5 Sales Metrics That Every Team Should Be Tracking

I have an immense amount of respect for sales teams. Selling is a highly challenging task that requires a combination of skills, including communication, persuasion, and negotiation. Selling is a balancing act of epic proportions, and those making sales need to know not only their product inside and out but their potential customers as well.

So, if your business has a sales arm, and you are actively seeking, opening, and closing sales for whatever your business sells – how are you tracking your sales metrics and ensuring you’re contributing to overall business goals? 

If you are not tracking your sales metrics, or maybe you are trying to find a few new metrics your team should be tracking, follow along with me in this article. I will go through a few sales metrics that every team should be tracking and why they are instrumental to the success and growth of your business.

The Importance of tracking your sales metrics

Some people are just not cut out for sales, myself included. For example, I was recently told by a client, and I quote, “that was the worst sales pitch in the history of sales.” And while I may have presented him with an awful pitch – I did manage to close the deal. 

And while my charisma alone may have been the reason it worked, I was able to move that sale into our CMS system, send it along to our account management team to manage it, and then we were able to track this client’s campaign and growth over the months to come. So while I am no salesperson by any stretch of the imagination, I do know that tracking sales metrics is an important part of scaling and building a successful business.

While my single sale wasn’t “pretty,” I learned a lot about how to approach sales and why tracking all the steps that occurred up to and after the sale is important. When it comes to the success or failure of our business and its marketing goals, measuring how you made or lost sales is an essential part of the process.

Key sales metrics every business should track

While I already had an idea of the metrics I wanted to track for our business, below are some of the metrics my business has used to track sales gains and losses over the years:

• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
• Customer engagement metrics
• Conversion rates
• Win/Loss ratio
• Sales cycle duration

⭐ Tip: Looking for a tool to help you track progress towards goals? Hive Goals, a tool within the robust Hive project management platform, lets you set goals, visualize progress, and keep everyone aligned in one centralized dashboard. Start a free trial to see how Hive’s full productivity platform can help you reach your goals today.

1. Understand your average customer lifetime value (CLV)

Knowing your average Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is key to understanding your customers’ worth over their entire relationship with you. The CLV helps you prioritize and focus on activities that will foster customer loyalty and user retention to continue building a strong, successful relationship. 

However, not all CLVs are the same, and depending on the type of business you are in, that value could be anything from 1 month to 5 years or more. So keeping track of CLV can save money in the long run and help ensure maximum results for your sales team.

2. Monitor engagement metrics

Knowing your customers inside and out is essential to the sales puzzle. It closely aligns with the sales funnel as well. Monitoring all of your customer engagement metrics across multi-platforms can help you build up a better understanding of their interests and actions. Using analytic software, you can build reporting around the following engagement metrics:

• Page views
• Open rates
• Click-through rates
• Bounce rates
• Page exit rates
• Keyword growth

These metrics paint a pretty clear picture for your sales team as to what marketing campaigns have been successful in getting customers interested in what you have to offer.

3. Track conversion rates

Tracking conversion rates is a must for any sales team. Knowing what your lead-to-customer conversion looks like can tell you a lot about the effectiveness of your sales process. When you track this metric, you can quickly identify any improvement areas. For example, are customers dropping off when they talk with a specific sales rep or maybe when they open a particular advertisement or page on your website?

Take a Sherlock Holmes approach and use these clues to solve the mystery of your customer conversions. The answer is in the data, and with a keen eye, you will be able to spot places to improve conversion rates and identify spots where people are falling off.

4. Analyze sales cycle time

Analyzing sales cycle time is an important yet often overlooked step in the sales process. For example, it took months of back and forth for the sale I discussed earlier before they signed on the bottom line. But the amount of business the sale brought to our company was worth the time I spent on the front end to close the deal.

Keep track of how long it takes to move your prospects through each sales cycle stage – from initial outreach to negotiation and purchase. Keeping an eye on these key performance metrics can positively impact customer experience, ensuring it remains fast and smooth while also helping to boost overall sales success.

5. Win/loss ratio

If you’re trying to determine which sales tactics work and make the most of your resources, calculate your win/loss ratio for new business opportunities. Your win/loss ratio is the number of deals you close converted into a percentage compared to those lost.

Calculating your win/loss ratio can be a powerful indicator of how efficiently the sales team is working and its effectiveness in meeting team goals. However, remember that when you calculate this metric, you will need to factor in the sales cycle time, as sometimes it can take an incredibly long time to close a deal, and this should not be overlooked in your ratios.

Track your sales process with the right software

Everyone should be able to track the sales pipeline from start to finish to maximize your sales performance and ensure that you’re driving the team’s progress. Using goal-setting software or a project management platform that can help your team communicate, monitor and pull reports is paramount to your business’s success.

You won’t know how well you are doing without setting a baseline, and you won’t know how you can improve if you don’t track metrics and find solutions along the way. Tracking the above sales metrics will give you a comprehensive understanding of your sales process and help you make decisions quickly and accurately.

Use Hive to reach your sales goals

Are you ready to start setting goals and tracking metrics for your sales team? You’re in luck — Hive’s newest (and most exciting) feature is Goals. Everyone wants to know how they’re progressing as an individual, as well as how they are moving their organization forward. With Goals, you can set various goals, visualize progress, and keep everyone aligned in one centralized dashboard. You can also:

• Create one, ten, twenty, or more goals for your team, so everyone understands what they’re contributing to.
• Centralize and automate your goal tracking and reporting.
• Pull data from other systems into Hive to streamline operations and reporting.
• Share your goal or goals, assign the goal to relevant teammates, track activity, and give yourselves a deadline.
• Understand how your team and organization are pacing towards an individual goal or a set of goals.
• Color-coded designations allow an easy understanding of “on-track” items.
• When it’s time to review progress, accomplishments, and achievements, easily export all relevant information.

Want to get started? Start your free trial of Hive Goals today!