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Improving sales performance hinges on correctly measuring and analyzing their sales data. However, many businesses still struggle to utilize sales data to its full potential. In fact, up to 46% of organizations don’t use data to measure their performance, leaving valuable opportunities untapped.
The most successful sales teams focus on uncovering deeper insights and leveraging them to improve their sales performance. This typically means analyzing specific sales metrics to know how to engage audiences better, design a better sales model, or even upskill the sales team.
In this article, you’ll learn in detail how to improve your sales performance by measuring and optimizing important sales metrics.
What is Sales Performance?
Sales performance measures the effectiveness of your overall sales effort.
Many things influence your sales performance, from your sales team’s experience to employee motivation, employee product knowledge, and your sales tech stack, and this influence can either be positive or negative.
Sales performance is also business-specific. It is measured based on custom sales targets that you have previously set.
For example, if you set a target to sell 1000 products in a month and you sell 980 products, you can say that you performed well with a 98% success rate.
But let's say you set a target to sell 10,000 product units in a month and only sell 2000 products. You would conclude that you have performed poorly due to your 20% success rate, regardless of the number of sales you made.
Why is sales performance so important?
Sales performance reveals how successful your sales are compared to your sales targets. Sales performance also informs you whether a particular sales strategy works well or whether a different strategy should be implemented.
How to Measure Sales Performance
Sales performance can be measured through sales metrics such as revenue, sales growth, average deal size, conversion rate, and customer acquisition costs.
These metrics focus on specific aspects of your sales; for example, average deal size reveals the average financial worth of each sale. Let’s explore how this works in more detail.
1. Connect KPIs to Business Goals
Key performance indicators (KPIs), also known as key success indicators or key performance indexes, are quantifiable financial or non-financial metrics used to measure a business’s performance.
To measure your sales performance, you must ensure that these indicators align with your business goals. So, for example, if one of your business goals is to increase revenue by 30% in the next 90 days then the perfect KPI to measure this goal would be “Revenue growth rate,” which measures the growth in your revenue over a specified period.
Here’s how to connect KPIs to business goals:
- Identify the goal
- Confirm that the goal is SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realizable, and Time-bound)
- Identify how to measure the goal (E.g, number of sales, % of the increase, and number of customer retention)
- Choose a KPI that corresponds with the identified measure (E.g., sales volume, sales/revenue growth, and customer retention rate)
2. Match Metrics to Performance Goals
Your sales metrics or KPIs should align with your performance goals to ensure that you and everyone on your sales team take daily steps to achieve your broad business goals. These performance goals may be created for sales teams or individual salespeople.
Let’s say you’ve chosen a KPI like sales volume to measure the number of sales you make; you can match it to a performance goal like “Upsell product X to every walk-in customer who buys product Y to increase daily sales by 50%.”
Here’s how to match metrics to performance goals:
- Choose a sales metric/KPI
- Identify what business goal this KPI is used to measure
- Breakdown the identified business goal into actionable steps that can be done daily
Sales Performance Metrics to Measure
Measuring sales performance using the appropriate sales performance metrics can easily be the difference between a business that experiences year-on-year growth and one that struggles.
Here are some of the best sales performance metrics to track:
Sales Team Metrics
Revenue generated
Revenue generated is the total dollar value of sales closed by each sales team in a period. This metric tracks the dollar value of all the sales closed by each sales team in a period. It can be used to identify which teams are the most effective by comparing their revenue against each other. Individual teams can also compare their revenue generated over time to analyze whether they are experiencing a growth or a decline in their generated revenue.
If you’re looking for a revenue enablement platform that enables your sales team to close more deals, try Spekit. Spekit supports sales teams by providing in-app content and in-context recommendations to guide sales reps during prospecting and engaging customers.
Sales cycle length
The sales cycle length measures the time it takes for your sales team to convert a lead into a buyer. Usually, a shorter sales cycle time is ideal as it indicates that the sales team closes sales much quicker.
Win rate
Win rate is a sales metric that measures how many deals and opportunities your sales team wins compared to lost ones. A high win rate indicates a strong selling strategy, and your sales team can quickly convince prospective buyers to initiate a purchase.
Sales content metrics
Sales content metrics, such as engagement rate, click-through rate, and content reach, measure the effectiveness of your sales content. A high sales content metric, such as engagement rate, increases awareness of a business’s services and boosts sales.
Spekit can help you improve your sales content metrics. It not only centralizes content creation, management, and sharing but also has an AI feature, “Spekit AI,” that sales reps can use to generate baseline content for playbooks and sales scripts.
Individual Sales Team Member Metrics
Quota attainment
Individual sales team members are usually given a quota to meet before the end of a certain period. At the end of this period, each person’s sales should be matched against their quota to assess performance.
Average deal size
This is a salesperson's average money value of sales in the period. The average deal size metric shows the quality of each salesperson's sales and helps identify salespeople who regularly close high-value deals.
Activity metrics
This is important for businesses and teams interacting directly with customers. Activity metrics include the number of sales calls and text messages a sales rep handles. It is used to measure the productivity of team members.
Retention rate
The retention rate metric measures the percentage of customers that a salesperson can retain over time. This metric also shows that the salesperson can build trust and maintain healthy customer relationships.
How to Improve Sales Performance
Now that we’ve explained how to measure your sales performance using sales metrics and KPIs, let’s see how you can improve your sales performance.
1. Optimize Your Sales Content
Content marketing is one of the top ways for salespeople to reach prospects, with 76% of marketers generating product demand and leads from their sales content. However, poorly created content will produce adverse results, so if you want to improve your sales performance, you should optimize your sales content.
Spekit saves you a lot of productive time by automating content optimization. The platform has over 100 templates you can customize for your sales playbooks and guides.
SpekitAI also enables you to create optimized sales content in minutes and convert lengthy documentation to bite-sized content that sales reps can easily digest, eliminating information overload.
2. Connect Your Sales Reps with the Right Content
Salespeople often work with multiple content scattered across different folders. This reduces their productivity and affects their workflow. Connecting your sales reps with the right content at the right time, wherever they need it, means they no longer have to dig through lots of files to find the information they need, a game changer for your sales reps.
With Spekit, you can automate the delivery of sales content to your sales reps. Spekit allows users to share sales content in any sales software they use. It also supports embedding sales content right into their workflow.
Sales reps can get real-time in-app notifications when new content becomes available to them, keeping them connected to available content all the time.
3. Conduct Regular Sales Performance Reviews
Whatever you don’t measure, you can’t manage; if you can’t manage it, you simply cannot improve it. Regular sales performance reviews measure the effectiveness of your sales effort to identify opportunities for improvement.
You can review your sales performance by comparing the previous period’s sales with current or budgeted sales with actual sales. You can also use sales metrics to measure your sales performance.
What matters the most is the strategic decisions you take from the insight you get from reviewing your sales; that’s how you improve performance.
4. Provide Just-in-Time Sales Coaching
Sales training increases performance by up to 20%. This increased performance contributes toward better sales performance and more revenue. But don’t just stop at providing regular training for your staff. Incorporate just-in-time sales coaching in your process to provide employees with bite-sized sales content when needed.
Spekit supports sales reps' onboarding and on-the-job training, surfacing learning content for them right in their apps and tools. Spekit doesn’t just provide learning content; it also ensures content retention, offering in-app quizzes to assess knowledge and reinforce learning.
5. Invest in Sales Enablement
Sales enablement tools are the future of sales and marketing as they seamlessly connect your content, marketing, and sales cycle, creating an integrated loop in your sales process. These tools also have support for business intelligence and CRM to streamline customer data analytics and relationship management and also provide valuable insights for data-backed decisions.
Spekit is a just-in-time sales enablement platform that seamlessly integrates with the tools you use to provide just-in-time learning to sales reps. But even more than coaching, Spekit supports analytics with a knowledge check dashboard that measures and optimizes sales reps' knowledge to ensure they’re equipped with the information they need to excel.
More Questions About Sales Performance
Here’s more thing you need to know about sales performance:
How do you measure sales performance?
You can measure sales performance using KPIs and metrics such as customer retention and conversion rates. You can also use Spekit’s ROI calculator to measure your ROI.
What is a good sales performance?
A good sales performance is one that not only meets your sales target but also exceeds industry average performance.
How do you evaluate salesperson performance?
You can evaluate a salesperson’s performance using individual sales metrics such as quota attainment and average deal size.
What is a good sales performance review?
A good sales performance review uncovers insights that can be leveraged to make data-backed decisions that improve sales performance.
Improve Your Team’s Sales Performance
Measuring sales metrics is a good start if you want to improve your team’s sales performance. They show your progress and uncover growth opportunities. However, tracking sales metrics can only improve your sales performance to an extent. You need a sales enablement platform that supports reinforcement learning to see continuous improvement.
Spekit combines just-in-time solutions with sales enablement to empower sales reps with the knowledge they need to excel at their jobs. Its AI-powered platform offers features and functionalities that make it easier for reps to reinforce knowledge, access sales content, and engage prospects better.
Spekit also offers seamless integration with Salesforce, Okta, Slack, Azure, Hubspot, Chrome Extension, Seismic, and Outlook. This means your sales team can surface information in any of these apps without interrupting their workflow.
With Spekit’s features and capabilities, you will build a super team of sales reps that close deals at the speed of lightning.
