By measuring salespeople’s activities, you can see where their time is actually being spent. At the same time, you can track the results of the actions they take.
When sales activities are measured and reported at the individual, team, and company levels, you can track progress toward goals, make necessary changes, and reward success.
In this blog post, we’ll go over the most important metrics for sales activities and results, focusing specifically on B2B sales.
Sales team activities are measured using specific, agreed-upon metrics, which may include, for example, emails sent, calls made, or scheduled customer meetings. Exactly what is measured or which metrics are prioritized depends on the company and its goals, but certain metrics are universally applicable in all B2B sales work.
When measuring sales activities, we track salespeople’s daily work and the results it produces. It is difficult to influence many of the factors that affect a company’s success, but sales activity is a concrete factor that can be influenced. For example, tasks completed, customer outreach, the number of deals initiated, and the results generated by these actions are all easily measurable.
If, for example, a salesperson fails to meet their targets, by tracking the right metrics, you can see whether the poor results stem from the salesperson not reaching out to enough prospects or from the fact that the salesperson has indeed been active but hasn’t closed any deals.
It is important to measure sales performance at both the individual salesperson and team levels, so that individual salespeople’s performance can be benchmarked against the team’s overall performance.
Only what is measured can be consciously improved. Measuring sales enables setting goals and tracking their achievement. It also helps reward success. By tracking metrics, you can see where salespeople’s resources are being allocated and what kind of results their work is producing.
Measuring sales also provides answers as to why some salespeople or teams perform better than others. When clear data is available on the reasons for their success, others can learn from their approach.
For example, if an individual salesperson is struggling to meet their sales target, tracking the right metrics can help pinpoint the causes. Is the problem that the salesperson isn’t reaching out to enough customers, or that, despite diligent outreach, deals aren’t progressing to closed sales?
When the right metrics are selected and reporting is consistent, the sales team’s performance can be optimized, which helps the entire company succeed more effectively.
A prerequisite for measurement is having accurate and reliable data on salespeople’s activities. To achieve this, a sufficiently versatile CRM tool should be in use. In addition, the entire sales team must commit to using the tool in their daily work, so that, for example, all conversations with prospects and customers, quotes submitted, and scheduled meetings are logged in the system, as well as closed and lost deals.
The CRM system should also provide automated reports on sales activities, allowing data to be tracked on a per-salesperson and per-team basis.
When there is a lot of data available, it can be difficult to determine what exactly should be tracked. Tracking should focus on key metrics, allowing you to address the right areas for improvement.
Here are the most important metrics for sales activities that you should at least track and report on.
Through the CRM system, salespeople receive tasks either via automation, assigned by a manager, or created by the salesperson themselves. Tasks include, for example, contacting a potential customer, scheduling a meeting, or sending an email. Tasks also allow you to track an individual salesperson’s workload and easily compare whether the workload is distributed evenly across the team or if one salesperson is taking on more work than the others.
Salespeople can send emails both personally to a specific customer and as automated messages. You can view the number of emails sent during the week at both the individual salesperson and team levels. In addition, we’ll take a closer look at the open and reply rates for these emails. And how often do the emails lead to clicks on the links they contain, event registrations, or meeting bookings?
How many calls does a salesperson make per week, and what kind of results do they produce? When tracking calls, it’s important to monitor how many of them lead to a conversation and how often that conversation leads to follow-up actions, such as a meeting or a request for a quote.
The number of customer meetings is an important metric, since without meetings, sales usually don’t happen. It’s worth tracking how many meetings a salesperson has during the week, how many of them are with existing customers, and how many are with potential customers. If a salesperson doesn’t have enough customer meetings, is it because they haven’t reached out to enough prospects, or have those outreach efforts failed to lead to meetings for one reason or another?
Even more important than the number of client meetings is their success rate. How many of these meetings lead to a proposal, a follow-up meeting, or a sale? If a salesperson has many meetings but the results aren’t up to par, the focus should be on identifying the causes of the poor results. On the other hand, if there is a salesperson on the team whose meetings consistently yield a significantly higher success rate than others, lessons can be learned from their approach.
In addition to the tasks assigned to a salesperson, we track how many of those tasks the salesperson completes on a daily basis.
How many upcoming tasks does a salesperson have, for example, for the coming week, and are the tasks distributed evenly among the salespeople?
When it comes to tasks, it’s also worth monitoring whether a salesperson regularly has overdue tasks. Are they actually overdue, or has the salesperson simply forgotten to mark them as completed? If a salesperson fails to complete tasks on time, the reason may be a lack of initiative. It could also be that the salesperson has too many tasks assigned to them, in which case you may need to adjust how work is allocated.
How many new sales opportunities—or deals—does a salesperson open in the CRM system in a week, for example?
And how many of the deals they open do salespeople close—that is, how many actually progress to a sale?
Hit rate refers to the percentage of new sales opportunities that are closed, meaning how effectively the team converts prospects into new customers. The hit rate can be tracked at the team level and compared to an individual salesperson’s success rate. If the team’s overall hit rate is low, the cause may be a lack of high-quality leads or insufficient training for the salespeople. If, on the other hand, one salesperson’s hit rate is significantly higher than the others’, the rest of the team can learn from their sales techniques.
How long does it take, on average, for a salesperson to reach out to a customer assigned to them, and how does this response time compare to the set targets?
Does the sales representative meet the assigned target time when a customer contacts them? If the response time is too long, solutions can be considered to address the issue. On the other hand, if the problem is a lack of time, the salesperson’s or the entire team’s workload can be better organized.
If a salesperson’s average deal size is lower than the company-wide average, the solution might lie in additional training for that salesperson. And what does a salesperson who closes deals larger than the average do differently from the rest of the team?
An individual salesperson’s sales may consist mainly of upselling to existing customers or entirely of sales to new customers. Of course, this is also influenced by how responsibilities are divided among salespeople—that is, whether some salespeople focus more on acquiring new customers than others. It’s also worth tracking this metric at the team level. Growing existing customer relationships is an important—and often the easiest—way to increase sales, but acquiring new customers should not be overlooked.
How well does a salesperson meet the personal sales targets set for them? If a salesperson or the entire team consistently falls short of sales targets, the reason may be insufficient effort or unrealistic targets. On the other hand, if targets are exceeded every month, they’ve likely been set too low, and the sales team could achieve even better results if the targets were more ambitious.
When selecting metrics, prioritize those that are most useful for the company’s business operations. Additionally, you should define the targets against which results will be compared.
The volume of activities and the progress of results should be monitored regularly. This makes it clear whether the sales team is heading in the right direction. However, mere monitoring alone won’t get you very far; necessary changes should be made based on the data. On the other hand, don’t forget to reward the team when progress is evident in the results.
HubSpot CRM makes it easy to track sales activities and the results they produce. You can create customized reports in HubSpot that allow you to track selected metrics both on a per-salesperson basis and for the entire team.
If you need help with sales measurement and reporting, please contact us or book a time slot on the calendar!