Creating a high-performing sales team requires more than just regular training and implementation of sales technologies. A big part of having a high-performing sales team lies in setting in place good sales analytics systems to assess the top sales metrics that matter to your business, depending on the lifecycle of your product or business, core business goals (long-term / short-term) and other priorities.
This is what helps sales leaders and sales managers to first prioritize the sales metrics that matter for the near future and set strong strategies that allow constant analysis and improvements of sales processes based on it.
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Its only when sales leaders and sales managers work in tandem with their sales analytics systems to extract deeper insights from all the available business data that sales teams can better their performance and scale sales and overall business growth.
Given the range of salestech platforms available today, sales leaders are spoilt for choice when it comes to assessing sales data to draw insights from it; what really matters now is understanding which top metrics should be used and studied deeply to draw more business insights from.
Here are a few top sales analytics and sales metrics that most sales leaders should be keeping a close watch on:
Conversion Rates of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) and Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs)
Most marketing and sales leaders already know how crucial it is to analyse their conversion rate in order to help implement the right conversion rate optimization tricks to keep business results healthy. But at a time when not enough importance can be given to closer alignment between sales and marketing systems and teams, it is also crucial for marketing and sales leaders to have a comprehensive understanding of the conversion rates for a period of time for both, MQLs and SQLs.
This will help business leaders identify ways to reduce the length of the typical buying journey while also understanding the behaviour of a typical lead as it moves from the top of the sales funnel during the lead generation stage to other buying stages.
This consolidated metric can help marketers know where to create more impact with their marketing campaigns with the aim to moving the lead into a sales-qualified status quickly.
Average Time Spent from Quote to Close
It’s no secret that the typical B2B sales journey is known to be a long and winded journey. That is why it is more important for sales leaders and sales managers to not only track their sales reps’ KPIs and individual performance, it is also important to calculate the average days it takes for sales reps to close sales deals from the first point of contact until the last stage.
This helps sales leaders to not only work on finding appropriate areas to fix in the sales reps process, it can help build sales plans that can reduce the time taken to close deals. These type of metrics and insights can be used to give better feedback and timely training or correction of sales messaging on sales follow ups to have leaner sales processes and more impactful results.
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Don’t Just Stop at Monthly Sales
Sales managers may feel that looking into monthly sales reports could be a good enough way of keeping a track on overall sales performance. Ultimately, the bigger the company and the larger the sales team, sales leaders have to be then dive into deeper sales metrics like day and weekly sales reports, quarterly values and half yearly / yearly metrics in order to analyse growth in sales, consistency, drop or percentage rise, future growth possibilities, areas for improvement and a lot more.
Smaller and mid-sized sales teams who also adopt a deeper breakdown of their monthly / weekly sales numbers will always be in a position to take quick action and be alerted when numbers start showing a dip far before it turns crucial.
Calculating Customer Churn Rate, with Marketing Stakeholders
Customer churn rates and metrics should not only be a marketers responsibility. At the end of the day, it’s the sales team that is meant to have a direct interaction and negotiation with the customer and it is important for sales leaders to have insight into the average customer churn rate. Knowing how often (and why) your customers are leaving helps both, sales and marketers focus on improving their customer retention policies while helping to identify gaps in their core marketing and sales / after-sales processes.
The higher the customer churn rate, the more crucial it is for marketing and sales to work together to know whether customers are leaving for a competitor’s service, whether they are leaving due to service or price problems, the reasons could be many. But knowing why your customer’s are churning and keeping a tab on the churn rate regularly will help improve sales and marketing tactics where needed for better overall business success.
Sales leaders are supposed to focus on growing their sales teams performance while focusing on achieving core business goals. The adoption of the right sales tech plays an important role but what matters most is identifying the top metrics that matter to you and analysing them regularly to keep a check on sales activities.
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Many sales leaders follow traditional formats that involve measuring each sales reps target and quota achievements, sales per rep, new customer acquisition rates, etc. While there are always going to be an array of sales metrics that sales people and leaders can dive into, knowing how to identify just a few combinations of metrics saves time and helps optimize sales processes.
While there can’t be a one size fits all solution to this, sales leaders who understand the importance of following a certain set of top sales metrics will always be able to scale sales performance with ease.