When conducting B2B sales, sales teams need to acknowledge that tracking sales metrics is vital in achieving their targets. In fact, tracking sales metrics is essential whether a firm is selling a single product or multiple products. This is because the data collected can help the firm’s management to increase the productivity of sales teams while ensuring maximum utilisation of the resources allocated to them.
Top 5 sales metrics that every B2B firm should be tracking
1. Sales productivity metrics
Sales representatives play a central role in helping a business achieve its goals. The more sales reps you have at your disposal, the higher the chances that your business will achieve its sales targets. Analysing your sales metrics will help you identify and discontinue the sales strategies that are inefficient. Moreover, you will be able to come up with strategies that enhance your team’s productivity.
Here is how you analyse the productivity of your sales reps.
- Determine the time spent on demonstrating how the products work. You can do this by dividing the number of hours spent on demos by the total time worked. Express this as a percentage.
- Calculate the time spent entering data manually. You calculate it by expressing the total hours used to make manual entries as a percentage of total hours worked.
2. New leads metrics
As a business, you need to track the new leads metrics based on their origin. It is essential in helping your business track your leads based on their source so that you can adjust your marketing strategies. The information provided by each new lead is vital in initiating targeted marketing. For instance, if the one source generates more leads, it makes sense for a business to allocate more resources and personnel to that channel. After all, a firm should not focus exclusively on the number of leads generated but also on the conversions obtained from the leads. Some sources may generate few leads with higher conversion rates as compared to others that create more leads but achieve fewer conversions.
3. Revenue generated against the lead source
Businesses can measure the income they generate from their leads based on each primary source. They can achieve this by tracking where their leads originate and estimating revenue based on leads from each source. For instance, if your most significant source of income is from the leads generated by social media, you can easily estimate the total sales from the platform. By expressing the amount generated from the leads on social media as a percentage of the aggregate income, you can calculate revenue from social media leads. Analysing income based on leads from different sources makes it possible for the business to direct its sales reps to sources that generate leads with the highest conversion rates.
4. Average conversion time
Another essential KPI in sales metrics is the average conversion time. Sales KPIs give businesses insights into the effectiveness of marketing strategies. Business executives and sales directors in a company can use the average conversion time to project their daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly revenues. When the forecast revenue is on the lower side, the management can adopt interventions to increase sales and boost the overall company revenue. For instance, if a business owner realizes that it takes a week to close a car sale while his/her target is ten cars a month, he/she will have to make changes that can help increase sales and achieve his/her objectives.
5. Sales Effort Spent
The amount of resources spent on each product should correspond to the revenue earned. By tracking the amount of resources used to sell a particular product and recording the income that such a sale generates, the business owner is able to determine the products that require more attention. For instance, if the sales reps are spending 30 % of their time selling product X and 75 % selling product Y, estimating the income generated from each sale will help you determine which product needs more time and which one requires less.
Conclusion
B2B sales are critical for the success of any organization, and there is a need for each business to track the most relevant metrics. By ensuring that a firm’s management focuses on leads with the highest prospects and directing resources to products with high conversion rates, they can drive sales up and increase revenues.
About the Author
This article was written by Conor O’Flynn of O’Flynn Medical. O’Flynn Medical has grown from a small family business to becoming an industry leader in Ireland and the UK in breast pump sales. Identifying the right sales metrics and KPI’s has been an essential aspect of their success.
