When it comes to sales tracking, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are a must have tool for any sales manager looking to understand the performance of their reps. 

Essentially, sales KPIs are a metric used to track the effectiveness or activity of your reps against a certain action. Armed with this information, you can make business decisions that help boost rep motivation, lighten their workload and build a focused campaign around your sales targets.

In this article, we’ll delve into just a few simple KPIs you should monitor and track for your sales team when endeavoring to understand and improve sales performance. 

Getting the right sales; is your approach up to scratch?

‍

It’s important not to get tunnel vision on your KPIs, sales performance isn’t always about the volume of sales overall, sometimes it comes down to making the right sales. 

‍

For example, let’s say you’re fat-fingered and added a few extra zeros to your order of steering wheels and now your warehouse is full. Moving this stock is not going to be easy if you’re only baselining your performance off the total number of sales and reps have an easier time of selling tires.  

‍

While it requires a clever sales tracking app to configure and track this effectively, setting a sales KPI which tracks the performance of a sales promotion for steering wheels would be a great way to get the word out and shift the extra stock. Tying a sales target to this KPI, potentially even one paired with a commission incentive would be a great way to push sales of this stock even further. 

When hard work isn’t working: make the work easy instead. 

‍

Putting in more effort may sound like a feasible idea, but unless that effort is guided by insight, and funneled into areas that are known to close deals, you won't be increasing sales performance.

‍

You may find yourself in a situation where you’re uncertain about which channels your reps are closing the most deals on. Without the right information, you’ve been encouraging your team to pursue discussion on every channel, in the hope that the extra effort across the board will close more deals. 

‍

To make life easier, you can begin tracking KPIs based on channels of discussion, for example, number of phone calls/F2F meetings. To do this, start by investigating which channels perform best by running reports on the amount of sales closed. Using the gathered insights to see which channels your team closes the most deals on you can then set KPI targets on the channels which have the highest conversion rates. To monitor these KPIs in the long run, you’d need to use a straight-forward sales tracking app. The final result? Less effort, and more sales. 

The ‘M’ word - Sales Team Motivation.

‍

Tracking the number of opportunities highlighted by your reps demonstrates their drive for getting more sales and their hunger for spotting new areas for growth. Likewise, the actioned opportunities show which members of your sales team have the drive and follow through to actually close the deals sitting on the table. Each of these are great KPIs to focus on to understand sales team motivation and whether it’s something that needs work. 

‍

While we’re on the topic of motivation and making KPIs, it’s important to ensure reps actually update your sales tracking software, a common rub point standing between sales managers and accurate KPIs. To address this, it’s important to pick the right sales tracking app that is unobtrusive on a rep’s busy lifestyle and feels natural for them to use. 

‍

You also may have noticed that many of the above KPIs are quite specific and tailored to unique business scenarios and behaviors of reps. In this sense, the generic cookie cutter KPIs presented in most usual sales tracking tools just don’t cut the mustard. Getting real results means tying performance to the right levers that keep things moving and money coming in, and that requires highly flexible KPI tracking, which you can learn more about here.

‍