Properly measuring your sales performance is essential for driving growth within your business. Usually, companies stick to measuring common key performance indicators (KPIs) such as goal achievement and quota attainment.
But if you’re in sales, you know that these aren’t the only important indicators you should be monitoring.
If you are looking to better measure the success of your performance as a salesperson or your sales team, keep reading to learn what you should measure and why these are key for growth.
The importance of tracking performance
To make accurate decisions about what is and isn’t working within your sales process, you need to have tangible data. Without data, you are making decisions based on what you THINK will happen.
This obviously isn’t the best way to make critical business decisions. When decisions are based on instinct, there’s no real way of telling what is performing well. Think of it as just the best guess.
We all know guessing won’t lead to the results we are looking for.
So what do you need to measure these metrics fully and accurately?
- Average Lead Response Time
Time is money and if you’re letting a lead sit around and wait, chances are they won’t be so willing to work with you.
Longer response time = Lower performance rate
Did you know that having companies with faster response times win up to 50% of sales?
When you let a qualified lead wait, they will move on to other things, or even worse, your competitor’s website.
There are a few things you can do to improve your lead conversion and pipeline metrics, both of which are based on the most important metric: speed.
Conversational marketing is marketing that talks to consumers. This can be done through live chat, chatbots, voice assistants, or other forms of conversational AI.
Replacing extensive form fills for simple questions that can be asked and answered in real-time can greatly improve your lead response time.
For example, if you work on roofing, a common question could be about materials used.
Try implementing a chatbot on your website with prompts following frequently asked questions or a Schedule a meeting link.
- Sales Productivity
Sales productivity is key to determining the ratio of effectiveness (outputs) versus efficiency (inputs)
Simply put, sales productivity is the maximizing of sales results while minimizing the number of resources needed.
According to HubSpot, Salespeople spend just one-third of their day talking to prospects, 21% of their day writing emails, 17% entering data, another 17% prospecting and researching leads, 12% going to internal meetings, and 12% scheduling calls.
As a salesperson, your goal is to spend as much time as you can talking to prospects. But with the amount of time spent researching, replying to emails, and scheduling calls has left less time for focusing on generating qualified leads.
Take time to analyze your sales productivity. Find out what you are spending most of your time on. Is talking to prospects low on the list?
Once you uncover what is hindering your sales productivity, you can make the necessary changes to increase effectiveness and efficiency within your sales process.
- Opportunity-to-Win Ratio
Measuring your opportunity-to-win ratio will help you determine your rate of success in converting qualified leads to closed deals.
Being able to see this metric will help you answer questions like, “Why was this sale lost”, “Was it lost to a competitor?” “Where in the funnel did they fall off?”
Having these answers will also pose a way for you to determine if the lost lead was due to a poor response time, a lack of rapport building, or maybe it wasn’t a qualified lead.
Whatever it may be, your opportunity-to-win ratio will help you make the necessary changes to your sales process or your sales team as a collective to improve the effectiveness of your efforts.
Sales can be tricky. And there are a lot of factors that can lead to a lost sale. But properly and accurately measuring key performance indicators will give you an answer on how you can improve sales efforts, individually or collectively as a sales team.
At conXpros we specialize in helping Home Improvement professionals generate high-quality leads. If you’re looking for support on lead generation, feel free to schedule a meeting or view our website to learn more about our process!
For more tips on all things Home Improvement Sales, check out our blog and Sales Tip Center!