B2B sales qualification is a delicate art. The BEBEDC method (Need, Stake, Budget, Deadline, Decision-makers, Competitors) has become a standard for structuring customer discovery: clear, complete and easy to [...].
You have just taken up your new position as Sales Manager and are responsible for improving your company's sales performance. To effectively manage your team, monitor progress and [...]
You've just taken up your new position as Sales Director, and are tasked with improving your company's sales performance. To effectively manage your team, track progress and adapt your strategy, defining and monitoring sales KPIs is vital. These indicators will enable you not only to measure current performance, but also to adjust your strategy to ensure continued annual growth and improved customer satisfaction.
What are the duties of a new sales manager?
As a Sales Manager, your role goes beyond simply monitoring sales. It's about laying a solid foundation for a high-performance organization, starting with a thorough understanding of existing sales reps processes. Here are the steps for structuring your mission:
1 - Get to know the existing sales organization
Start with an in-depth analysis of current practices. Identify process strengths and weaknesses, as well as team dynamics. This step is crucial to establishing an initial diagnosis.
2 - Assessing the company's sales performance
Your team's performance is based on a number of key indicators, such as sales and conversion rates. Measuring these elements will give you an overall view of current results and opportunities for improvement.
3 - Define a clear sales strategy
Once performance has been assessed, set objectives in line with the company's vision. A clear business strategy will guide the team towards a well-defined course and measurable objectives.
4 - Optimizing sales team organization
To improve performance, effective team organization is essential. Determine the roles of each member of the team, and make sure that business skills are well distributed.
5 - Monitor performance and adjust strategy
Use sales KPIs to track progress and adjust your strategy as needed. This flexibility is crucial for coping with market changes.
6 - Optimizing sales reps tools and resources
Adopting the right tools, such as a CRM to centralize data, will make it easier to manage information and track results.
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Sales KPIs: Definition and why measure them?
Sales KPIs are quantitative and qualitative indicators that measure a company's sales performance. This data gives you a clear picture of your team's progress, and helps you anticipate any necessary adjustments. In other words, KPIs are your compass: they guide your actions and guarantee informed decision-making.
Harvard Business Review and McKinsey emphasize the importance of frequent, rigorous monitoring of overall performance. In fact, 85% of companies that rigorously track their KPIs increase their productivity by 20% (HBR), and companies that track their KPIs on a weekly basis make decisions 50% faster (McKinsey).
10 sales KPIs for sales managers to track
Certain KPIs are essential for measuring and managing sales performance. Here are the main ones:
1 - Sales generated by the sales team
This is the simplest and most direct indicator of sales reps results. It allows you to measure sales and see whether financial targets are being met.
Sales = (Value of each sale made)
2 - Average length of sales cycle
This sales KPI tells you how efficient your sales processes are. If the sales cycle is too long, this may indicate obstacles or inefficiencies at certain stages of the customer journey.
Average length of sales cycle = (Length of each sales cycle) / Number of sales made
3 - Conversion rate from leads to opportunities
Measuring the number of qualified leads that turn into opportunities is essential for evaluating the effectiveness of your prospecting efforts, across all your acquisition channels.
Lead-to-opportunity conversion rate = (Number of opportunities generated / number of qualified leads)
4 - Average contract value
By tracking the average value of contracts signed, you can identify trends and adjust your pricing or promotional strategies according to the results.
Average contract value = total sales / number of sales made
5 - Business activity rate
This sales KPI reflects the commitment of your sales reps : calls, meetings, presentations... It enables you to monitor the team's real activity.
Sales activity rate = total number of sales actions / number of sales reps
7 - Customer acquisition cost
CAC is an essential indicator for assessing the investment needed to acquire new customers by channel. It must be optimized to guarantee the profitability of sales reps.
CAC = Total sales & marketing expenditure / number of new customers acquired
8 - Conversion rates by stage of the sales cycle
By analyzing the conversion rate at each stage, you can identify where the stumbling blocks lie. For example, if many prospects leave at the sales proposal stage, this may indicate a pricing or positioning problem.
Conversion rate per stage = (number of prospects moving on to the next stage / number of prospects in the current stage)
9 - Customer retention rate
This indicator measures the percentage of customers the company retains over a given period. A high retention rate means high customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Customer retention rate = ((number of customers at the end of the period - new customers acquired) / number of customers at the beginning of the period)
10 - Customer Lifetime value
CLV represents the total value a customer generates for the company over the entire duration of their business relationship with it. This KPI is crucial for identifying long-term customer profitability, and for guiding acquisition and retention decisions.
CLV = average contract value x average duration of customer relationship (in years)
The weight of all these sales KPIs needs to be assessed in relation to your business and the areas for improvement you've identified, so as to retain the key ones for your business and consolidate them in a Dashboard.
Monitor sales KPIs
1 - Centralize data in a CRM
Data centralization is crucial for monitoring your sales activity. Well-integrated CRM software enables you to gather all information on potential customers and sales opportunities in one place. CRM data quality. This system provides an overview of the customer relationship, integrating the tracking of interactions, sales actions and purchase histories.
Thanks to this centralization, sales teams have a 360° view, enabling them to optimize the management of each prospect/customer, avoid losing essential information and identify growth opportunities more quickly. In short, a well-designed CRM becomes a strategic tool for centralizing and generating your sales KPIs continuously and accurately.
2 - Automate data collection
The effectiveness of a CRM depends on the quality of its data 77% of companies consider that CRM data is of poor or very poor quality. This situation is often caused by the fact that sales reps manually fill in the CRM; between two appointments, when they have a moment at the end of their rounds, or simply in the evening after their day. This task is often perceived as tedious and unrewarding, to the detriment of time spent with customers. The result? A CRM with inaccurate data that negatively impacts your company's sales performance.
Later in this article, we'll see how theSales Enablement application automates data collection and integrates it directly into the CRM, saving time for sales reps and providing reliable data for sales and marketing departments.
3 - Establish a frequency for monitoring sales KPIs
The frequency with which sales KPIs are monitored plays a decisive role in the responsiveness and sales effectiveness of sales teams. Weekly analyses, for example, enable problems or opportunities to be identified quickly, and informed decisions to be taken without delay. According to a McKinsey study, companies that monitor their KPIs on a weekly basis see an average 15% improvement in productivity.
This frequency of monitoring enables managers to stay close to results and adapt in real time to changes in the market and buyers' expectations. It also creates a proactive work dynamic within teams, where everyone feels committed to achieving weekly objectives.
4 - Create Dashboards for a clear vision
Dashboards are essential for simplifying the analysis of sales KPIs. A well-designed dashboard provides a clear and instantaneous visualization of data, making it easier to interpret performance in real time. Thanks to graphs, trend curves and visual indicators, managers can quickly spot deviations from targets and identify areas for improvement.
A sales reps dash board also saves time by avoiding tedious manual analysis, and promotes rapid decision-making based on concrete data. By integrating these sales reps indicators, dashboards become invaluable steering tools for sales reps, who can adjust their strategies at a glance.
Drive your sales teams with sales KPIs
A sales manager must ensure that his team understands the importance of KPIs and uses them effectively to improve performance. His ability to define clear objectives, communicate them effectively and motivate his team is crucial to achieving the expected results.
1 - Explain the value of KPIs
The first step in mobilizing a team around KPIs is to make their importance tangible. Explain clearly why these indicators are essential for achieving company objectives, but also for the individual performance of each team member. Sales KPIs are not just abstract numbers; they are tools for directing efforts and maximizing results. By popularizing the impact of KPIs, you'll help every member of your team to understand their usefulness, which in turn will encourage more natural buy-in.
2 - Set SMART objectives
For sales KPIs to be properly integrated, it's crucial to define SMART objectives. SMART objectives translate KPIs into concrete, attainable goals that every team member can visualize and understand. This approach makes progress measurable and motivates everyone to accomplish their tasks with a clear goal in mind. By defining clear objectives, you'll facilitate progress and provide concrete benchmarks for evaluating the effectiveness of each action.
3 - Motivate teams with incentives
The final lever for reinforcing adherence to sales KPIs is to set up appropriate incentives. Reward performance to reward effort and encourage a dynamic of self-improvement. Bonuses, formal recognition and other benefits are all ways of strengthening your sales team's commitment. Incentives not only reward success, but also create a corporate culture of performance and continuous improvement.
Create a culture of sales KPI measurement and continuous improvement
1 - Make sales KPIs a daily reflex
Integrating sales KPIs into the day-to-day work of teams is crucial to creating a performance culture. This means that every team member must understand the importance of KPIs, and consult them regularly.
By making KPIs accessible and including them in work routines, we foster commitment and accountability on everyone's part. The more sales KPIs become a reflex, the easier it is to stay on track and quickly adjust efforts according to results.
2 - Analyze gaps and adjust your strategy
Sales KPIs are an excellent way of measuring progress, but also of detecting deviations from targets. As a sales manager, analyzing these deviations enables you to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your strategy and adjust your sales approach accordingly.
This regular analysis becomes a formidable method for reacting quickly to your environment, adjusting your game and optimizing your team's sales performance. By establishing a dynamic of continuous improvement, you encourage your teams to surpass themselves and constantly seek new ways of achieving their objectives.
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Sales Enablement : Sales KPIs to easily manage your business and much more
1 - Salesapps for understanding and managing sales activity
Sales KPIs are essential, but what about the progress of appointments? The sales enablement application, coupled with the CRM, enables you to track all the salesperson's activity during their exchanges with the buyer. Whether it's the sales path followed during appointments, or tracking usage statistics (by session, by user, or by video/document viewed and shared), Salesapps offers you a complete analysis environment. By combining sales KPIs and content usage KPIs, you can considerably optimize sales performance.
2 - Improve sales force efficiency
The average salesperson spends 67% of his or her time on non-sales-related activities (LinkedIn States of Sales), i.e. 16% on team meetings, 17% on CRM updates, 15% on training and 19% on various administrative tasks. The benefits of the sales enablement application are twofold! Before the appointment, sales reps save precious preparation time. All marketing content is centralized, eliminating the need to search for it on a drive or SharePoint.
What's more, the risk of using obsolete content is reduced, as updates are automatic and managed directly by management via a back-office. After the appointment, reports are automated and integrated directly into the CRM. The data fed back into the CRM is of the highest quality, and can be used by sales management. Sales staff gain in quality time, because they can devote it to tasks that are important to their company: selling!
3 - Create an immersive, interactive customer experience during appointments
The variety of content integrated into the application (video, simulator, 3D....), the salesperson's ability to personalize his or her approach thanks to sales paths, as well as his or her ability to answer questions and enrich the sales pitch with additional content during appointments, all help to create a customer experience that lives up to the buyer's expectations. B2B storytelling is a great way to increase your impact during appointments. It makes it easier for your sales rep to capture the buyer's attention and be more decisive in his or her argument.
FAQ Why is it important to track sales KPIs? Tracking sales KPIs makes it possible to measure the overall performance of sales reps, identify strengths and areas for improvement. It helps to make informed decisions to optimize sales strategies, adjust actions and improve results. KPIs provide clear information for adjusting objectives, maximizing productivity and achieving desired results.
How do I choose the right sales KPIs for my company? The choice of sales KPIs depends on your sales reps objectives. For a company, this could be sales volume, conversion rate, sales cycle, annual revenue generated per sales rep, or satisfaction of existing customers. It is essential to define sales reps indicators that are aligned with your strategic priorities and adapted to the nature of your market and your sales teams.
How often should sales KPIs be measured and analyzed? The frequency depends on the nature of your business, but in general, it's advisable to measure essential sales KPIs on a weekly or monthly basis. This enables you to monitor performance trends, adjust strategies quickly and react to market trends in real time.
What tools can be used to track sales KPIs? There are several tools available for tracking sales KPIs, such as CRMs (Salesforce, HubSpot), sales enablement platforms (like Salesapps), and business intelligence tools (Power BI, Tableau). These tools centralize data, automate reporting and provide real-time visibility on sales performance. It's important to choose a tool that integrates well with your current system and is tailored to your specific needs.
