Imagine if when you were in school, you never received any grades or feedback from your teachers for your work. You’d be totally in the dark because if you’re not tracking your performance, you can’t understand which study methods are working — or which ones aren’t.
Sales metrics are the same way.
You can use all the latest software and innovative sales techniques, but if you’re not tracking your progress you’ll have no data for comparison. And if you can’t identify progress, it’s extremely difficult to grow and succeed. We’ll explore which stats matter most, how you can track them, and how monday sales CRM makes it easy.
Which metrics are important in sales?
First, let’s get the basic definition out of the way.
According to Hubspot sales metrics are ”…data points that represent an individual’s, team’s, or company’s performance. They help track progress toward goals, prepare for future growth, adjust sales compensation, award incentives, and bonuses, and identify any strategic issues.”
Measuring this data helps you see whether you’re spending time on the right things by showing you whether or not your investments pay off — or where the process gets stuck.
Which factors you choose to measure will depend on your specific business and the goals you’re trying to reach, but commonly measured stats include:
- Total revenue
- Market penetration
- Conversion rate
- Deals closed
- Customer lifetime value
- Number of qualified leads
- Number of people in the sales pipeline
These are often referred to as “key performance indicators” or KPIs. They’re usually divided into three main buckets:
- Sales activity metrics,
- Sales performance metrics
- Customer satisfaction metrics.
You could divide your metrics even further within these three buckets, but those categories are a good place to start.
Activity metrics can be interactions on social media, emails sent, or conversations had with potential leads. Total revenue would be considered a sales performance metric, and customer lifetime value is a customer satisfaction metric.
How to benchmark and track important sales metrics
Before tracking sales metrics, you need to take stock of which numbers are most relevant for your organization and team. You can use industry standards for reference — after all, not everyone is a Fortune 500 company. Let’s walk through three core steps of tracking sales metrics.
1. List your goals
You need to have a list of goals to work toward and check your metrics against. Here are a few guidelines to get started.
- Be specific about your goals: If you want to bring in more revenue, maybe one of your goals is to bring in a certain number of leads by the end of the quarter. A follow-up goal from that would be to convert a certain percentage of those leads to paying customers to meet a set revenue target.
- Think about what’s important to your business: What does it need in order to grow or upgrade to its next stage? How can you get there?
- Make your goals reasonable: Breaking nebulous goals down into small, manageable chunks makes them seem a lot more attainable than keeping them vague and not assigning a concrete metric to track them with.
- Plan to track activities that contribute to your goals: An example of that could be tracking the number of calls made or emails sent that led to conversations, then tracking how many of those conversations led to follow-ups, and how many of those follow-ups led to closed deals—plus how many of those people were satisfied with the product after buying.
2. Track everything with the right software
Investing in the right sales software will give you the capability to expertly track your goals in real time, letting you see a high-level view of everything at once or drill down into the specifics of a task.
A good CRM software stores customer data so everyone can access it, gives everyone involved a place to communicate and cuts down on repetitive tasks by automating some of that work away. All of that together helps your team stay on task, operate more efficiently, and ultimately be more likely to hit their goals. And if something goes wrong, you can drill down to figure out why.
Using centralized software means information doesn’t get siloed within specific departments, because everyone has access to the same data and everyone is talking. That sharing of information cuts down on repetition, confusion, and possible frustration among your team.
monday.com Work OS has a dashboard function for tracking sales goals and progress, as well as additional ways to view your work — Timeline View, Calendar View, and more. You can even see each team member’s workload to ensure that tasks get directed to the people with the capacity to take them on.
You can use templates and automations to create consistent workflows and streamlined communication for optimal sales metrics tracking. monday sales CRM is easy to set up and use and can be used for other sales functions, too, like:
- Contact management
- Lead capture
- Customer projects
- Sales pipeline management
3. Check, check, and check again
Once you have your goals set, your software up and running, and a set of agreed-upon processes for tracking your sales metrics, keep checking them.
It’s tempting to check them at the beginning and leave them sitting again until the end of a campaign, but resist that urge — holding off until the end might mean it’s too late to implement a change that could’ve saved you some trouble.
With monday sales CRM, you can set up routine notifications and generate email reports of progress to be sent out to teams so you always stay up to date. In the next section, we’ll talk a bit more about the possibilities with monday.com as your CRM and sales operations tool.
Get the important metrics at a glance with monday sales CRM
monday sales CRM is customizable to fit a variety of needs. You can create everything from sales process flowcharts to track your funnel to dashboards for tracking KPIs, all without leaving the OS.
Let team members get a wide view of everything or just see what they’re assigned to with the searchability functions and People column in monday.com boards. Updates let people communicate right in the app, even send files and create documents.
Our CRM also facilitates easier communication with clients, letting you connect your email account and send messages from the Work OS. There’s a collection of email templates to choose from, and the CRM logs all your conversation to refer back to later — useful if you’re tracking how many emails get sent in a particular quarter.
Read also: Optimizing sales productivity
FAQs
What are sales performance metrics?
Sales performance metrics measure the effectiveness of your sales team’s efforts. These metrics include stats like email reply rates, the number of calls with leads that led to a meeting, how many deals are in the pipeline, monthly recurring revenue, and more.
How do I choose which sales metrics my business should track?
Your business goals will determine the most relevant metrics to track. Figure out what you want, how to get there, and what activity or result you can track that best measures your progress, and go from there. For example, if your goal is to bring in more qualified leads, you can track metrics like email opens, social media engagement, and customer satisfaction surveys.
Once I have them, how do I measure my sales metrics?
That depends on what you’re tracking. If you’re looking at revenue generation you might track how much money you make per deal closed or how much each team member is earning. Lead generation metrics might include inquiries from social media, follow-up calls, and ad performance. These are just a few examples, but whatever you track you’ll want a good CRM to help manage it all in one place — it makes life much easier.
Visualize sales metric performance with ease
Without a way to visualize and track your goals, achieving them becomes difficult. The monday.com Work OS is designed to make tracking important data as seamless as possible, whether that’s a campaign budget or text follow-ups.
Sign up for a free trial today to get hands-on experience with monday sales CRM and see what it can do for you.
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