5 metrics to measure your sales team's progress
Measuring a sales individual’s performance should be a simple task. All you need to do is generate a report that shows you who closed how much business. And viola! You have your top performer. Not completely true!
How much business a sales individual closes is just one metric for measuring success. Ironically, most sales individuals are never really measured on all metrics that enable them to succeed.
This means they may be closing business for you month in and month out but they never truly evolve as a sales individual. As a leader it is vital that you make sure that your team is not just measured on the right metrics but also get regular feedback based on the same metrics.
Here are 5 key metrics that should help you not just measure but also improve performance of your sales team.
Revenue generated
Let’s start with the obvious. Your sales team members should definitely be measured on how much revenue they have generated and how much they have achieved in the last year.
Targets keep changing and even the way your organisation measures revenue might change.
A common switch in measuring revenue generated, is going from MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue) to ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue). What is important is that there is transparency whenever there is a shift in the sales paradigm in your organisation.
New customers acquired
‘Land and expand’ is not just a fancy catch phrase but a reality in the SaaS industry.
Every sales individual wants to close a million-dollar deal but such deals only come along once in a while. With most software organisations moving to a subscription based model, every new customer acquired is vital to keeping business going.
A single large deal can help meet quota but most organisations value a sales individual that keeps adding to their customer base.
How the new customer acquired metric is used usually varies from organisation to organisation. So much so, some organisations are happy to give their sales individuals a customer acquisition target as opposed to a revenue target.
Opportunity to closure ratio
What differentiates an average sales individual from a great one, is conversion ratio. An analysis of the exit points in the sales funnel will reveal where your sales individual is struggling.
Most organisations chose to ignore this metric as there is no industry standard that defines a good opportunity to closure ratio. However, a detailed analysis of team averages will show what an organisation’s base line is in terms of closure ratio. You will also get an opportunity to see who your top quartile is and who are not up to the mark.
Opportunity to closure ratio is important because it might show that your best sales individual might has more to give if he has a lower opportunity to closure ratio.
Sales Hygiene
One of the most difficult metrics to measure is sales hygiene.
Hygiene is what your organisation and you as a leader define it to be. As a leader, make sure that you generate a series of reports that are then shared with my team. Then make sure that my team is constantly measured on meeting the expectations laid down under hygiene. Repeat offenders are marked down on scoring and people with good hygiene are rated higher.
Instead of just making sure hygiene is met, make sure you transmit the importance of hygiene to your sales team.
Account management
I talked about land and expand earlier in this post. It is vital that your sales individuals be held accountable when it comes to account management.
A common way of doing this is splitting sales quota into new business acquired and business from existing accounts. Another way is to measure the number of expansions and upgrades they are bringing in.
Larger organizations usually split their sales team into new business and account management. In which case, this metric will be missing from the new business sales team’s metrics.
Either way, it is important that your sales team be held accountable against this metric.
There are a few other metrics that might be relevant to specific organisations. To name a few, number of product demonstrations or client meetings. However, by and large the above mentioned metrics should suffice and give you a detailed look into your sales team's performance.