Using KPIs to Benchmark Excellence in B2B Sales Management

Sales leaders use many KPIs to assess their sales teams. These metrics help sales managers improve their results and achieve their sales goals. While these sales KPIs are helpful, sales leaders and sales managers need their own set of KPIs to assess their own performance.

What follows here is a list of KPIs that you can use to assess and benchmark sales leaders and sales managers.

Sales Leadership KPI 1: Overall Sales Effectiveness

The most important leadership KPI is the overall effectiveness of your sales force. If you look at any team, be it a sports team, an orchestra, or a sales team, success comes from having the highest levels of competency. You can measure your sales effectiveness by looking at your average win rate in B2B sales.

Your average win rate across your sales teams is a telling leadership KPI, as it provides a view into how well the sales force has been trained, developed, or coached by their sales leaders. The greater the average win rate, the more evidence you have that the sales leaders are improving their sales force. You can use this KPI to monitor sales leader performance in a competitive market.

Sales Leadership KPI 2: Individual Sales Effectiveness

You may have a high overall sales effectiveness across your entire team, but you also need every salesperson on your team to reach their full potential. Using these sales KPIs, you need to look at everyone’s sales effectiveness. By focusing on individual performance, you can identify the salespeople who need more help to succeed. You can also determine each salesperson’s strengths and weaknesses, and use that to develop customized training and development to help everyone reach their maximum potential.

To determine what percent of your team needs help, take the number of sales reps with low sales effectiveness and divide it by the number of team members with high sales effectiveness. For example, if you have 20 reps total, and 11 have low rates of effectiveness, 55 percent of your sales force needs help closing deals. This is how you set effective KPIs for your leadership team.

Sales Leadership KPI 3: Increase of Sales Effectiveness

Continuing our effectiveness example, the 11 B2B salespeople on your team will not improve their performance overnight. It takes time to develop high-performing salespeople. This evens out the first two KPIs by looking at each individual’s effectiveness. Ultimately, this is what will lead to an increase in your sales team’s overall effectiveness.

If one salesperson increases their win rate from 17 percent to 31 percent, this suggests that they are improving, which is evidence that their sales leaders are providing them with the help they need. This is critical for sales leaders to build the best sales force possible. World-class sales enablement is important in helping you identify and address skills gaps in your team.

Sales Leadership KPI 4: Quota Attainment

If you wanted to argue about the order of these KPIs, I would understand. The first three sales leadership KPIs for B2B sales are all about your sales force. This KPI is the percentage of the sales manager’s team that reaches quota.

Over time, you want everyone on your team to reach their quota, but that isn’t an easy outcome to generate. The more you work on the first three KPIs, the closer you will be to helping each salesperson reach their quota, which leads to your quota.

Sales Leadership KPI 5: Forecasts

Forecasts do more than predict the revenue in a quarter or year. Inspecting and coaching sales pursuits allows sales leaders and sales managers to learn what development opportunities they need to improve their results. An accurate forecast is evidence that the sales manager is on top of their B2B sales pipeline, knowing how well their sales team is when it comes to progressing deals.

Sales Leadership KPI 6: Employee Engagement

Your team’s engagement scores are an important set of KPIs that can prove that the sales force is getting your time and attention. It also suggests that you are giving each person what they need to succeed. It’s important to remember that every person on your team has their one reason for doing something. By keeping a high engagement with your team and helping them reach their goals, you will have a sales force that is engaged in pursuing their goals and your initiatives.

Sales Leadership 7: Time Spent Coaching

This answers the question, "How can leadership KPIs improve employee engagement and retention?” Salespeople crave individual coaching time, and most want more than they get. Many sales leaders and sales managers spend more time in internal meetings than they spend with their sales force. Coaching should be a priority, even if you must carve out time every two weeks to give your attention to your team.

Sales Leadership KPI 8: Retention

There is a fact that most sales leaders and sales managers fail to acknowledge: The longer a salesperson works in the same industry and the same company, the better their performance. In the future, your potential customers will buy from B2B salespeople who are experts and authorities who can improve client results. As younger generations avoid working in sales, this KPI will become an important indicator of retention-related B2B sales strategies that leaders need to pursue.

Sales Leadership KPI 9: Achieving Sales Goals

You might consider placing this KPI above quota attainment, but no sales leader reaches their goal without their team reaching their goals. The few salespeople that exceed their quota often carry a large part of the rest of the B2B sales team’s goals.

The odds that you will achieve your sales goals is greater when you have more salespeople achieving their sales goals. This is why the first four B2B sales leadership KPIs dominate the top of this list.

Sales Leadership KPI 10: Sales Objectives

You can hit your sales goals without hitting your sales objectives. Your sales objectives may include several sales strategies that produce some important result that isn’t net new revenue. It could be cross-selling, acquiring large new clients, competitive displacements, greater profitability, or gaining greater control over the B2B sales process and B2B sales cycles. Your sales objectives are important to the sales organization and the enterprise. Hitting your objective-related KPIs is how you align leadership KPIs with organizational goals and objectives.

Sales Leadership KPIs

Sales leaders and sales managers who challenge their teams to hit a set of KPIs should challenge themselves with a set of metrics that will ensure their teams succeed. The first eight KPIs here are crucial for sales success at the team, individual, and organizational level. They also protect the last KPIs, which relate to achieving sales goals and pursuing a list of worthwhile sales objectives. The better you do with the KPIs at the top of this list, the better your overall results, including on the two KPIs you are responsible for generating.