Measuring and tracking your sales team’s ongoing performance is the best indicator you have to consistently manage and deliver on your objectives.
When measuring overall sales performance, you need visibility of your team’s collective efforts and individual performance. A team overview gives you critical details about your sales process and reveals how likely you’re to meet broader goals.
Implementing teamwide sales tracking can seem like hard work, but it doesn’t have to be.
In this article, you’ll learn five actionable steps to effectively measure, track and enhance your sales team’s performance. You’ll also learn how to leverage essential sales metrics, customize dashboards and implement AI-powered automation to streamline your processes.
Why it’s critical to measure your sales team’s collective performance
Measuring your team’s sales performance helps you make better business decisions. With a confident grasp of how well your team is selling, you can forecast revenue more accurately, optimize your sales strategy and highlight growth opportunities.
Focusing on collective performance ensures everybody keeps the big picture and the broader aims in mind. It also encourages teamwork, unity and shared goals, motivating team members.
Alongside keeping morale high, as a sales leader you need to be able to:
Realize when you need to reallocate resources or change priorities to avoid missing targets in your sales cycles
Manage team expectations to encourage everyone and keep them on track toward hitting goals
Discuss deeper issues, such as the competitive landscape or wider economic factors that impact profitability
Reduce the tensions and stresses typically felt by salespeople
Develop creative solutions to problems and prevent future issues
In most cases, you must track team performance to recognize and accomplish the above mentioned tasks.
While doing this with software is more manageable, it’s not as simple as signing up for a sales tracking tool. Before accurately measuring sales productivity, you must set your goals and expectations.
5 steps to measure your sales team’s performance and productivity
Setting clearly defined, reasonable expectations and metrics for your team helps everyone start on the same page and lays a strong foundation you can build upon.
Before you can leverage intuitive tracking tools to your advantage, you need to decide what you’ll measure and how often. With this baseline, you can optimize your productivity with tools and check-ins.
Here are five steps to measure and enable a more productive sales team.
Step 1: Solidify how to measure sales productivity with short and long-term goals
The most effective productivity measures focus on short-term task completion and long-term performance. While weekly (or even daily) targets help keep your team on track, the inevitable ups and downs of sales can sometimes result in demotivation.
Longer-term sales goals provide a more realistic measure of success and give salespeople room to breathe. However, it’s crucial to balance these and review them regularly.
For example, if your win rate is high but your customer lifetime value is low, your reps may be targeting potential customers who aren’t likely to make repeat purchases.
If daily and weekly goals are too easy to achieve but long-term success is lagging, you’ll need to review which sales activities are making an impact.
The best way to set achievable sales team goals is to involve your reps in their creation. Doing so allows you to discover any potential obstacles before they arise.
As a result, your goals are more likely to be realistic and your team will feel more motivated and invested in working to achieve them.
To set more effective activities and goals, try a framework like SMART. It stands for:
Specific. Define the goal and how you’ll achieve it.
Measurable. Decide how you’ll measure goal progress and achievement.
Achievable (or Attainable). Ensure goal isn’t too challenging or stressful to reach.
Realistic. Confirm the goal aligns with organization-wide targets.
Time-based (or Time-bound). Set up realistic time frames for reaching your goal.
Instead of setting vague goals based on guesswork, the SMART framework is a tried, tested, reusable roadmap.
It’s also important to clarify how you’ll reward your sales representatives for meeting all of these short and long-term goals. If the incentive isn’t worth it, you may demotivate your team without realizing it and impact performance.
Step 2: Set sales productivity metrics and expectations
You can use the data from setting and tracking sales goals to indicate whether your team is truly productive.
Along with broader goals (e.g., number of closed deals), your team needs smaller success markers (e.g., proposals sent and deals in the pipelines) to track progress toward major goals. These key performance indicators come in the form of sales objectives and sales metrics.
Let’s say your goal is to increase conversion rates. A sales objective to achieve this could be to upsell 20 deals in the next quarter. Therefore, the metric you track will be “deal upsells”.
These numbers act as “leading indicators” or “lagging indicators” to qualify how close you are to achieving your goals.
Every sales team leader should be tracking these four groups of sales performance metrics to measure productivity:
Activity metrics
Pipeline metrics
Productivity metrics
Results metrics
Let’s explore each of these important metrics in more detail.
Activity metrics
Activity metrics track the regular sales activities and tasks your reps undertake to move leads along the pipeline and close deals. Sales managers usually monitor these over a certain time period (e.g., a week or quarter).
Examples of activity metrics include calculating the total number of:
New leads acquired (someone who has expressed an interest in your offer)
Initial calls
Follow-up calls
Outreach emails
Field sales visits
Social media interactions
Scheduled meetings
Activity metrics also include any other communications data from your customer relationship management (CRM) software (e.g., follow-up email cadence).
Pipeline metrics
You can break down the stages of your sales pipeline to see exactly how deals are progressing and which of your sales professionals’ activities have the greatest impact.
Pipeline metrics can include:
Average sales cycle. The amount of time it takes for a prospect to become a customer.
Number of deals in the pipeline. The total value of potential deals.
Number of opportunities. How many qualified prospects are likely to become customers.
Average deal size. The average amount of money a customer spends on your product.
Closed opportunities. Deals sales reps have either won or lost.
Deal loss reasons. Why a prospect or lead decided not to buy.
These numbers can give you insight into your sales process's strengths and weaknesses, helping you spot opportunities to improve efficiency and effectiveness.
Productivity metrics
Productivity metrics measure how effective and efficient your team is in their sales activities. Sending hundreds of emails each week is only worthwhile if an acceptable percentage results in sales.
Productivity metrics you can track include:
Win rate. The percentage of deals you win.
Lead response time. How quickly reps reply to leads’ messages.
Percentage of deals won. How many deals won compared with the total number of sales opportunities.
Average customer acquisition cost (CAC). How much it costs in both sales and marketing efforts to earn a new customer.
Conversion rate. How efficiently reps convert leads to customers.
Number of activities over time. How many sales calls, emails and visits your reps complete in a given time.
Productivity metrics reveal which team members may be struggling and tell you where additional training or support is needed.
Results metrics
Results metrics convey the sales organization’s overall success. Success for any sales team should include hitting targets, happy customers and increased revenue.
Some of the most common results metrics include:
Sales quota attainment. The revenue or objective a rep must hit within a given period of time.
Customer satisfaction (CSAT) and retention rates. How to measure the success of your customer experience, including new and existing customers.
Churn rate. The percentage of customers who stop paying for your business for services.
Customer lifetime value (CLV). The total amount you earn from a customer over their entire lifecycle with your company.
Number of new customers. How many leads become customers.
Total revenue. The amount you’ve earned from all of your customers.
You can use these numbers to inform your team meetings, highlighting wins and learning from losses collectively.
Step 3: Develop a customized visual dashboard of your sales pipeline
Your sales team should be focused on more than just closing deals. Lead generation must be ongoing, as well as lead scoring, qualification and nurturing.
A robust lead management system is the bedrock of a good sales funnel. While tracking these activities without software is possible, a sales CRM with pipeline management and sales tracking tools can streamline your efforts and save reps a lot of valuable time.
Many CRMs offer real-time reporting and high-level dashboard overviews. For example, Pipedrive’s customizable dashboards give you tailored pipeline visibility so you can track your team’s most useful sales metrics.
Configure real-time metrics (e.g., number of leads and proposals) to develop a clear visual overview of your prospect and customer data, identify areas of improvement and simplify your sales cycles.
Here’s some of the sales data you can track in your customizable Pipedrive dashboards:
Snapshots of your deals (new, won and lost) to see which reps are closing most often
Sales activities across your whole team to see whether calls, LinkedIn messages or emails have the most impact
Revenue and sales forecasts to figure out which team members are bringing in the most money
How each member of your sales team is performing individually
Use it to see how many deals each rep wins and loses and how many activities they complete.
You can also shuffle metrics and reports around your agile dashboard and hide options you don’t need.
Download Your Guide to Sales Performance Measurement
By customizing your sales dashboard you’ll start to understand exactly how your pipeline is flowing and spot issues before they grow.
Step 4: Implement AI-powered automation and give your team time to sell
Many startups and small businesses begin by tracking their sales process, performance and productivity on a spreadsheet.
As you scale, you’ll want to stay on top of your data and give your salespeople enough time to do what they do best – sell. To achieve this, you’ll require a robust sales automation system.
The aim here is to streamline your team’s workload by focusing their efforts on human-led activities, such as in-person visits.
In the meantime, you can automate almost your entire sales process (including repetitive, time-consuming admin) with high-quality tools aided by artificial intelligence.
For example, your reps may want to trigger a personalized email whenever they move a deal along the pipeline. When reps have many other high-priority sales tasks, they can forget these personalized touches that keep leads warm.
You may also want a way to track your entire team’s performance on the same dashboard without flipping between multiple spreadsheets.
Some tools, like Pipedrive, handle these tasks and even include built-in tools for your reps to analyze past performance and optimize it going forward.
For example, Pipedrive’s AI Sales Assistant continuously monitors your contacts, deals and emails to highlight valuable insights. Reps can use these to boost productivity and focus on activities that convert customers.
Automatically generated performance reports can help you spot team members falling behind and design custom sales training to bring them up to speed.
Instead of trying to manually work out every deal’s win probability, AI-powered automation filters those with the highest likelihood and recommends the next best steps to increase your chances.
In addition to using the technology to track your team’s overall performance, you can give each rep the ability to visualize and increase their sales efficiency, avoiding awkward missed quota meetings.
With the right software, each person can spot which processes need work and use AI-powered suggestions to improve sales enablement.
Step 5: Follow up with your team collectively and individually
You’ve now set your goals and metrics, making them easier to visualize for regular tracking and streamlined activities with automations. To make the most of your collected data, you need to share the insights with your team.
The best way to do this, including all the necessary context, is to arrange regular catch-up meetings and use them to discuss any new or recurring issues. However, this may be easier said than done.
According to Mentimeter, 52% of US business leaders say low engagement is their biggest meeting challenge.
Instead of dominating the discussion in a meeting, engage your team by including each person in the conversation. For example, you can ask each team member what went well this week, what didn’t and what they think could improve.
Optimize this time by collectively troubleshooting solutions and sharing helpful workarounds so team members can learn from each other.
Here are four more principles for holding meaningful meetings:
Use recurring agendas as templates. Team members can be more prepared with helpful information if they know which items to expect.
Always provide value. Give reps new information to help them sell better (e.g., third-party training or customer feedback).
Encourage interaction throughout. Set input expectations before the meeting, host Q&As and lead brainstorming sessions.
Stay consistent. Ensure you hold recurring meetings on the same day and time (weekly or monthly) so reps can plan their time accordingly.
It’s also essential to check in with each person individually. If a rep is falling behind, you can use one-to-one sales meetings to sensitively discuss any external factors that may be contributing and make a plan to help them catch up.
You can also use these personal meetings to ask every salesperson if they could benefit from extra training, support or resources to proactively mitigate any problems or challenges.
Instead of singling out someone in front of the group, offer each rep tailored support in private and keep everyone’s working environment positive.
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Sales performance measurement: 4 tips for tracking your team’s success
Measuring your sales team’s successes and failures is vital to all sales organizations. It helps you optimize individual and group performance and, ultimately, pipeline efficiency and conversion. However, while sales performance measures are essential, accurate and useful measurement isn’t easy.
You must know which key performance indicators (KPIs) matter to you and how to track them effectively. Beyond the hard skills of tracking sales, you need the soft skills to celebrate great work, deliver negative feedback without knocking confidence and develop a culture where failure is always a step towards future success.
Here are our top four tips for measuring and optimizing your team’s performance.
1. Celebrate the positive
Whether you’re reviewing a sales rep’s individual sales productivity, quota attainment or your team’s overall performance, seek out reasons to celebrate.
Offer incentives when sales goals are reached. Giving credit where it’s due is a tried-and-tested morale booster, especially when sales targets are ambitious.
Here are a few ways to celebrate the positives:
Post leaderboards for various goals, including more KPIs than just hitting quotas (e.g. “Top three problem solvers this week”).
Celebrate mini-goals along the way. For example, if you have a goal to reach 10 closed deals this week, celebrate the halfway point.
Discuss small wins alongside the big wins. Did an employee bring a deal back on track? Did a colleague overcome a sales objection creatively? Celebrate!
Your focus on the positive should extend to how you present the review process to your team. Always frame it as an exercise to find out what’s working best and why, so the rest of your team can replicate it, rather than as a way to call out underperformers or allocate blame.
2. Make failure a part of success
No matter how much you optimize your team’s sales performance, failures are inevitable in the course of your sales activities.
A negative reaction to failure isn’t helpful and will undermine the confidence of your salespeople. Instead, embrace failures and involve your team in the process of learning from past mistakes.
Here are a few ideas for ways to do this:
Anonymize situations when discussing errors in a group. Speak generally about something that went wrong and avoid naming specific colleagues.
Talk about the positives along with the negatives. What happened that went well?
Own up when the reason for failure was a lack of resources or another leadership factor (e.g., it was an easy mistake for an employee to make because they weren’t given the right information about the sales prospect).
These lessons should be formalized into an actionable plan and, where necessary, filtered into your processes and training materials. You can then follow up and review progress against the plan until you’re sure your measures have been effective.
This way, you’ll slowly create a “test and learn” culture where failures are discussed and profited from, rather than swept under the carpet.
3. Identify pain points
Some pain points in the sales process are more obvious than others, but it’s often the hardest-to-spot issues that have the most significant impact on sales performance.
Triggers are a great way of discovering these roadblocks. Just like you’d use CRM triggers to monitor the new leads you’re trying to sell to (e.g., changes of management, profit announcements, etc.), you can create real-time triggers to flag up many concealed issues.
For example, if time spent on administration tips your trigger, it may mean some of your salespeople aren’t using your CRM to its full potential or that it isn’t fit for purpose. If a lack of qualified leads in your sales funnel tips the trigger, there may be issues in your marketing department.
This is all about testing and learning. Whenever you surface an underlying issue, remember to really dig into it and create a long-term solution.
4. Choose the sales KPIs that matter
For some businesses, a short lead response time is vital. For others, there are far more important sales performance metrics to track. Not all KPIs matter to everyone, so determine which important sales metrics are key for your business.
Here are a few important KPIs sales managers should consider:
Revenue from new business vs. revenue from existing customers. It’s crucial to know whether targeting new customers is the best way to drive revenue or whether the opposite is true and customer retention is the driving force of your sales strategy. Dig into your monthly recurring revenue (MRR) and annual recurring revenue (ARR) and see what’s working for you, then alter your revenue targets where necessary.
Average lifetime value of a customer. The average customer lifetime value (LTV) is an important data point for sales performance measurement. Breaking this down by demographic can help you target demographics with a higher LTV to CAC (cost of acquiring the customer).
Net promoter score (NPS). The NPS is a customer satisfaction and loyalty measurement. It’s taken by asking customers how likely they are to recommend your product or service to others. You can estimate your net promoter score by surveying customers or using tools that assess sentiment online.
Number of deals won vs. deals lost. Conversion rates (also known as close rates) may be one of the easiest metrics to track, especially using a CRM, but keeping an eye on win rates and churn rates (plus the average deal size) is still vital when it comes to sales performance tracking.
Cost of selling vs. revenue earned. You need to make sure that your customer acquisition cost (i.e., the average amount you spend on staff, promotions, technology and admin to get a sale over the line) doesn’t exceed the sales revenue you get (although there are long-term strategies where this can work).
Market penetration. How well-known are your brands and products compared to your competitors? What’s the benchmark in your industry? How does your pricing compare?
Sales growth over time. Growth over time is always an important sales measurement, whether it refers to total revenue growth or profit margin.
You should also measure sales performance using various team and individual activity metrics.
Essential metrics for outreach could include:
Total number of sales calls made, emails sent
Social media/LinkedIn connections contacted
Amount of time your sales force is spending on each prospect
Number of meetings and live demos delivered every quarter
Amount of upselling achieved
Once you’ve identified the key metrics in your sales process, you need a fast, simple way to track them. Unless you have time to spend puzzling over pages of sales data (and let’s face it, what sales leader does?), you need visual, customizable reports and a clear sales dashboard.
Ideally, you want the option to measure and analyze every aspect of your sales cycle, from your rate of lead generation to blockages in your sales pipeline and your amount of closed deals.
Final thoughts
Tracking and measuring your sales team’s performance is key to driving consistent success.
By setting clear goals, monitoring essential metrics and using a powerful CRM system like Pipedrive, you can stay aligned with your business objectives. Regular performance reviews, both for individuals and the team, help celebrate wins and turn challenges into learning opportunities.
AI-powered automation streamlines processes, allowing your team to focus on high-value tasks. Start empowering your sales team today – try Pipedrive free for 14 days and experience the difference it can make to your sales performance.
