5 Steps to measure Sales Performance

In recent years, businesses face a unique problem they aren’t prepared for. That being, flooded with data that’s too much to make sense of.

The landscape of sales changes every decade, but in the last few years – it’s been revolutionised. With the introduction of technology, sales professionals can do tasks faster and cheaper than their predecessors. This, of course, includes making sense of sales data.

Having a torrent of sales data is a double-edged sword. If you could make sense of it, your processes become efficient; else it becomes a redundancy.

Here’s where Sales Performance Metrics help. They help you dig deeper into that data and churn out powerful insights. 

Let’s dig deeper to understand more about sales performance metrics: 

What Are These Metrics for Sales Performance?

Simply put, Sales Performace Metrics are data points that track the performance of your sales teams.

If done effectively, these metrics help organisations track progress toward goals, identify any strategic issues and prepare their reps for future growth.

You can also identify which tasks done by sales reps are high ROI and which tasks are low ROI and distract sales reps from high ROI tasks. You are better off delegating or automating them.

Needless to say, sales data analysis boosts team productivity, assists in customer satisfaction, and enhances sales performance. 

What Makes Sales Performance Metrics important?

Sales Performance Metrics help you assess performance across a range of domains. This real-time data directly gives you an idea of what tasks to focus on in the future.

These measures show you the cracks in your sales processes that either lead to revenue or productivity loss. You can further craft effective strategies with this knowledge. After a successful track record of these strategies, you can teach them to your new reps!

Here are the five effective steps to measure the performance of your sales.

1. Identify The Targeted Outcomes

The first and foremost step to measuring sales performance is to know what you want. Clearly defining the benchmarks for specific metrics is integral to actually achieving them.

Identify the targeted outcomes of your sales strategy. Not only this, you should consider the following too:

1. Steps needed for successful implementation of your strategy.
2. The pros and cons associated with it.
   

2. Set Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Key performance indicators, or KPIs, are the metrics organizations employ to evaluate if their marketing and sales operations actually work. They let you know your organisation’s progress along a set target.

KPIs are of two types:

1. Leading indicators: They forecast further progress of your organisation along a result.
2. Lagging indicators: They tell about the past success of your organisation across a metric.

Here are a few KPIs that are relevant to B2B businesses:

1. Lead-to-customer Conversion Rate
2. Sales Growth Rate
3. The lifetime value of a customer
4. Sales per region
5. Call and Emails per Sales Representative
6. Cost Per Lead
7. Cost of acquiring a customer
8. Revenue And Profit
   

3. Analyse metrics with the help of tools:

To know if your numbers are satisfactory, you need tools. Organisations need tools for a simple reason: Manually observing data gets time-consuming and hard to keep up with at scale.

Many tools can help you analyse data: Microsoft Excel stands tall among the rest. If your use case is specific, there are always relevant tools online.

4. Communicate your findings to relevant stakeholders

Once the data is analysed, you communicate the information to the relevant stakeholders. You may also mention your personal conclusions on top of the cold, hard data.

Use graphs, pie charts – any visual elements – to aid your findings.

5. Measure performance

Tracking the performance data of your sales reps is essential, not only for short-term optimisations but also for long-term performance improvement.

This further improves pipeline effectiveness and conversion rates. The secret to optimization and producing greater sales prospects is identifying where you achieve and where you fail.

The time and effort invested in developing a deeper understanding of your sales success are worth it.

Final Thoughts: 

Sales metrics assist businesses in knowing what works and what doesn’t. This further helps them develop repeatable and scalable processes that result in rapid and predictable growth.

In addition to solving cracks in the sales funnel and taking advantage of opportunities, sales metrics enhance the effectiveness of your sales reps. An organization which tracks sales metrics hits its sales goals, has well-trained reps and excels in today’s competitive environment!

Sales performance can also be increased by having the distribution and sharing of content from a unified place like Kytes. With it’s collaborative nature, your sales team can have access to the necessary documents, guidelines and SOP’s to close more deals and increase win percentage.