Sales KPIs, such as the number of prospect touches, leads, quotes, closed sales, and customer retention metrics, provide valuable insights into sales performance and help businesses identify areas for improvement to achieve revenue goals.
Primary Implication
The best way to hit your monthly sales goal is to ensure that the weekly marketing and sales activities needed to hit your sales goal are getting done. The failure to consistently perform the daily and weekly actions required to convert a lead into a sale is how you come up short on your top line.
The math of business is simple. If you sell less than you planned, you will make less than you want unless you have made a corresponding offset in your expenses. You can only get in front of slowing down expenses if you know in advance through your sales KPIs when sales will be below plan.
Overview
The most common leading indicators that can help you see potential sales performance issues before they negatively impact your profits have their origin in how you best shape the lagging result represented by Net Sales. For example, Net Sales is shaped by the following:
Sales Activity
- Number of prospect touches (calls, emails, appts) per week
- Number of leads received
- Number of quotes, RFP, RFQ, Bids, Look Ats completed per week
- Number of close sales per week
- Conversion rate
- Average transaction size
- Weekly net sales
Customer Retention
- Number of customer returns
- Volume purchased by returning customers
Once you have identified your KPIs for sales, your next step is establishing a baseline to measure current performance against historical. Do this to measure your progress and gauge whether you are doing better or worse than when you started measuring sales activities.
Next is setting activity goals to push your sales function to improve. The gap between your goal and baseline is what you will be working closely to realize your profit plan revenue goals.
