How Salesforce Measures Its Most Important Sales Metrics

Patrick Blair, EVP, Commercial Sales, Salesforce

Every sales organization should have one metric that’s considered the most important measure. It sounds obvious, but it’s always surprising to me how companies become distracted with so many other details and metrics that aren’t true drivers of their business.

At Salesforce, our most important metric is annualized contractual value, or ACV. This number is the sum of new or add-on opportunities. ACV is followed closely by pipeline. The first doesn’t happen without the second, yet pipeline without the ability to become ACV isn’t beneficial.

All pipeline, all the time

We like our managers to examine and inspect pipeline constantly. They need to review the overall pipeline targets to best understand what’s going on, and whether the numbers are big enough to get to where they need to finish.

As good as your last month

We also enforce a “making every month” methodology. It’s a cultural thing and it drives the consistency and cadence of our business. It’s not about a deal or quarter or year. It’s always “how’s your month?”

Not closing it alone

Another benefit of consistently inspecting pipeline is that various opinions may result in a different (better) approach to any particular transaction. It’s easy to get happy ears and dream about a big deal, but we prefer to get multiple eyes on our pipeline for deeper inspection.

Having total transparency

When it comes down to it, we measure our pipeline and ACV with total transparency. It’s a tremendous way to run a sales organization and of course our customer relationship management (CRM) solution helps with that.

To read the complete article, “How Salesforce Measures Its Most Important Sales Metrics,” visit Quotable.