What are the most important KPIs sales managers should always track? The main 4 KPIs are:
- Conversions and activities
- Time until first appointment with decision makers
- Customer engagement score
- Quotations generated and closing rate
Sales Key Performance Indicators are metrics that help you measure:
- the health of your sales pipeline and;
- the effectiveness of your sales team.
Every sales manager worth their salt understands it’s crucial to track the right KPIs in order to achieve their goal. However, sometimes it’s difficult to identify the right KPIs.
Maybe we can lend a hand with that. We’re here to give you the four pillars of success: the four metrics you should absolutely be tracking as a sales manager. But first…
Right vs. Wrong Sales Metrics
Tracking the wrong metrics is a waste of time. Going after vanity metrics may look good on paper but doesn’t tell you anything useful about the process.
Tracking the right sales KPIs helps you in making smarter and faster decisions. To optimize the process, you could invest in a sophisticated sales tool to process large amounts of information and make your life easier.
Tracking the right sales metrics allows you to minimize redundancies, instantly driving better results.
The 4 Essential Sales KPIs
Here is the list of crucial sales KPIs that you should be focusing on:
1) Conversions and activities
Tracking and improving conversions is a sales manager’s bread and butter. However, tracking conversions alone doesn’t give you the big picture about your team’s performance.
Great sales managers spend a substantial amount of time coaching and guiding their team. ‘Activity Tracking’ allows them to see how many activities their reps are performing and where their skills stand to be improved. The utility in activity tracking is very measurable – the fewer activities the reps need to perform in order to reach a conversion, the faster and smoother the whole sales process becomes. Which will also improve conversion – it’s a win-win!
2) Time until first appointment with decision makers
As soon as the prospects get identified, validated and qualified, they need to be contacted without further delay. Otherwise your team might end up losing an opportunity to your competitor. This is an important metric that often gets neglected.
The speed to get an appointment for the demo will help you know how efficient your sales executives are.
3) Customer engagement score
If you measure customer engagement you are most likely to identify customers who are ready for upselling and cross-sell. Also, it will let you know how the existing customers are interacting with your product/ service. This enables you to understand the pain points of customers and what you need to improve in terms of product offering.
Your customer engagement score is tracked based on the product usage. A higher score is directly proportional to a happy and satisfied customer.
4) Quotations generated and closing rate
How many quotations do your sales executives generate after face to face interaction with decision makers on the buyer side? How many customers need to be acquired so that your team hits the sales target?
You need to look at historical data to determine what your sales executives have to do on a daily/ weekly basis in order to achieve organization’s objectives. Through historical data, you get an overview of what you did in the past. For best sales performance management results, historical data has to be combined with current trends to make estimates for the future.
