Sales Metrics

We are often asked what the best metrics are to keep track of sales effectiveness. Increasing productivity of the sales force is an important task for sales management, and the right KPIs can help with this.

But there are a lot of options to create this sales scorecard, so let’s look at some of the key elements.

Sales Effectiveness

Metrics can help to increase sales effectiveness in multiple ways. For example, metrics can be used to:
Evaluate performance of sales people
Focus on the right sales opportunities by analyzing past deals
Assign the right sales support resources (sales engineers, management time, etc.)
Measure the effect of changes in your sales processes
Benchmark with comparable companies

Depending on your priorities, you will choose different metrics and KPIs.

Sales Performance Scorecard

A good starting point is the creation of a Sales Performance Scorecard. A scorecard is a performance measurement framework that covers all relevant metrics for your sales organization. It is focused on actionable metrics, rather than just measuring performance. The process of getting to a sales scorecard start with an analysis of your most important sales goals. From there, you will choose the metrics that allow you to keep track of performance, and optimize performance along the way.

Sales Dashboards

A sales scorecard could be as simple as a spreadsheet. However, spreadsheets are not ideal for collaboration, because it’s hard for multiple users to work on a single spreadsheet together. Turning your scorecard into a dashboard solves this problem. Everyone can get a real-time view of the data, and create a view on the data that is relevant to them. Once you have the right metrics in your dashboard and all members of the sales organization have access to a personalized dashboard, you are well underway to becoming a metrics-driven sales organization.

Learn More About Sales Metrics

In this article we could only give a high-level overview of sales metrics and sales dashboard, so we can imagine you’re like to learn more. The following resources may be interesting for you:

Learn

Read how Dave Barry at Enterasys brought sales analytics front-and-center; or view a webinar with Tina Babbi at TriNet, who moved her company from ‘anecdotes to facts.’

View success stories »

See

Take a quick tour of GoodData for Salesforce sales analytics application. See pre-built dashboards integrated directly into Salesforce CRM, and dashboards for regions, sales ops and execs.

View features »

Try

Get a GoodData account today. You can access a live Sales Analytics Demo – a complete sales pipeline analytics solution for a typical mid-sized company. Call us to connect to Salesforce CRM, NetSuite or SugarCRM.