeople able to navigate complex deals with larger price tags?

The ideal scenario is to increase deal size over time. As your team becomes more proficient at closing more important deals, you should set challenges to continually land bigger clients, increasing your ability to grow revenue.

RELATED READ: Modern Customer Discovery Questions

Let’s use a SaaS company as an example. They might target smaller businesses and deals when first bringing their product or service to market. After seeing some success, they might want to increase their average deal size. But how?

• Upsell customers using the basic package to the premium package
• Provide more features and value and increase the price
• Increase the duration of the deal
• Improve the customer experience
• Expand their product line

The better the product becomes, the easier it is to sell to bigger companies. As an example, set a target of growing the average deal size by seven percent each year.

4. Number of Touch Points

Which tools are working best for your team? When you track interactions or touchpoints, you can discover where your sales reps’ strengths and weaknesses lie. You might track the number of calls they make and set a minimum target. However, you’d be better off tracking the number of meetings booked.

RELATED READ: First Meetings: Why Opening is The New Closing

Follow-ups and social media engagement are essential, too. But only in specific industries. For example, see how your sales reps show up on LinkedIn if you sell in the B2B industry. LinkedIn is a great place to prospect.

Knowing how long your reps take between touchpoints is essential, too. Are they waiting too long to reach out or respond?

When sales and marketing align, tracking touchpoints becomes a worthwhile exercise. A high-quality customer experience is made up of high-quality interactions. It’s easier to move prospects through the sales pipeline if marketing provides helpful and relevant information to them. A more informed prospect is easier for sales to conversate with.

5. Conversion Rates

A lead becomes a sales-qualified lead (SQL) and then an opportunity. Finally, they move from opportunity to closed/won or closed/lost. You need to know the percentage of prospects that move through your funnel, broken down at each stage. 

For example, if a lead doesn’t become an SQL, why not? If an SQL becomes an opportunity, what did your team do right? You also want to know how long it takes to move prospects down the sales funnel. How much time do they spend in each deal stage?

Often, sales and marketing teams are at loggerheads. But if they align, marketing will produce qualified leads, improving lead generation, raising sales volume, and lowering customer acquisition costs. 

Additional Considerations

Customer Retention

Customer lifetime value is the revenue that can be expected throughout the average relationship with a customer. 

Once a relationship and rapport have been established with an account, your team would ideally nurture this existing relationship to keep them satisfied and grow the lifetime value of the account. However, if a sales rep constantly brings in customers that churn, this is a red flag and cause for concern.

Customer Satisfaction

You can improve tracking sales performance by measuring your customer’s happiness levels, indicating if your customers will buy more and advocate for your brand.

Did your client have a positive sales cycle? Did they enjoy communicating with your team? Getting feedback from customers that have closed (and lost) can help you determine where your sales team might be lacking.

Consistency

Set clear targets and measure your progress. If you build a reputation for high-quality performance and limit duplicative efforts among your reps, you develop strategies for long-term growth.

Beyond Sales Team Performance Metrics: Improving Sales Performance

Watching and measuring your sales team’s performance metrics doesn’t have to mean micro-managing or following up with them every day when you don’t see the numbers you want to see.

Performance metrics should be a guiding light for you as a sales leader. Use them to determine where your team needs the most support. Where are the blockers when it comes to converting prospects into customers?

It’s important to consider team morale as well. Create a culture of excellence and feedback. Nobody wants to hear feedback or criticism if the work environment is already hostile.

Your team relies on you to be an active, empathetic, and effective leader. If you’re struggling to hit sales goals, it’s time to identify and fix the core issues preventing you from winning. If you want a customized, guided learning path with measurable milestones, check out the Sales Accelerator Program today!