Six Sales KPI Metrics to Empower Your Sales Team in 2022

Regardless of size, product, or industry, coming together as a team and identifying the KPIs that will set you on the right path is a long (but necessary) process.

Unfortunately, many companies get lost along the way. If you searched for “the best sales KPIs” on Google right now, you would come up with millions of results. Some articles even offer more than 30 different KPIs that “every sales leader should be measuring.” 

The problem is that the more KPIs you decide to track, the less effective they are.

In this article, we’d like to share why going insanely granular with your KPIs is a route to confusion and the six KPIs that we’ve found deliver actual impact for sales teams.

Too Many KPIs Are Ruining Your Sales Game

In Sales, we love technology. By integrating sales tools and collecting terabyte after terabyte of data, sales teams can dissect the process (and the art) of sales to incredible extents. You can find data on every aspect of the sales process.

The unending list of sales tools that harness the insights of the frontline sales team is a marvel of modern outbound. But, it is possible to have too much of a good thing.

With access to so many data points, you can go unnecessarily deep and granular when it comes to tracking Sales performance. However, the biggest problem with having 20 KPIs is that you actually have zero. The point of KPIs is to provide your sales with indicators that affect change and impact how each person does their job.

When a sales leader is on their soapbox about twenty different areas of improvement, how can individuals even begin to work toward new goals? It’s frustrating, and we’ve seen it time and time again: 15-20 KPIs measured across the team, most of them based on daily activities, and none of them changing anyone’s actions for the better.

The key to finding KPIs that matter is genuine introspection. Do you know your business well enough to find 2-6 key areas to benchmark? And, can you use those to take the business upward? 

The critical KPIs take hours to plan and various team members to iron out the essential details. Whether your company has just secured Series A funding or is introducing a new arm to its enterprise, your sales team needs to agree on a few leading and lagging metrics that matter.

Six Sales KPI Metrics That Will Lead Your Team to More Revenue

We won’t come outright and tell you which KPIs will be the best for your sales team. You need to do an internal assessment to start figuring that out (or give us a call). However, we will help you understand six KPIs that consistently make an impact on the sales teams that employ them.

The following KPIs unearth details about the sales process, individual efficiency, and critical problem areas that can impact annual revenue negatively. All six may be right for your business or just a select few.

#1 Average Sales Cycle 

We have seen sales org after sales org following the same stringent guidelines of arbitrary day count for the sales cycle across all employees. It’s the way it’s always been done, so why change, right?

Two things about that. 

First, every sales cycle is different. Every salesperson operates differently, and if they run their plays according to their prospects’ needs, their funneling will look different from the next rep’s. Second, not looking at the average sales cycle by rep limits how much managers can understand each rep’s strengths and weaknesses across stages. 

If you start to measure the sales cycle per rep, frontline managers will be able to recognize individual rep trends and coach the individual instead of the team.

Not everyone needs coaching in the same areas. Pinpointing where reps can improve their outcomes will manifest real results in both the seller and the pipeline.

#2 Average Conversion Percent 

Every seller knows the frustration of a conversion dropping out of a sale in the middle of the funnel (or the top or the bottom, for that matter). 

When you keep a consistent record of where your prospects fall out, when they fall out, and with who is valuable data. 

Rather than employing a blanket approach to address conversions, honing into each stage, again by rep, can support targeted remediation and improve outcomes.

#3 Tracking Attributed Closed-Lost Reasons

This is probably one of the most critical sales reports to review. Why? Tracking the reasons a sale fell through can inform the company of potential areas of growth. 

Whether it was poor communication, pricing, features, reputation, reviews, timing, or any other number of reasons people may give for not closing, companies should be tracking this diligently.

Not only does tracking closed/lost metrics help reps better prepare for future objections and obstacles, but it can help them avoid many objections in future sales. For example, by improving communication, creating missing content, updating pricing models, and giving development and leaders feedback on the product when applicable. 

#4 Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC).

There is such a thing as a bad customer. 

Product fit is important, but so is financial applicability. Keeping track of CAC is not always an obvious KPI to sales teams and closers with a quota to hit, but it greatly affects the bottom line.

How long is the onboarding process for this client? What’s the output from your sales team? What’s the output of your customer success team? Has marketing been involved? 

Knowing the cost of a new customer puts sales teams in a better position to make quick decisions about a deal. It also allows managers to elevate to leadership if they see a trend in costs and perhaps need to pivot their strategy to go after the right customers for a healthier business.

Related Content: How To Track the Right Metrics For A Healthy Sales Funnel

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How To Track the Right Metrics For A Healthy Sales Funnel

#5 Product Performance

As salespeople, we should all have the same goal: solve problems and make our clients raving fans of our product. By tracking sales KPI metrics like product performance, salespeople can have a nearly tangible view of how well their client connects and uses the product. If they see outright adoption, it’s an opportunity to upsell or cross-sell. If they see widespread discord, it allows them an opportunity to jump in and see what the issue is.

In many ways, product performance is a value KPI and an opportunity to increase client engagement and set the tone for your relationship. It never goes unnoticed when there’s an opportunity to be a resource and partner for your clients.

#6 Meaningful Conversations

Meaningful conversations is a big one and strays far from the typical KPIs that salespeople are most familiar with in Sales organizations. 

When you can benchmark meaningful conversations among sales, you tap into a sales KPI metric that is realistically indicative of how many meetings you’re going to set and how much pipeline you’re going to generate.

Activity metrics are no longer an accurate forecast metric.

Today, we may ask reps to send out 100 generic emails on a Monday that get no replies by the time the next generic email is scheduled. We may ask for 100 calls every day, but we’re still not setting meetings. 

Do these metrics and results indicate that you should send 100 more generic emails on Monday or make 150 calls a day? (The correct answer is no.)

So what is a meaningful conversation? It’s more than a reply or an answered call, but a positive exchange that gets you to the right person or starts to coordinate a time to meet.

Tracking meaningful conversations achieves two things for sales teams. 

1. It allows them to focus on sending value-driven, personalized emails or messages because they’re not focused on hitting a quantity number.
2. These conversations are a more accurate metric to determine how many conversations reps need to have to get to X number of meetings.

Tracking meaningful conversations is very similar to activity metrics in that the lag metric is the same: meetings set and closed deals. However, activity metrics just no longer mean what they used to because send-all emails and 100s of cold calls no longer work.

Related Content: RevGenius Mag: 5 Takeaways from Why Outbound Isn’t Working for 82% of Companies & How to Fix It

Own Your KPIs and Own Your Sales Growth

Now is the time to introduce KPIs that can challenge your sales team to elevate their performance and their talent. 

As all-star indicators, these KPIs allow you to create a more sustainable culture within your organization of sales excellence and progress. But remember, the KPIs your business chooses to propel its sales beyond last year are specific to you.

They are your KPIs.

No matter how many blogs you read or conferences you attend, the KPIs you track need to match your business goals. 

When you have KPIs you can coach to, ones that can create a cycle of improvement for every individual, these types of KPIs have the greatest impact.