As a sales leader, you can often feel lost, with no clear visibility into what is happening with your business operations or your sales team. However, sales metrics are a way to get more visibility into your team’s activity and performance.

There is no easy way to establish KPIs or sales indicators, and we know that each team is different, so not every statistic will apply to your business. Even if there is a lot of information available, you should keep in mind that everyone’s business is unique.

Knowing which is the most important KPI to improve the performance of your sales team is key to achieving common goals such as:

• Sales target
• Sales closing percentage  
• Recurring old customers and so on

In this regard, establishing a clear approach that is easy for your team members to digest will ensure that they are all on the same page.

What are Sales indicators?

Sales  metrics  are performance measures used by sales teams and senior management to track the effectiveness of sales activities within a company. Measures like these can help improve sales performance, sales funnels, and the length of sales cycles.

The key is to  choose the sales indicators that are most relevant to your business objectives; focusing on the wrong ones could be costly for your business.

Steps to Create Effective Sales Indicators

If you have the metrics to do a sales analysis, but you don’t know how to enforce them, your plan won’t work. For the success of your strategy you must follow these simple steps:

1. Review your sales plan to choose KPIs that are most important to the business

KPIs are, in short, the set of metrics that are used to measure the effectiveness of the actions carried out in a business, and they acquire a special role in business development.

There are different KPIs for every business, simply because every business is unique. When you choose a KPI after an established business that isn’t actually similar to yours, it’s going to fail. So, choosing the right KPI for your business will depend on the factors that affect the revenue of your business.

2. Set customer-centric goals

As soon as you understand the process of acquiring a customer, then you focus more on  how to make your customers happy. If the customers are happy  then your business will also be on the right track.

How you make your company as a customer centric organization will depend on how you align between your goals , strategies and their execution. 

It’s simple but most companies don’t get it because they do not put the customers at the center of their business. All they care about is generating revenue. 

As a result, the customers do not retain and they suffer in the long run. So, setting up customer centric goals is as vital as getting the customers.

3. Specify the details of its implementation

The objective of setting KPIs is to achieve goals. To achieve the victory the path of it needs to be well defined with details, so that you can rectify any shortcomings. 

Details of how your sales team will achieve the KPI’s is as important as making them in the first place. Make sure that each member knows their responsibility and they take ownership of the responsibility. How KPIs will be implemented should be clear to all. Also, it’s vital that the KPIs are properly measurable and achievable.

How to establish sales indicators?

When establishing indicators to measure the performance of sellers, you should think about the following points:

1. Be specific

Take your company’s top sales metrics and break them down even further. How can your department contribute to this broader goal?

Identify your primary business goal based on the type of business you are in. Give context to your metrics. How would you align your marketing and sales teams to increase monthly recurring revenue if the monthly goal was to increase recurring revenue each month.

For example, to increase monthly recurring revenue by x%, you could for example try to improve your marketing activities by y%.

2. Implement actions

What are the actions that need to be implemented to achieve your goals? Do not stop until you have a clear understanding of what your team must do. Once you’re done, you should have a solid list of actionable metrics to work towards. 

Now apply these actions to go get the best from your team. The following measures will help to implement throughout the process:

1. Maintain business focus: You have to know where you are going so that all the opportunities that are going to arise allow you to stay focused on what is important.

2. Establish priorities: By doing so, important issues will not be lost in the midst of emergencies.

3. Make decisions : What do you do and what will you delegate (to yourself or to other people)

4. Evaluate and correct: It will also be easier for you to make corrections if you have these goals. In order to accomplish this, we suggest taking stock at least once a quarter.

3. Stay informed

Constant communication and monitoring of your KPIs is essential for the success of your team.

• You can monitor your progress towards achieving your daily and monthly goals by displaying metrics, for example, using a dashboard or CRM.
• Dashboards are an excellent option to interpret and display data in a concise and meaningful way through the use of graphs and tables.
• You can view an interactive, real-time view of your pipeline using this form of communication to ensure that each member of your team is aware of progress.
• Real-time viewing of business metrics facilitates transparency at all levels and enables real-time business decision-making.

Conclusion: 

A clear direction, collaboration, and strategic thinking are necessary to determine sales metrics. Your team will stay on track for success if KPIs are aligned with and supported by organizational goals.