The features and benefits of sales performance indicators
Sales performance is an essential aspect of a global strategy to ensure a company's long-term survival. It refers to a company's ability to generate maximum sales from the human, financial and material resources at its disposal. To measure sales performance, it is necessary to use Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): metrics that enable the profitability of a sales action to be determined in relation to an objective, over a given period (increase in sales, rise in sales volume, rate of return, rebound rate, etc.).
Why measure your sales performance?
Generally speaking, sales performance is linked to a company's overall performance. It makes it possible to identify the growth levers that are working, and to draw up an effective action plan to reinforce them. Sales performance is also a reliable yardstick for identifying a company's weaknesses, enabling it to find solutions or anticipate any problems that may arise.
How do you measure a company's sales performance?
To analyze a company's sales performance, it's essential to use the right tools to track efficiency indicators, such as a sales dashboard or CRM software.
The structured interface of a performance chart provides a clear view of the sales indicators you decide to track. Thanks to this type of tool, you can also identify trends in your business, communicate the right data to your sales teams and use them to help you make the right decisions for your marketing and sales strategy.
CRM (Customer Relation Management) software enables you to analyze and track sales performance indicators simply and effectively. The use of this type of tool centralizes all data relating to customer profiles, sales appointments and the sales pipeline, facilitating analysis and the communication to be established around these various success indicators.
What are the main sales performance indicators?
Sales performance indicators can be used to assess a company's numerical performance (sales growth, conversion rates, etc.) as well as its qualitative performance (customer loyalty, etc.).
These types of measurement indicators are generally concrete figures based on the performance of your company's sales force. They can be tracked from month to month or year to year, and allow you to assess your teams' productivity levels.
Quantitative performance indicators
Here are the most important quantitative sales performance indicators to track:
- the number of telephone calls made in the course of prospecting ;
- the number of qualified leads ;
- the number of visitors to your website;
- the total number of appointments booked ;
- sales volume recorded ;
- sales cycle lead time (long or short) ;
- the number of sales in progress and the number of sales lost ;
- the number of new customers signed ;
- average sales basket ;
- the number of shopping cart abandonments ;
- sales achieved.
Qualitative performance indicators
Because the quantitative results of sales performance don't depend solely on the sales teams, it's important to take qualitative criteria into account when assessing the overall skills of your sales force.
Here are the most important qualitative sales performance indicators to track:
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- the level of qualification of the prospecting file ;
- the real causes of lost opportunities;
- customer satisfaction (using CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software);
- the number of customer service complaints ;
- Customer objections and the quality of responses.
To further define, optimize and analyze your sales and digital marketing strategy, you can also determine KPIs in the form of rates.
Sales performance indicators in the form of rates
Among the most relevant, we recommend you follow :
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- Appointment booking rate: this is the number of sales appointments concluded as a result of prospecting carried out by your teams. This sales performance indicator enables you to analyze your sales force's skills in transforming a meeting into an introductory appointment;
- Transformation rate: this concerns the volume of appointments that lead to a sale. This KPI is used in particular to assess the negotiating skills of your sales force;
- Customer retention rate: this is the number of customers who return year after year. It is used to assess customer loyalty;
- attrition rate: this KPI is used to assess the number of customers who have not placed an order this year. It can be used to identify problems in lead nurturing;
- the open rate: this allows you to measure the impact of your e-mailing campaigns on your target audience. It concerns the percentage of people who opened your e-mail after receiving it;
How do you choose your indicators?
To choose the right sales performance indicators, we recommend that you first look at your objectives. A sales KPI must be linked to a pre-determined SMART objective that is beneficial to the company. It is therefore essential to use KPIs that will be useful to your company's growth when you analyze them.
Be precise and choose the key performance indicators that will speak most to your sales teams and correlate with your sales strategy and action plan. Choose no more than 10 to avoid getting lost in the results. Use the right tools (CRM software, management dashboards) to enable you to track KPIs effectively without getting lost.
Finally, select the KPIs according to your company's needs and expectations. KPI analysis must be carried out in a logical way, according to the size of your company and your expectations.
Would you like more information about sales performance indicators?
Don't hesitate to contact us. We'd be delighted to help you choose the right products to boost the performance of your sales strategy!
