What are metrics? Metrics are figures that tell you important information about a process you are investigating. They tell you accurate measurements about how the process is functioning and provide a base for you to suggest improvements.
Measuring metrics are useful because:
- Realistic sales productivity metrics helps to improve a sales reps' performance. Remember if you want to improve it, you have to measure it.
- Sales metrics give management teams the opportunity to identify what is working and what isn't, across a variety of process points-lead generation, lead qualifying, sales closes, lead sourcing, and more.
- Metrics are just as much about motivating a team as they are about measuring its performance.
- If goals and metrics are unclear, it causes unnecessary stress and lost productivity.
- Good metrics and processes give managers the opportunity to be more effective, but more importantly a rep can only give top maximum effort when they clearly understand the reward.
Types of metrics to measure to improve your sales performance:
- Total sales by time period - Here you will measure your sales for a certain time period and compare it to a previous time period, this will show you how well your sales are performing.
- Sales by product or service - By tracking these sales figures you well be able to see what product or service is successful and which are not. The product or service that is the best-selling is where you should spend more time promoting. This will also help you in the long run, for example if your sales are declining you then will have to update your product or service to be more up to date with the current market that you operate in. You will also be able to identify the potential of your product or service has in the future.
- Sales by lead source - By tracking this you will know which lead source to spend more money on advertising. You will also be able to optimise your lead generation.
- Revenue per sale - The easiest way to increase sales and profits for most companies is to increase the average revenue per sale. You won't be able to improve this metric if you don't measure it.
- New vs. returning customer sales - What percentages of your sales are coming from new customers versus returning customers? By tracking this you will be able to identify if your marketing tactics are working. This will also help you identify if you need to improve your customer retention as this can dramatically improve sales and profits.
