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Sales Strategy
7 impressive sales metrics for winning B2B sales teams
Is your sales team struggling to convert leads into loyal, long-term customers? That’s a common struggle with many modern B2B businesses.
Scattered data points stand at the core of this problem. Billions of rows of unused, siloed data in your CRM, Salesforce, Gong, and other tools in your tech stack can help Sales team formulate better strategies to improve decision-making.
Building a data-driven culture is key in optimizing processes and efficiency, training reps to leverage data in their day-to-day operations to always make the next best step with confidence.
Understanding the insights hidden in your data is crucial, as siloed and disorganized data will only further hinder sales teams from unlocking their peak potential and winning strategies.
For context, B2B sales means selling to C-suite executives and businesses proficient in technology, and closing a deal with them reveals tactics and strategies that can be replicated in the next potential lead.
To achieve this, you need to assess—sales metrics.
These metrics reflect your data in relevant indexes and enhance the productivity and efficiency of your sales teams.
While every sales metric is essential, some help your teams focus on their core competencies. That’s what we’re going to explore today. Intrigued?
Read on to learn:
- What are sales metrics?
- Sales metrics and KPIs (Are they the same?)
- 7 sales metrics your Revenue teams need to increase conversions
Why is it important to track sales metrics?
Sales metrics are crucial data points that measure the success or performance of a sales rep or team based on specific criteria, defining their progress against predetermined goals and strategies.
Tracking metrics helps your sales team spot the strengths and weaknesses in their pitch to avoid making mistakes across channels. These metrics also work as coaching materials to enable managers to compare and contrast a reps’ sales tactics, whether successful or unsuccessful, to guide teams towards more conversions and deals won.
Tracking metrics helps determine if your go-to-market initiatives are paying off or not. You can adjust different aspects like personalization, persuasion, agenda, and language by analyzing different metrics and their success rates.
Pro tip: Don’t focus on one single metric! Consider a combination of satisfaction, performance, and activity metrics for a 360-degree view of your sales team.
What’s the difference between sales metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)?
What are sales metrics?
Sales metrics measure quantifiable data against your sales team's specific activity or process. For example, calls made, leads lost, leads won, customer satisfaction, and more. These metrics help understand team success and are all-encompassing. However, this often overloads the teams with information that can be irrelevant to their sales goals.
For example, companies may track social media metrics, but are they really generating revenue through them? On the other hand, churn rate can help you understand why customers are unsubscribing or leaving your service and find an industry or product gaps.
What are KPIs or Key Performance Indicators?
On the contrary, KPIs are the benchmarks for the success of a specific activity or goal.
KPIs are standards that sales rep should aim to achieve and are specific benchmarks that correlate with organizational goals.
Remember, not everything with numbers is a KPI! Some sales KPIs include:
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
- Churn Rate
- Cost per Acquisition
- PQLs (Product Qualified Leads)
7 sales metrics your sales teams need to enhance conversions
Your sales metrics can be anything from new customers or cold leads to cost spent on retaining existing customers.
The key is to focus on meaningful data that has more relevance in your sales cycle and to your overall business. To make this part easier for you, we’ve gathered 7 impressive sales metrics you should focus on:
- Conversion rate
Sales conversion rate measures the number of leads your team successfully turns into a customer.
Source: Ruler Analytics
This is an essential metric for both your sales and marketing teams.
- It helps the marketing team create and determine quality leads
- It helps the sales team understand the effectiveness of their pitches or strategies
For example: If the marketing team acquired 100 leads and the sales team converted 30 of those leads, the conversion rate for this is 30%.
Sales Conversion = (Leads Converted into Sales / Qualified Leads) x 100
- Churn Rate
The churn rate defines the rate at which a customer stops doing business with your company. A high churn rate means you’re losing customers.
Retention is always cheaper than acquisition (5 times cheaper, if we’re talking numbers)!
Sales and revenue teams can reference churn rates to either improve their marketing tactics and strategies or shift the focus on customer relationship building.
Customer churn rate = (Lost Customers ÷ Total Customers at the Start of Time Period) x 100
According to Bessemer Venture Partners, a good churn annual churn rate is 5% to 7%.
If your churn rate is higher than this, you should rethink your approach and focus on building strategies to reduce this rate.
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
Customer lifetime value is the total revenue your business can expect to receive from a customer.
Customer Lifetime Value = Customer Value x Average Customer Lifespan
For example: For an e-commerce company, let’s say a customer makes a first-time purchase for $150 and continues making purchases over 10 years, averaging $350 a year. This customer would have a CLV of $3500.
CLV rate helps your sales team build customer relationships and enhance the quality of leads they convert. The higher your CLV, the more business you derive from less number of customers.
Pro Tip: Quality over quantity in sales defines winning teams!
- Deal Slippage Rate
The deals that slip from your expected conversion timeline are known as the deal slippage rate. A revenue forecast from a customer helps you define the value you bring in every month or quarter. However, it will not count if that deal is pushed to another timeline.
Slipped deals are also referred to as “Tumbleweed Deals,” meaning your team had tried to close the opportunity, but was delayed due to unforeseen circumstances.
Sales teams can understand slippage using workspaces like Gyaan, where they can map a customer and leads’ journey to alter their sales approach towards the ones in the “Negotiation” phase in image example above.
- Lead response rate
Lead response rate is the time a front line sales rep takes to reach out to an acquired customer, whether it’s through outbound or inbound channels like emails or cold calls.
For example: The sales rep that reaches out to a customer within 5-10 minutes will have more chances to convert them than the sales reps who take days to reach out.
The faster your sales rep response time is—the more likely a quality leads will be provided an opportunity to learn more, gain interest, and move down the pipeline.
- Average Deal Size
Average deal size is a common metric used by B2B SaaS companies that represents the average amount of money customers spend on a software solution. Another way to understand this is the average revenue you make from every closed deal.
This is an important metric for the sales team and the company because it helps see how good their product/service are in terms of sales volume, cost, revenue growth, etc. Analyzing average deal size enables your sales team to determine what features/products are selling well (or aren’t selling well) and how much revenue they’re making per sale.
Average Deal Size = Total Value of Closed Won Opportunities / Number of Total Closed Deals
- Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
Customer acquisition cost defines the average amount spent acquiring a new customer. This generally includes: advertising costs, marketing costs, the salary of sales and marketing reps, and more.
Customer Acquisition Cost = Cost of Sales and Marketing divided by the Number of New Customers Acquired
CAC helps the sales team understand if a lead is worth chasing. For example: If the CAC for a customer is more than your revenue, you should find leads with the same value with less CAC.
To achieve this, focus on high-performing acquisition channels, revisit your pricing, and understand if it’s reasonable for your target market, and use these methods:
- A/B testing to optimize landing pages
- Assess sales funnel for under-performing purchases or steps
- Prioritize sales automation and leverage data to build a sustainable strategy
If you’re able to pinpoint the channels with low CAC, you should divert marketing spend towards them and acquire more leads that are easy to convert.
Choose the right sales metric for the sake of your success
Building winning sales team and operationalizing a winning process is only possible when you equip them with the right metrics and tools to assess and track their performance. Most companies are sitting on loads of unused data, and there’s a great advantage for those who can use data to inform better decisions.
In this article, we’ve mentioned the metrics you should use to help guide your sales teams toward better performance and put your data to use. The arsenal that makes it possible to gain more customers through data—CRM and workspaces. The more complex, dimensional, nuanced, and organized data you have on these platforms, the better data insights you can use for analysis.
At Gyaan, we say, “Kill the game, not the deal,” and that’s only possible when you provide a workspace that empowers your team with all the necessary data to act on. If you’re not already using our workspace, be sure to check it out to learn how Gyaan can help your sales teams make better, informed decisions and never second-guess their next step.
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