Tracking and analysing key B2B sales metrics is vital when it comes to your business growth strategy.
Without consistently measuring concrete statistics, it’s impossible to accurately reflect on your sales efforts and detail how you can improve moving forwards.
To put it simply, if you want to drive success in the B2B market, you need a clear understanding of your key performance indicators (KPIs) and a strategy to improve performance over time.
With so many metrics to choose from, however, it can be hard to know which ones are the most important.
Whether you’re a sales manager, sales rep, or part of the marketing team, we’ve identified the key sales metrics you will need across each department to monitor and enhance your business model.
But first, let’s clear up some frequently asked questions on this topic…
Sales Metrics & Sales KPIs: What’s the difference?
Sales Metrics are specific measurements that businesses use to review and analyse sales performance, such as the number of sales calls made or the percentage of leads followed up on.
KPIs are more broad goals used to measure overall progress towards an organisation’s main objectives.
For example, tracking sales growth over time or determining the number of sales opportunities won compared to those lost.
While metrics help companies evaluate daily performance in detail and make small adjustments, KPIs provide a view into longer-term strategic trends. Together, sales metrics and KPIs are powerful tools for measuring sales success.
But how important are they?
How Significant are Sales Metrics?
We’ve already mentioned the need to track and analyse sales metrics for business growth, but let’s take a look at how important this process is.
Sales metrics offer a quantitative view of your progress over time, helping you understand the effectiveness of different strategies.
Metrics can provide insight into how your current customers engage with products, how well your sales reps are doing, and what kind of prospects might be interested in investing in your services.
As such, sales metrics can be very significant in reducing costs and ensuring more consistent growth.
Remember, sales are your company’s primary source of revenue and profit, so performing data analysis is not an area you want to sidestep.
19 Sales Metrics & KPIs all the Best Sales Teams are Tracking
From measuring success in lead generation and conversion to overall customer retention and satisfaction, there are a variety of key sales metrics and KPIs that you should be focusing on.
Here are 20 crucial sales metrics & KPIs you should track and improve to stay one step ahead of the competition.
1) Lead Conversion Rate
The lead conversion rate is a sales metric that shows how often leads become customers.
This metric will tell you what percentage of your conversions were successful.
If you see that your lead conversion rate is low, then you may need to review your lead generation strategies or financial incentives offered during the conversion process in order to make them more enticing.
2) Sales Win Rate
The sales win rate measures how effective the sales team is at closing new business opportunities by comparing total wins versus total losses in a given period of time.
Achieving a high win rate is essential for all companies because it means that they are able to acquire more customers with fewer resources invested into each sale.
If your team has a low win rate, then you should take steps to increase their training, offer additional incentives for winning deals and focus on improving the customer experience when they engage with your brand.
3) Annual Contract Value
Your Annual Contract Value (ACV) measures the total revenue generated by a customer over the course of one year.
This helps companies determine if they are optimising their pricing models appropriately based on how much an individual customer is willing to pay for their service.
Higher ACVs mean larger sale opportunities and potentially more money earned from such customers over time in mutually beneficial contracts arrangements.
4) Revenue Per Opportunity
The Revenue per Opportunity (RPO) metric measures the average revenue generated from a single sales opportunity from start until finish regardless of its closure status (won/lost).
The RPO equation: calculate “Total Revenue Generated” divided by “Total Number Of Opportunities” then multiply it by 100%.
This gives you an estimation of how much money comes out of each sale attempt made by your organisation over time, as well as insights into lost sales that could have potentially been won if different tactics were applied.
5) Cost-Per-Lead
When it comes to paid ads, measuring sales metrics is key.
CPL measures the cost of acquiring a new lead through your marketing and sales efforts.
Doing this helps you to understand the efficiency and effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and how much you are spending to generate new leads.
Calculate this by dividing the total cost of your marketing campaign by the number of leads generated.
To lower your CPL, ensure you are targeting the right audience, optimising the conversion rate of your landing pages and continuously refining your campaigns based on performance data.
6) Average Days to Close
Knowing how long it typically takes for sales reps to close a deal can help inform strategies for shortening the process or investing further resources in getting up-and-running quickly when engaging with new prospects.
Calculate it by taking the total number of days it took to close all deals in a given period, and then dividing that number by the total number of deals closed in that same period.
7) Number of Sales Activities
This metric measures the total number of actions taken by your sales team.
This can include activities such as phone calls, emails, meetings, presentations, and demos.
Sales team incentives are just one way you can increase the activities. It’s important to track this data as it gives you an indication into the effort and motivation of your staff.
The aim of these activities, of course, is to generate engagement, which brings us to sales metric number 8…
8) Sales Engagements Rate
Calculate the sales engagement rate by taking the number of successful sales interactions, such as phone calls or meetings, and dividing it by the total number of activities.
You can improve this rate by utilising a CRM to manage and track your leads, and to automate certain tasks such as follow-up emails.
9) Sales Qualified Opportunity Rate
Your SQO rate is fundamental when it comes to lead generation.
It measures the percentage of leads that have been qualified by the sales team as having the potential to become paying clients.
To calculate it, divide the number of leads that have been qualified by the sales team by the total number of leads generated, and multiply by 100.
10) Percentage of Reps Meeting Quota
It’s always important for each individual member of your sales team to hold accountability for their results.
But measuring this doesn’t have to be daunting for the individuals. Instead you can offer rewards and incentives if sales reps are hitting their targets on a regular basis.
To have everyone in your team smashing their targets, it’s important to consider how best to motivate them, which may include career progression, training and great leadership.
11) Churn Rate
Knowing how good you are at keeping clients is a KPI that can be critical to the long term success of your business.
Examining churn rate means knowing why and how often your existing customers are leaving you. Churn is key to improvements for better success in the future.
Calculate churn rate by dividing the total number of churned customers over a given period by the number of customers you had on the first day of the specific period.
12) Customer Acquisition cost (CAC)
Keeping track of CAC allows companies to gain valuable insights into how much they need to invest upfront per customer before closing a deal.
Understanding this ratio means it’s easier for you to make decisions about budgets down the line as well as cutting back where necessary.
It will also help you to explore ways your company might better invest its funds while seeing better return on investment across all campaigns.
13) Email Open Rate
Email open rate is simply a percentage of recipients who opened an email out of the total number of emails sent.
To give you a benchmark idea, a study by Campaign Monitor found the average email open rate was 21.5%.
To improve this rate, refresh your mailing list, make the subject line more enticing and experiment with the time you send emails.
14) Email Click-Through Rate
Email click-through rate is a metric that measures the number of clicks a specific email campaign receives divided by the number of times the email was delivered.
To calculate CTR, divide the number of clicks by the number of delivered emails and multiply by 100 to get a percentage.
To improve your CTR, personalise your email content by segmenting your audience, ensure your emails are mobile friendly, include eye-catching design and include a call-to-action.
15) Net Promoter Score
Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures satisfaction and loyalty levels among existing customers.
It is calculated by asking customers to rate their likelihood of recommending a service to others on a scale of 0-10.
Survey results gathered shed light into areas requiring improvement such as customer service. By investing time into NPS insights, you can help to decrease your churn rate.
16) Customer Lifetime value (CLV)
This metric estimates the net profit attributed to the entire future relationship with a client.
It’s important because it helps you understand the potential value of a client and make informed decisions about your marketing and sales expenditure.
To calculate CLV, multiply the average value of a sale, by the customer’s average purchasing value, average purchasing frequency and the average lifespan of your clientele.
It’s important to note that this is helpful for forecasting, but offers no guarantee.
17) Social Engagement Rate
Let’s talk about social media.
Your engagement rate measures the level of interaction and engagement that your brand’s social media post receives.
A key step in your sales funnel, it should be the aim of businesses in the B2B space to improve this number to spread awareness and top-of-funnel activity.
Social media platforms, such as LinkedIn, will provide you with analytics, including your engagement figures, for each and every post you make.
You can improve your engagement on Socials by creating a consistent strategy and sticking to it, as well as engaging with comments and in the news feed yourself.
18) Market Penetration
Market Penetration refers to the extent to which a service is being used by customers in a particular market.
It is a measure of how much of the market is being captured by a specific company or brand.
It is important to know this to help you understand your position within the market and identify potential growth opportunities.
One way to calculate this is to divide the number of customers using a service by the total number of potential customers in the market.
There are many ways to attempt to increase your market penetration, such as raising awareness of your service, maintaining current client relationships and deploying targeted marketing campaigns using segmentation.
19) Content & Website ROI
Considering how much your website costs to run, and how much you spend on creating content at all stages of your sales funnel, work out how much this investment is making you.
Measure the ROI by dividing your revenue generated by the cost of creating and promoting the website and content creation.
You can improve ROI by ensuring you are fully optimised for SEO, by creating high-quality and relevant content, by improving the user and experience and by testing different strategies for promoting the website or content.
Additionally, you can focus on conversion rate optimisation (CRO) and using data to drive decisions.
How do you Analyse Sales Metrics to Improve Results?
Sales metrics alone are simply data. It’s what you do with the information that can enhance your performance and propel your business growth.
Analysing sales metrics may seem overly technical to begin with, which can be daunting for some. But don’t worry, it’s not as complicated as it may seem.
All you need is a deep understanding of the data points used to measure performance and a strategic mindset.
Firstly, you need to develop an understanding of what each metric means. Make sure you define clear objectives for each metric you are tracking and include data-driven benchmarks for measuring your progress.
Secondly, you need to be consistent in your measurements to give you constant visibility into the current state of your business performance at all times. There are software tools available to help you automate this.
Thirdly, you should analyse trends over time to identify strengths and weaknesses in your performance. This longer term analysis will give sales managers invaluable understanding of the factors driving sales performance.
Next, use benchmarking analysis to gain a competitive advantage. This means comparing your sales metrics against industry standards and other competitors in your market to identify areas where improvements are needed.
Finally, you should use all of this data collection to set new goals.
Generating strategies using sales metrics serves two purposes; firstly, they will give your team a focal point to collectively rally around, and secondly, they provide your sales leaders with tangible targets to strive for.
Leveraging Technology to Enhance Sales Results
At Excelerate360, we understand the importance of utilising data to drive sales results.
That’s why we have invested heavily in a sophisticated tech stack that all of our clients have transparent access to.
This allows them to make informed decisions and take a data-driven approach to their sales strategy.
If you want instant access to this technology, and to propel your lead generation strategy, please don’t hesitate to get in touch and we’ll be more than happy to walk you through it.