Sales is the bread and butter of any company and hence the sales team is under pressure to deliver their targets, and perhaps exceed them, more often than not. The optimum functioning of the sales team is important to ensure your business is growing at the desired rate. To ensure the team keeps up its productivity, a lot of times, too much focus is put on their objective data and targets. But the sales process involves much more than that.
A clearer picture of the sales team’s performance, challenges and commitment can only be visible when you constantly measure their performance with the right metrics. A performance management system can help you do just that.
When used correctly, a performance management system can give you the insights you need to make data-driven decisions to take your sales team’s performance to the next level. But what key metrics should you track?
In this article, we will discuss the 3 key metrics you need to track your sales team’s performance.
The 3 Key Metrics You Need To Track
1. Lead Generation and Nurturing
The initial stage of the sales process is lead generation. Naturally, the more leads your team generates, the more potential customers you have to work with. But it’s not just about quantity, it’s also about quality. Your team needs to focus on generating qualified leads that are more likely to convert into paying customers. This means identifying the right target audience, understanding their pain points, and tailoring your messaging to address those points.
Once you have generated qualified leads, it’s important to take those leads on your product’s journey that culminates in sales. This means building relationships with those leads and providing them with valuable content that will help move them down the sales funnel. By tracking your team’s efforts on leads, you can find areas where they may be falling short and make the necessary adjustments.
2. Sales Velocity
Sales velocity is a metric that measures how quickly your team is closing deals. This metric takes into account the number of leads converted, the average deal size, and the length of the sales cycle. By tracking sales velocity, you can identify areas where your team may be struggling to make the final push and suggest improvements to enhance their performance. One way to improve sales velocity is to focus on your team’s sales process. Are there any bottlenecks in the sales process that are slowing down deals? Are there any steps that can be eliminated or streamlined? By addressing these issues, you can enhance your team’s ability to close deals quickly and efficiently.
3. Customer Retention
This is a type of metric that measures how well your team is able to keep customers happy and engaged. It’s one thing to make a sale, but it’s entirely another thing to keep that customer coming back for more. Tracking customer retention can help find out the reasons why the team is not able to keep customers engaged.
One way to improve customer retention is to focus on providing excellent customer service. Are your team members responding to customer inquiries in a timely manner? Are they going above and beyond to address customer concerns? By providing excellent customer service, you can increase customer satisfaction and increase the likelihood that they will return for more business in the future.
How to use these metrics to improve sales team performance
Now that you know the three key metrics you need to track your sales team’s performance, how can you use this information to improve their performance? You can do this by setting specific goals for each metric and tracking progress toward those goals. For example, you may set a goal of generating 100 qualified leads per month and track your team’s progress toward that goal.
Conclusion
If you are thinking of using these metrics to measure your sales team’s productivity, you can go for advanced sales performance management software. In addition to the above-listed metrics, these programs also include measures such as win rate and net promoter score (NPS) to dynamically determine your team’s performance in real-time. You’d then be able to take suitable steps to tackle the challenges. For example, if you notice that your team is struggling to generate qualified leads, you may need to invest in better lead-generation tools or provide additional training to help your team hone their targeting and messaging.
