Do You Know What Your Sales People Are Doing Today?

Key Sales Activity Metrics: How to hold yourself and your people accountable

Sales is not rocket science, it’s plain math. If you know your conversion rates, you can figure out what type of activity and the volume of calls and outreach required. These sales metrics show what today’s salespeople are doing on a daily basis. Sales activity metrics are “manageable,” meaning managers can directly influence them, and drive amazing results.

Overtime, with established metrics for your team or your own sales efforts, you can get a solid idea of what it takes to hit certain goals, and have your fingers on the pulse of the revenue generation engine.

Imagine one of your low performing reps isn’t hitting their quota. Diving into their activity metrics, you discover they just aren’t sending enough emails to generate the number of calls they need. You can’t control how much this salesperson sells — but you can tell them to increase their daily email output, and sales typically follow.

Here are some typical sales metrics you should track:

• Outbound Calls made
• Prospecting Emails sent
• Conversations (talking to a human)
• Social media interactions (LinkedIn, etc)
• Scheduled meetings
• Demos or sales presentations
• Referral requests
• Quotes/Proposals sent

These sales activity metrics are leading indicators. In other words, they predict your ultimate results in both building pipeline and closing business. In our next post, we will provide statistics for planning and industry sales KPIs to use as a baseline.