9 Key Sales Metrics to Track

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When business owners and entrepreneurs ask themselves how they can increase sales, despite being proactive, many fall short of an actionable answer because they overlook the obvious: The secret to increasing sales is understanding your sales metrics. Having a good grasp of your metrics empowers you to recognize areas of improvement; crucial to increasing sales growth.

All aspects of your sales are important, but certain metrics give you more valuable insight than others. While it’s vital to have a handle on your weekly revenue, there are metrics you need to focus on in the long term to improve and reach your goals.

Here’s a look at nine critical sales metrics to track and why it’s important to track them.

Sales Metrics You Need to Be Tracking

Cost per lead – What is the average cost per new customer or lead?
Number of SQLs – How many sales qualified lead do you have per month?
Sales cycle length – What is the closing ratio of all new prospects?
Retention rate – What is your customer churn?How many customers are you losing?
Total outbound emails delivered – How many net new contacts are coming into the pipeline?
Positive responses to emails – How effective are your efforts? Focus on those who have expressed interest in order to determine this.
Conversion rate – Are your emails converting? Figure out the number of qualifying emails to handoffs.
New opportunities generated – How is your campaign performing? Figure out the handoff rate, specifically the number of handoffs for every “x” amount of emails delivered.
New closed deals in the month – How much new revenue is generated each month?

Why metrics matter and how to track them

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By tracking the right metrics, you’ll gain an understanding of where to put your energy and what to adjust in your pipeline. Rather than always looking to the bottom line, you may be able to identify an area on which you can improve easily that will allow you to increase revenue more simply. Small tweaks to your sales process can have a big impact on your overall growth. Moreover, focusing on smaller components makes any increases or decreases easier to track and thus, easier to celebrate or remedy.

It’s also important to ensure that you’re tracking metrics for every campaign at both the team and individual levels. Doing so will give you greater insight into what’s working and what’s not and can also help with professional development, training and new hires.

Although having a handle on weekly revenue contributes to your business’s overall success, focusing on these nine metrics enables you to recognize and develop areas in need of improvement. Tracking them will help to ensure that you reach your goals and that you don’t miss any opportunities.