Essential Sales Metrics to Drive Your Business Growth

Your goal is to hit your revenue number – whether it is just you or a team. While you do that, there are a few key metrics that will identify trends related to your sales that provide insights into efforts.

“There are certain key metrics that are indicators that your sales process is on or off track.” 

Keep an eye on these metrics and ask yourself the following questions as you look to improve your sales process.

• Opportunities. Do you have enough open opportunities to close new business and did this number increase in line with your projections that you used to set quota? This guides you to make sure you are spending enough effort on prospecting – bringing in new opportunities that may become customers.
• Sales Cycle. You sales cycle is how long it takes form the time you connect with a prospect until you close a sale. What is you average sales cycle and is it longer or shorter than expected?
• Time Spent Selling. Am I (or my sales team) spending enough time selling? Take the time to measure how much time your reps actually spend selling.
• Win Rate. Did your win rate stay within the acceptable range that you expected or was it higher or lower than expected? And why? Did it drop because deals were larger? Did it drop because you were selling to a new market? Keeping track of opportunity win rate gives you some insight into the ability of your reps to close a deal.
• Average Deal Size. Is your average deal size larger or smaller than expected and why? The average size of closed won deals is a metric which can quickly flag deals that may not be worth pursuing or larger deals that need attention.

These sales metrics are worth keeping an eye on as they will alert you to trends and also allow you to forecast better in the future.