40 sales indicators for you to choose and apply
How can sales indicators help you sell better? There is no doubt that measuring and monitoring key performance indicators, or KPIs, enables companies to achieve their business objectives more quickly.
Commercial indicators, whether qualitative or quantitative, are many and varied. Tracking them on a sales dashboard within CRM software, for example, helps you adapt your sales management and lead a winning strategy.
What is a commercial indicator? How do you define a KPI? Which tools can help? We'll show you why, in order to measure performance, adopting a CRM system is key to monitoring your indicators.
What is a commercial indicator?
A sales indicator, also known as a KPI, is a metric relating to a sales process, in this case, within the company. For example, sales volume. Sales is important and the sales volume indicator is a key indicator of whether sales is going well or not.
What is a KPI?
KPI is the abbreviation for Key Performance Indicator. When you read KPI, you mean indicator. You can use, or even create, any KPIs you like. Above we gave the example of a sales KPI; another sales KPI could be the average ticket, margin, among others.
What is performance?
It's the result of indicators, significant and positive figures for the company's growth, such as the number of sales, average ticket, profitability, etc.
Performance is not just about "good numbers"; meeting customer needs and satisfying them with the right product or service is also part of the performance equation.
👉 It's worth remembering that sales performance doesn't just depend on the work of sales teams, however competent and efficient they may be.
To measure sales performance, companies use KPIs. This also applies to other areas of the company's business: marketing indicators or indicators related to human resources.
Why measure sales performance?
Sales performance is a marker of the company's overall performance.
- They identify what works and what doesn't;
- It allows you to reinforce what is working;
The target is very important, but equally important are the indicators, which accompany, monitor and measure it. Measuring the performance of your business gives you the visibility you need to drive and adapt your goal and strategy. Knowing the right time to accelerate or implement changes is essential for the continuous development of a company.
How to implement performance indicators?
Having better understood what performance is, it's time to talk about how to implement indicators to track and monitor the performance of your business. We suggest adopting tools (software) that will automate and help with this process. CRM is a good example.
To implement indicators, you need to
- Define what you want to track. Specific sales of a product? Your sales funnel? The satisfaction of your employees?
- Connect the indicator to an objective and/or strategy. There's no point in having an indicator without it being connected to an objective. Otherwise, you won't know how to interpret the information the indicator is providing;
- Choose the indicator effectively. For example, if you want to monitor the performance of the sales funnel. It might be pertinent to have indicators that track: number of leads, number of leads that have been contacted, number of leads that have received a proposal, number of leads that have become customers;
- Determine how this will be monitored, via software? Spreadsheet? And how often? Weekly, monthly?
- Tell your stakeholders that this indicator will be used to measure objective X or whether strategy Y is working;
- Do the actual monitoring and, if necessary, make adjustments.
That's it! Congratulations, you've implemented the indicator. Now, watch out! Don't fall into the trap of implementing dozens of indicators, try to keep it simple and short; in the end, you don't want to spend more time implementing and monitoring than actually selling.
40 indicators to monitor to calculate your business's performance
To measure your performance without getting lost, there are various ways of categorizing indicators, whether quantitative or qualitative. Note that some indicators can fit into more than one category.
The chart below shows one possible way of developing a typology of indicators:
Performance indicators based on rates
- Conversion rate: the sales performance indicator par excellence, because it measures how many potential customers actually become customers;
- Retention rate: Customers who continue to trust you after a first purchase;
- Loyalty rate: these are customers who have purchased your products or services at least twice;
- Attrition rate: the inverse of the loyalty rate, it calculates the percentage of customers lost and therefore helps measure customer satisfaction;
- Win rate: measures the prospecting effort, for example by measuring the total number of meetings booked in relation to the total number of potential meetings.
Quantitative indicators
- Number of meetings with potential clients;
- Number of sales made (confirmed orders);
- Number of sales in progress;
- Number of lost sales;
- Number of new clients;
- Number of customers lost;
- Number of leads, or business opportunities;
- Value of sales;
- Turnover generated;
- Average ticket is the total amount sold divided by the number of sales;
Qualitative indicators
- Percentage of qualified leads;
- Level of lead qualification (quantity and quality of information available);
- Knowledge of the competition;
- Knowledge of the sales cycle;
- Knowledge of the sales pitch;
- Knowledge of the customer's buying journey;
- Knowledge of common questions and appropriate answers;
- Knowledge of commercial deadlines.
Indicators related to prospecting
- Number of calls made,
- Number of emails sent,
- Number of calls completed with breakdown by closing status,
- Number of emails opened,
- Number of replies to emails,
- Number of business opportunities evaluated,
- Number of tracks detected,
- Evaluation of detected projects,
- Time spent between the start of the prospecting process and the conclusion of the sale,
- Cost of customer acquisition,
- Cost per prospect, or cost per lead (CPL).
Indicators on your website
- Number of visits to your site;
- CPC (Cost per click);
- Number of content downloads;
- Clicks (CTA);
- Number of forms filled in;
- Number of visits to a landing page;
How do I choose a KPI?
The choice of relevant indicators is specific to each company. Here are some tips on how to choose a performance indicator:
- 1 indicator = 1 objective. A KPI should be used directly to measure the company's objectives and strategies;
- 1 indicator = 1 decision. It is a tool to help make decisions on specific points. Monitoring KPIs is good, analyzing them and drawing the appropriate conclusions is even better;
- Simplicity: choose simple KPIs that speak for themselves and their teams. Also, don't try to multiply the KPIs at the risk of drowning in numbers and losing all interest in monitoring.
How to measure sales performance?
The advantages of investing in a CRM system
Once you have chosen the relevant performance indicators for your business, you need to be able to analyze them and monitor their evolution in different contexts (over time, by salesperson, for example) in order to make the right decisions.
The best tool for this is CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software. It makes it easy to access and measure the most important commercial indicators for your business. It also reduces the volume of administrative tasks for your sales team.
Which software should you choose to monitor your sales performance?
CRM software, or customer relationship management software, is an extremely important tool not only for monitoring indicators, but also for organizing salesactivities and processes. Here are three tools with advanced performance monitoring features.
Salesforce Sales Cloud
Salesforce, if there's one CRM or software you may have heard of, it's Salesforce. It almost needs no introduction, but Salesforce really is one of the most complete solutions on the market and has a range of applications to help your company grow.
What you'll find in Salesforce that will help you monitor your performance:
- Available for any device, giving you the mobility to track your sales from anywhere;
- Opportunity management;
- Sales forecasts;
- Reports and dashboards;
- Customize reports easily (drag and drop).
SinglePoint.CRM
SinglePoint.CRM is a very complete CRM. With over 15,000 customers, SinglePoint.CRM has sales, marketing, customer service and project modules. It can even be customized to meet specific needs.
To monitor and measure your performance, you'll find
- Management reports with the activities carried out by the sales team;
- Sales cycle management;
- Tracking and control of visits;
- Lead management.
SinglePoint.CRM
Smark CRM
Smark CRM is a CRM focused on accelerating your sales, with functionalities that allow you to manage the area, the team and the processes. It includes the main indicators needed to monitor performance.
You'll find in Smark CRM that will contribute to your performance:
- Intuitive dashboard;
- Sales funnel;
- Visits and calls tracking;
- Customer relationship history.
Smark CRM
To monitor is to boost
If you still had doubts, you're now convinced of the importance of indicators for monitoring your business's performance. Don't let yourself drown in the volume of tasks, implementing and monitoring KPIsis essential for the growth and sustainability of your company.
All you have to do is choose the indices that are relevant to your business, and monitor them using dedicated software. Happy monitoring!
Article translated from Portuguese