4 Things to Monitor in a Sales Team

Keeping track of your sales team’s performance is extremely important. You need to keep an eye on how every salesperson on your team is approaching your clients, and what type of results they get. In addition, you need to see which methods are working and which ones aren’t. You also have to keep track of your costs and the ROI of your sales efforts. Let’s take a look at some of the things all businesses should monitor in their sales team.

The Quality of Sales Conversations

One of the most important things to monitor is whether your sales team is doing a good job at conveying value to prospects. This can only be done with active monitoring and recording of conversations. Being able to analyze a large number of conversations and identify what works and what doesn’t can be tough, however, so you may need to start looking for conversation intelligence tools.

Conversation intelligence tools allow you to do things like capture points in a conversation that seem to lead to higher conversions. It can also identify whether some people in your team omitted key points. This will help you improve coaching and training, but also be able to hold underperforming salespeople accountable. You’ll also be able to understand exactly why they’re underperforming and demonstrate what they need to correct.

Sales Cycle Length

A metric that will tell you a lot about how individual reps are performing is sales cycle length. You will be able to establish an average sales cycle length for certain products and be able to identify outliers. You’ll quickly see who can close the fastest and who is struggling. When combined with conversation intelligence tools, you can look at what makes these faster selling salespeople more successful. This will be a metric that will come in very handy during evaluations.

Trials

This is more of a group metric, but one that all companies should monitor closely. Trials are the number of new accounts during a set period. This is a metric that marketing and sales need to use together as the marketing department will be largely responsible for bringing in leads. You can compare trials year after year or sales period after sales period to set goals and push your team to continually improve.

Lead Conversion Rate

Lead conversion rates are perhaps the single most important metric you need to keep track of when monitoring the performance of your sales. And you’ll only be able to track this effectively with a robust CRM system. To get your lead conversion rate, all you have to do is gather a report of the leads you got within a certain period and divide the ones who converted with the total. You can then look at industry standards and monitor the effects of changes in your strategy.

These are all things you need to keep a close eye on if you want your sales team to constantly improve. This will also help you see where you’re going as a team, and how each member is contributing.