How to Define Success for Your Sales Team. Hint: It’s About More than Just Revenue

When it comes to evaluating sales team growth and overall success, most executive teams start by looking at metrics like net income and revenue. However, while sales are an important piece of the puzzle, it isn’t always easy to generate new growth by mulling over past numbers. Success in business comes in many forms, and sometimes tracking the right metrics can help to inspire your team and lead to a better tomorrow.

7 Alternative Ways to Measure Sales Team Success

All too often, meetings with your sales team might revolve around the current month to date totals. However, focusing on other aspects of the sales funnel could help your entire crew to generate the right kind of business, improving your company in every area. Next, we’ll explore seven alternative ways to measure the success of your sales team.

Consider adding lead quality metrics to your sales KPIs.

1. Improved Lead Quality

All sales leads are not created equal. While a sheet of phone numbers and contact names can certainly be helpful, focusing on finding the right prospects can help reduce your company labor costs and improve revenue. Talk with your sales team about doing their research to find leads with depth and genuine interest. By paying more attention to finding quality sales leads instead of focusing solely on quantity, you may even lower your customer acquisition costs.

On your company metrics dashboards, pay attention to the source of your newest incoming leads, and ask your team to center more attention on sales leads that are likely to lead to large orders or an expanding customer base.

Conversion rates can be a great way to measure the quality of leads that your sales team is contacting.

2. Higher Conversion Rates

If your sales team is doing a great job contacting prospects but has a hard time closing deals, focus on improving your conversion rates. Ask your sales team to focus on their BOFU goals to help customers who may have questions about your products or services.

Additionally, tracking customer pain points by talking with clients can help to streamline the purchase process, which can improve your sales. For instance, Sococo, a company that focuses on creating workplace dashboards for remote coworkers, began keeping track of pain points on their company health dashboard to streamline their marketing efforts, improving their win rate.

Although difficult to measure, focusing on keeping prospects happy can be a great way for your sales team to measure their success.

3. Happier Customers

When you have clients who are happy with your products and the level of service they are given, they will spend more and rely on your business. Make customer interaction a priority with your sales team, and work together to create initiatives to eliminate problems throughout the sales process. Ask your sales team if they have ideas about how to reach out to prospective clients, such as through their own social networks. By focusing on the customer experience through targeted sales tactics, your team may be able to open new doors.

Measuring repeat business and monitoring what those customers look like, can help bring more customers in the door that will stay longer.

4. More Repeat Business

Repeat business is crucial for helping your growing company, especially if you market a physical product. Have your sales team keep an eye on customer lifetime values, new accounts, and repeat clients. Set goals like improving cart totals and encouraging client loyalty. Encourage repeat business by having your sales team create incentives for returning customers, and track the success of those promotions.

Every sales team wants a shorter sales cycle. Measuring this can help you track if you're keeping up on leads or not.

5. Shorter Cycle Time

The longer your conversion time frame, the higher your customer acquisition costs become. Encourage your sales team to work on shortening the sales cycle time by walking customers through the entire process and being available for clients who have questions along the way. Explain that by vetting the right leads early on in the process, the entire sales cycle shortens and produces better results.

Sales is all about relationships. Teach your team to build relatinships, not just sell.

6. Relationships with Larger Clients

Although it definitely pays to have a diverse customer base, creating relationships with larger clients can help to spread the word about your company while also driving sales. Work with your sales team to identify and target clients that have large networks to facilitate future growth.

If your sales team is happy they'll be able to make their prospects happy.

7. Improved Sales Team Morale

Although it might not seem like a big piece of the puzzle, working towards a happier, more fulfilled sales team can drive the passion and energy you need to keep your company moving forward. Create incentives with your team to encourage success, and talk with each team member individually to coach them.

Monitor your sales KPIs with a Grow business intelligence dashboard for SMBs.

Using Sales KPIs to Track Your Progress

Making the choice to coach your sales team is important, but keeping an eye on the numbers can help everyone to know whether or not you are meeting your goals. To make metrics easy to track, focus on finding a business intelligence platform that meshes with your sales software. By taking this simple step, you can make it easy to monitor everything from sales lead sources and cost per customer to average ad spend and the number of new users.  

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