Metrics Used to Evaluate Your Sales Results

Many owners believe that sales is the easiest group to measure in their entire organization. Top line revenue does accurately reflect the result of your sales team. The dilemma for an owner is that if sales are off from Q1 to Q2 that revenue metric only tells you where you are not WHAT you can do to fix the problem.

This post will give you some additional thoughts about things you can measure in your sales organization that can shed some light on where the sales train is going off the track.

Numbers

1. # of phone outbound calls
2. # of contacts to appointments or full presentations
3. # of referrals generated
4. # of new prospects added to database
5. # of existing customer who placed follow-up orders in a fixed time period
6. # of sales of a particular product

Time

1. Time from lead generation to qualification
2. Time from qualifying conversation to proposal
3. Time from proposal to order
4. Time from qualification to order

Dollars

1. Avg transaction value
2. Avg spend per customer per year
3. Avg gross/net margin
4. Avg size of first order compared to fourth order

I am not at all suggesting this list is complete, just wanted to give you some things think about.  Also, I am not suggesting that every manager should be looking at all of these metrics.  I think that most organziations with a good list of 5 metrics accurately measured and reported (broken down by team and individual)  is solid for most organizations.

Posted in Cost of Sales, Strategy