The 22 Most Important Sales Metrics for Your Company

The modern sales manager has dozens of different sales metrics they can reference to analyze the efficiency and effectiveness of their sales team. Each metric offers different levels of granularity and provides insight into the impact of a sales operation.

While an emphasis on revenue is important, some sales performance metrics highlight positive leading indicators of growth. Others may indicate opportunities to abandon lower-impact initiatives. To help you understand each, we’ve listed 22 sales performance metrics, along with brief definitions. We’ve also broken them up according to where they fall within the different stages of the sales pipeline.

This isn’t a comprehensive list of every single sales metric. At the same time, it’s important to be strategic about which sales metrics you pay attention to so that you can filter between substance and noise.

The best sales pipeline metrics vary between organizations, depending on their short- and long-term priorities. So, you’ll want to be selective about the sales metric template and dashboard you use. That said, let’s dive in.

At the top of the sales funnel, various marketing and outreach efforts come together to generate leads. Here are six of the key sales performance metrics to monitor.

1. Outbound calls and emails made - On a daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis, measure the number of cold calls made and emails sent to prospective clients. You may find that your team needs to ramp up or scale down their outbound sales efforts.
2. Cold response rates - Determine the percentage of prospects who call back, return your voicemail, or reply to your email after you initiated a cold sales pitch. This helps measure the effectiveness of each outreach channel and your pitch.
3. Inbound calls and emails received - Track the number of calls and emails coming inbound from interested prospects. This may indicate the power and potential of your branding, marketing, and thought leadership campaigns.
4. Lead response time - Measure how quickly your sales team responds to inbound interest. Consider what your team members can do to accelerate their response times so customers are contacted faster.
5. Cost per lead - Quantify the cost of generating an interested lead by adding together advertising costs and labor and dividing that by the number of acquired leads. Then, be obsessive about driving this cost metric down.
6. MQL to SQL conversion rate - Among the total marketing qualified leads (MQL) generated, determine how many actually convert into sales qualified leads (SQL) so they can move further downstream. Most sales managers are motivated to improve this ratio.

Beyond the initial set of sales pipeline metrics are performance indicators that cover the middle of the sales funnel. Sales requires a commitment from customers to discover more about how your products and services solve their key pain points and problems. These sales metrics demonstrate the momentum (or lack thereof) your sales team has with your leads.

1. Meetings scheduled and held - Track the number of demo meetings your team successfully schedules with SQLs. Then, compare that against the number of meetings actually held to determine if prospects fail to show or if they reschedule, or if your sales reps miss their meetings.
2. Average time to produce proposals - After each demo, you should measure the average time needed to produce your sales quote or proposal. This keeps your team accountable to rapid response times so you can shorten the sales cycle length.
3. Average follow ups for feedback - Once you’ve sent your proposal, count the average number of times you need to follow up with potential clients to proceed toward the negotiation or acceptance stages. Although you might not be able to influence this metric much, you can at least set expectations on how much your sales reps need to communicate with leads after delivering their proposals.

In their response to your proposal, clients may push back for adjustments on pricing or edits on terms and conditions — or they’ll have signed on the dotted line. The sales performance metrics at this late stage include:

1. Revisions requested - Monitor the number of rounds of revision clients request in order to finalize the proposal. A higher average number of revisions may indicate that your team needs to ask better or more questions earlier on in the sales funnel.
2. Average discount required to close - Calculate the average discount clients want before they ink the deal. This may help determine future pricing strategies or changes in your current pricing structure.
3. Add-ons and upsells secured - Quantify the extra items or premium services successfully added to a contract and purchased by customers. This sales performance metric helps you evaluate how effective your team is at increasing revenue per customer.
4. Sales cycle length - Measure the number of days required to take a prospect through the full sales funnel, from initial outreach to opportunity won. Use this sales pipeline metric to forecast how long it may take future leads to convert into actual customers.
5. Sales demos to decisions - Check to see how often demos turn into positive purchasing decisions. A lower demo-to-decision ratio may indicate that your team needs to improve their sales collateral and demo process, or that they may need stronger sales qualification strategies.

After you close the sale, it’s helpful to look back and take stock of your team’s overall performance. The following sales pipeline metrics give you a macro perspective beyond the sales funnel.

1. Customer acquisition cost - This calculates the labor, advertising costs, and commissions paid in order to acquire a customer. As with cost per lead, you want to find ways to improve your acquisition costs.
2. Sales to advocacy ratio - Determine the number of successful referrals you’ve generated relative to the number of existing customers you have. Then, work to create more incentives that may promote further advocacy.
3. Customer retention rate - Beyond prompting referrals, it’s also important that you preserve existing customer relationships. This metric calculates the percentage of clients who continue to renew their commitments with your company.
4. Average deal size - Though contract values may range in size, the average deal size sets a benchmark for what’s considered a small, normal, or large contract value.
5. Customer lifetime value - Consider the total of goods and services purchased by a customer over the entire lifespan of their relationship with your company. Most organizations aim to progressively improve their customer lifetime value through various loyalty and retention programs.
6. Revenue by territory, market, category, or product line - Segment your sales using different criteria to pinpoint where you derive more of your revenue. You may find that your solutions are in higher demand in certain territories or that some products sell significantly better than others. Use that data to make better marketing, research and development, and staffing decisions.
7. Total revenue - Aggregate your sales each month, quarter, and year. Hopefully you’ll find that you’ve exceeded your sales targets.

Sales growth - Similarly, measure your monthly, quarterly, and annual sales revenues against previous periods to see if revenues have grown, shrunk, or stayed the same.

Although there are dozens of ways to analyze your data, there’s no single sales metric template that every business should follow. Since each organization has different goals and needs, tailor your own set of sales metrics to focus on the performance stats that will have the biggest impact on your company.

Consider, too, using other common sales metrics, or develop your own to help you better dissect your team’s effectiveness and performance. Make sure to communicate your goals with your sales reps and managers, and to set benchmarks that hold them accountable for their productivity and results. As you become more metrics-driven, you’ll find that your team similarly adopts the same mindset, which encourages them to consistently outperform their quota.