Sales Teams’ 20 Most Important KPIs

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Blend your data world

6 min readAug 8, 2019

Every company “gambles” its existence on the generated revenues from the products and services that are offering to its customers with no regard of the company’s product or service. Among all of the company’s teams, the one that influences the profitability the most are the sales teams. Thus, all strategic decisions that affect the operations of this team cannot be guided by intuition due to the high failure risk.

Instead, specific performance indicators must be taken into account while making decisions. Such indicators are numbers that can be turned into meaningful stories with actionable insights.

So, what should a company should measure regarding its sales performance?

Key Performance Indicators

These performance indicators are called key performance indicators (KPIs), and they are frequently used for creating the necessary reports. Thus, all tactics that you use for approaching new customers, your email campaigns, your website as well as the use of social media channels, and all the elements must be reflected in your KPIs.

The good news is that the modernized sales operations can use many different services which can provide an ocean of data. By integrating data from multiple sources into a database, you can monitor all the critical factors that affect your business.

KPIs

However, to identify what exactly are the KPIs, you need to pay attention to you must start thinking about the goals that you have set and the sales mix you are using. It is certain though that the goals of each company are different and as a result, the performance indicators that need to be measured.

So, there is nothing as one-size-fits-all. That is the reason, in this post, we are going to present the most critical KPIs as well as the data source you can use to calculate them.

Types of KPIs

When it comes down to sales, the most important performance measures have to do mainly with conversions rates. For example, how many leads and opportunities are converted into paying customers and what is the amount of revenue generated from them. Apart from these, you may find it useful to monitor other aspects too, such as inbound and outbound reach effectiveness or the productivity of each agent.

Service-Based KPIs

If you are still building your sales team and you are using some service like Salesforce, Hubspot or Pipedrive, then here are some pointers of where your KPIs should aim.

In this section, we have included a set of metrics and sales KPIs that focus on every step of the sales process. Monitoring all these steps is essential while taking a closer look at your sales team performance.

Outbound Reach KPIs

The number of emails sent: This KPI represents the absolute number of emails sent during the outbound lead generation.
Calls made: It represents the absolute number of calls made during the outbound lead generation.
Email Open Rate: The email open rate KPI measures the percentage of people who open an email from an outbound approach.
Click-through rate: Similarly to the previous metric, click-through rate measures the percentage of email receivers that click a link included in the outbound email they received.
Email Response Rate: Out of the total number of sent emails, how many receivers replied.
Average/Maximum/Minimum Lead Response Time: A sales KPI regarding the time a receiver of an email, i.e., a lead, takes to reply.
Average/Maximum number of follow-ups before responding: Statistics regarding the total number of contact attempts a marketer makes before receiving a response of any kind.
Demos scheduled: Whenever applicable, it represents the absolute number of demos scheduled during the outbound lead generation. It refers to those leads that have already responded and have expressed interest in the company’s products but have requested for a live demonstration before considering to convert.

For more information regarding outbound reach, you can also check here.

Pipeline Metrics

Being able to monitor the progress of the sales team on a higher level is also crucial. You can get in a blink of an eye a more unobstructed overall view of the performance without having to combine information from multiple graphs.

Length of the sales cycle: The sales cycle is the time starting from the first contact with a potential customer until his deal is finally closed (either won or lost).
Total Opportunities Opened by month: This KPI represents the absolute number of leads that turned into opportunities each month.
Total Opportunities Closed by month: The absolute number of opportunities closed each month either as won or lost.
Lead to Opportunity Conversion Rate: This Sales KPI Reflects the percentage of leads that turned into opportunities each month.
Opportunity to Win Conversion Rate: Reflects the percentage of opportunities that turned into paying customers each month.
Average Contract Value: This metric represents the average value of each sale.

If you want a more detailed description you may go here and find the the 20 Sales KPIs for awesome sales teams.

Conversion Metrics

Percentage of Deals Won: The KPI calculates the percentage of won deals overall closed deals over a specific period, e.g., a month or a quarter.
Percentage of Deals Lost: The percentage of lost deals over all closed deals over a specific time, e.g., a month or a quarter.
The overall trend in lead generation (comparison to the number of previous months): A comparative measure between the leads generated this month against those of the last.

Sales Productivity

Distribution of Lead per sales reps (Owner): When a lead is created, it gets assigned to an owner. Its owner is responsible for keeping in contact with this specific lead.
Distribution of Opportunities per sales reps (Owner): The same sales reps own opportunities as they did as leads. This metric, along with the previous one, can reflect how well each sales reps doing. Sales reps with have many owned opportunities are likely more convincing than others.
Percentage of sales reps achieving 100% quota: Each sales representative has a daily or monthly goal. That can be expressed either as total emails sent out every day/month or as the total number of leads or opportunities that converted into paying customers. By measuring how close each representative came to his goal is a way of evaluating how productive he was.

Revenue Gain Metrics

By integrating your data from a CRM system like Salesforce with other Financial Services like Stripe, you can also measure:

Total Revenue: The ultimate sales KPI that instantly translates selling efforts into value. It can also work as a motivator for the sales team.
Total Revenue generated from top 10% customers: By identifying the company’s most valuable customers and tracking the revenue generated by them can give the sales team more insight into the value of each one of them and furthermore help them prioritize the company’s customers.
Revenue by product: This metric helps the sales team to determine what portion of the total revenue was generated by each product separately. It is even more helpful in the case of new products where this proportion is equal to the value-added by the addition of a new product or service.
Total Revenue in Sales Pipeline: It is highly correlated with the Average Contract Value KPI mentioned before. While not all potential customers in the sales pipeline are going to convert to paying ones, monitoring their total potential revenue can help the sales time to realize how valuable each one of them is for the company.

Final thoughts on sales KPIs

In today’s world, the competition that a company has to face is higher and more fierce than ever before. And so is the amount of the available data. Only by taking advantage of it, a company can continue to thrive through continuous monitoring of the right performance indicators and business metrics within a data-driven culture.

You can find more resources about sales KPIs. Check out these posts:

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