B2B Sales Metrics: A Few Best Practices

For any sales leader, it is important to identify which key metrics matter to the organization and their sales team and when to track them. This is a crucial part of measuring overall sales performance and comes handy when trying to identify problem areas in the sales/outreach process that needs immediate resolution.

Identifying the right sales metrics and what needs to be tracked and why can enable a sales team to drive optimized output and even persevere during a downturn. A good sales metrics assessment system can also help brands avoid negative disruption during economic hardships or challenging market conditions because it comes processes optimized and allows companies to keep a check on sales outgoing costs, if done right.

When it comes to shortlisting the most important sales metrics for a brand, sales leaders and sales managers need to have proper visibility into the end to end sales cycle and process. They also need to collaborate on whether they want to use their metrics assessment program to drive rep performance, growth, team output, customer satisfaction or something entire different.

Knowing what the goal is will help identify what sales metric to track.

Before going down the path of understanding what sales metrics need to matter most through a particular quarter or other period of time, it helps to have a few fundamentals in place:

Sales Pipeline Metrics

Every sales rep and sales team needs to have a healthy all-year pipeline to help achieve goals. B2B sales people need this more because a typical B2B sales cycle can sometimes be extremely long and without a healthy pipeline, sales quotas might not be achieved.

This is where it becomes important for sales leaders to track more on how current deals are progressing, what percentage of deals are in a cold/warm/hot state, which ones need specific attention to drive closure and such other elements.

This is also where sales managers, sales leaders and sales people across the hierarchy should have a way of evaluating various factors like actual win rates, total customer acquisition costs, number of qualified leads to chase, average deal sizes.

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Lead Generation Metrics

Alignment between marketing and sales is key to driving overall company growth. In most cases, marketing teams man the online systems, website practices and handle the communication or automation done via chatbots, virtual assistants, etc while also having insight into the state and activity of their various website visitors.

A unified CRM that allows both teams to identify more on what among these incoming prospects are MQLs/SQLs, how they should be handed off or nurtured, costs per lead throughout the lead generation activity are just some of the factors that can help B2B sales teams tighten the overall process, keep a healthy flow of leads for nurture campaigns for both teams: sales and marketing based on which prospect is at what stage in the journey and this can contribute to maintaining a healthy sales pipeline as well.

Overall Productivity Metrics

A sales team can either be very lean and centralized or maintain a large distributed set up with region wise responsibilities, based on company size.

This is why it becomes important to identify strong methods to track sales productivity across the hierarchy no matter the team size or current set up.

The right productivity metrics can help identify what sales reps are spending time on, what they should be spending more time on, time spent on actual sales cycles.

Unified CRMs allow sales leaders to have visibility into this, if its set up right, sales leaders can easily track sales cycles, buyer journeys, where sales processes or conversations are lagging among other crucial points.

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Measuring the Right Sales Metrics at the Right Time, is a Must

In a data driven B2B sales world, constant measuring of every sales activity and regular optimization and improvement is need to drive performance and growth and tide over competitor threats. Without the right metrics assessment process in place, sales teams could end up being a cost to the company and it could lead to a downfall in future in terms loss of potential revenue that trickles down to brand hardships, layoffs, cost cutting and much more.

A stringent sales metrics evaluation process has to change, depending on near-term company goals as well as current challenges. The idea behind a good sales metric measurement system lies in optimizing processes and ensuring consistent growth.