In business, monitoring the performance of your sales team is very important. Such evaluation should be in terms of revenue generation and this can help your business stay alive also financially in track.
Setting up standard a measurement criteria in place will help you quickly determine if you are making any progress or some individuals in your sales department are not performing up to expectations.
Here are some key metrics to measure and evaluate the effectiveness of your Sales Teams.
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Percentage of opportunities won
Tracking the percentage of opportunities won by your sales team is key towards measuring and evaluating their effectiveness. For instance, if sales reps renews existing contracts, it’s a sign that the customers still find value in your products or services and that the sales reps have been effective in maintaining the relationships during the duration of the original contracts. This is so important in security good financial flow as well as bringing in new customers.
Sales cycle
Analysing the sales cycle versus time taken and input provided is also a keymetric to measure and evaluate the effectiveness of your Sales teams. Do this by measuring and evaluating sales effectiveness using the effectiveness curve. Your business can get a view into not only what’s working, but which members of their team are detracting from effectiveness. This makes it possible to focus on either improving the poor performers or firing them
Forecast accuracy
Forecast accuracy is also used tomeasure and evaluate the effectiveness of your sales teams. Top performing businesses constantly measure their performance and optimize their process so as to improve accuracy in their products and services. As a sales leader, always drill down and understand which factors and behaviors impact effectiveness at every stage of the process and reinforce the correct actions, skills and behaviors in a way to check and improve accuracy in your business.
Sales activities
You can measure and evaluate the perfomance of your sales team by taking a look at sales activities. This is just the big picture, you will need to measure a number of team and individual activity metrics too. These could include the number of sales calls made and emails sent and the amount of time your team is spending on each. This must also include the number of meetings and live demos your team is delivering every quarter.
Opportunity health
Opportunity health simply refers to the winning rate and the percentage of your total sales opportunities that go on to become paying customers. The evaluation goes on like this, if you have 200 new opportunities every week, how many of those will eventually result in a sale? If you close 40 out of every 200 sales opportunities, you’ve got a win rate of 20%. Having noticed such a poor performance, you will be able to confidently predict your long-term win rate, you can forecast more accurately, set attainable yet challenging sales quota to motivate your team, and budget more effectively for the next quarter.
Pipeline Coverage
Pipeline coverage is a valuable metric you can use to measure and evaluate the perfomance of your sales team and it reveals whether your team has enough opportunities coming down the pipeline to make quota for a given period. Your sales pipeline coverage ratio compares how full your pipeline is relative to your quota for a given period. Sales pipeline coverage helps you figure out how many opportunities you need to have ongoing at any given point, since not every opportunity will result in a sale.
Pipeline replacement
Pipeline replacement is also another metric you can use to measure and evaluate the perfomance of your sales team. It is important to focus on high value leads and it’s equally as important to know when to let go of a lead too in order to shorten the sales cycle. A lead is considered dead when they clearly state they’re not interested, when they can’t be contacted, or you’ve spoken to them multiple times and they can’t be pushed through to the next stage of the pipeline. Be able to identify these dead leads so that you can move on to the next sales opportunity to close big deals without wasting any more time trying to breathe life into leads that simply won’t buy from you.
Deal size
You always need to monitor the size of deals your sales team close on quarterly basis. This may include: the number of deals in your pipeline, the average size of the deals in your pipeline, the average percentage of deals that you win and the average lifetime of a deal before it’s closed so as to measure and evaluate the perfomance of your sales team and the health of your business. Analysing the results over time will also give you a clear picture of how any changes or improvements you make to your sales process are contributing towards overall growth.
Quota Attainment
Your sales pipeline is constantly changing hence you need to make sure that you’re keeping details up to date on every single lead by adding regular notes and information for each stage of the sales process. If you’re not careful, your sales pipeline can start to get a little disorganized and chaotic which will make you inefficient and could lead to lost sales hence make sure you use quota attainment to measure and evaluate the perfomance of your sales team.
Summary
When all the metrics given above are put in place, your sales team feels competent and knowledgeable enough to understand how they are performing within the business and you can see how each sales team member is performing.
