{"id":18584,"date":"2018-11-14T15:53:18","date_gmt":"2018-11-14T15:53:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/?p=18584"},"modified":"2024-07-25T11:56:55","modified_gmt":"2024-07-25T10:56:55","slug":"sales-kpis-metrics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/sales-kpis-metrics\/","title":{"rendered":"18 sales KPIs and metrics for B2B companies to drive more revenue"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are many parts to a high-performing sales organization \u2013 the right people, processes and strategy, to start. But today, the underlying backbone of all of it is the right data as a foundation for customer acquisition.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not to say there\u2019s no art to practicing sales. Much of what defines our most outstanding sales reps is their ability to deeply understand our prospects\u2019 and customers\u2019 business needs and speak directly to them. They often care about far more than just their sales quota<\/a>. While science has always been part of sales, it\u2019s hard to ignore the increasing importance of taking a data-driven approach to growing your business.<\/p>\n

As a sales leader, that means you have to be able to interpret and use data about your team and organization throughout the sales cycle. As a sales rep, you need to be comfortable understanding the data behind your pipeline. For both, it\u2019s the ability to turn numbers like lead volume, win rates and ARPA into an actionable plan that impacts the bottom line. If you\u2019re forecasting<\/a> short on your global revenue target, do you know how you\u2019ll make up the difference? That\u2019s not a rhetorical question.<\/p>\n

The best way to gain this visibility is through clearly defined sales KPIs. Here\u2019s a look at the sales KPIs we track at Intercom and how we use them to drive key outcomes.<\/p>\n

What are sales KPIs?<\/h2>\n

Sales KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators, are a series of agreed-upon, quantitative measures used to assess the performance of a sales organization. KPIs help sales reps, managers and leaders track progress to targets, identify high-level trends and themes, and manage individual and team performance.<\/p>\n

Sales KPIs versus sales metrics<\/h3>\n

Some might argue that there are fine-grained distinctions to be made between KPIs and metrics. In my world, they\u2019re just two sides of the same coin. You can think about it this way: your KPIs are the key metrics<\/a> you use to measure sales performance.<\/p>\n

Beware of headline KPIs<\/h2>\n

When you\u2019re first defining your sales KPIs, it can be tempting to focus all of your attention on headline KPIs<\/a> like organizational or individual attainment. After all, the end goal of any sales organization is to bring in more money for the business. While headline KPIs are a concise way of understanding where you\u2019ve netted out, they rarely provide the full picture of how or why you hit (or missed) your targets in Salesforce.<\/p>\n

“The point of tracking sales KPIs is to drive action for our team, not just to display them on a sales dashboard”<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why I spend much of my time examining underlying KPIs like lead flow, pipeline creation, churn, expansion and more. The point of tracking sales KPIs is to drive action for our team, not just to display them on a sales dashboard. For example, say that I notice we\u2019re over delivering on sales eligible leads but our number of stage one opportunities \u2013 new leads that our Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) mark as qualified and pass to our Account Executives (AEs) \u2013 hasn\u2019t increased. I can interpret that in one of two ways: either we have more leads of poorer quality, or we haven\u2019t staffed up our SDR team to convert the increased volume. Both can be corrected to get us up and over the line.<\/p>\n

The 18 top sales KPIs and metrics<\/h2>\n

Below I break down the top 18 sales KPIs that we track here at Intercom. The KPIs are organized by category with more detail on how we calculate and use each sales metric. Here are the 18 sales KPIs and metrics we\u2019ll cover:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Sales eligible lead delivery<\/li>\n
  2. First response time<\/li>\n
  3. Number of accounts contacted<\/li>\n
  4. Number of accounts engaged<\/li>\n
  5. Stage one opportunity creation<\/li>\n
  6. Stage two opportunity creation<\/li>\n
  7. Average revenue per account<\/li>\n
  8. New logos acquired<\/li>\n
  9. New logo revenue<\/li>\n
  10. New business win rate<\/li>\n
  11. Expansion dollars<\/li>\n
  12. Contraction dollars<\/li>\n
  13. Churn dollars<\/li>\n
  14. Gross customer churn<\/li>\n
  15. Net expansion revenue<\/li>\n
  16. Net new revenue attainment<\/li>\n
  17. Individual quota attainment<\/li>\n
  18. Revenue sold per rep<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    6 types of sales metrics (and the best KPIs for each)<\/h2>\n

    While there are infinite metrics we could track and many more that we do track, these are the ones we feel are critical to driving growth<\/a> and efficiency.<\/p>\n

    For many of these KPIs, you\u2019ll want to measure them on two levels: individual and team. Both are important if you want to manage your sales reps to top performance and ensure your team is on track to hit company goals.<\/p>\n

    1. Lead generation KPIs (Top of funnel)<\/h3>\n

    \"Lead
    \nOur lead flow KPIs tell us the volume of leads entering the sales funnel. These top of funnel KPIs are leading indicators of how many opportunities we can expect our SDRs to hand off to our AEs.<\/p>\n

    For our inbound leads \u2013 new leads that are generated by marketing activities \u2013 we track:<\/p>\n