8 Sales Metrics You Need To Be Tracking

Oh hi. You’re probably here because you want to know all about sales performance metrics – you know, which ones to track, how to track them, and why you’re even tracking them..

Yep? In that case, you’re in the right place.

Let’s get started with the basics:

What are sales metrics and why are they important?

Sales metrics are the data points you track to assess sales performance on an individual, team or company-wide basis. By tracking and analyzing progress, you can figure out what’s working and what’s not, making it an important part of improving your sales performance – and ultimately, revenue.

If your sales team isn’t performing, the numbers will say it all. Scroll down for the key metrics to track for sales success.

Sales metrics vs sales KPIs

It’s easy to get mixed up between sales metrics and sales key performance indicators (KPIs) because in reality, all KPIs are metrics, but not all metrics are KPIs.

But what’s the real difference between sales metrics and sales KPIs?

Simply put, sales metrics are there to track performance, whilst KPIs are there to set expectations and measure progress towards key business goals. You could say that KPIs give a high-level view, whilst metrics hones in on performance from more specific business activities and processes to achieve these goals.

When your metrics go above and beyond your KPIs, you know you’re in a good place.

8 sales metrics to track

There are a lot of sales funnel metrics out there, but we wanted to focus on some of the most valuable sales metrics you should be tracking.

1) Sales qualified leads (SQLs)

A sales qualified lead (SQL) is a lead that is ready to talk to a salesperson or sales representative. This lead will preferably match your ideal customer profile, and has made its way through the marketing funnel, requesting more information about your product, service or solution.

You want high quality SQLs, whether they’re inbound or outbound leads – and guess what? Similarweb Sales Intelligence can help you with that.

For those inbound leads, use our account review and list filters to make sure the data is matching up to your ICP.

And for outbound leads? Our Lead Generation tool is a goldmine with over 450M contacts for over 30 million websites..

You can narrow down your search with over 100 filters – including company size, location, website traffic, and technologies used – to make sure you’ve got a list of prospects that work for you, and that your solution works well for. Then simply click the Contacts tab for all those precious contact details, and export to excel or straight to Salesforce or HubSpot.

And there you have it, a bunch of high quality sales qualified leads. Anyway, back to the top sales metrics to track.

2) Lead velocity rate (LVR)

Your lead velocity rate (LVR) measures the increase – or decrease – in the number of qualified sales leads that your business generates on a monthly basis.

Lead velocity rate is a key indicator of how good your pipeline is – are you getting in front of the right type of customers, and are you marketing yourself in the right way? It’s also critical to measuring business growth over time and forecasting, because – ideally – you want your LVR to be going up and up…. and up (and up and up and up).

Having a real-time indicator of  growth is so beneficial to your sales strategy, but it doesn’t just stop there. You’re going to want to track some more of the sales efficiency metrics in this list too.

Here’s how to calculate lead velocity rate:

3) Sales cycle length

Sales cycle length refers to the amount of time it takes for a lead to move down the funnel to a closed-won deal. It’s no secret: the shorter, the better – because that way, you can fit in more sales conversations (and closes).

Your sales cycle can be shortened by optimizing each part of your sales process, from your first outreach email to how you close the deal, and not forgetting how you retain them too.

Our top tip: Make your sales email stand out from the crowd with exclusive and valuable insights (that they actually care about) from Similarweb Sales Intelligence Account Review and Insights Generator. Then, make them sign and stay with your winning personality, support, and by keeping up with those consultative insights to provide your clients with real value for their business. Trust us, it’s a winning formula.

Talking of formulae – to work out your average sales cycle length, you need to look at individual sales cycles and how long they took, and go from there.

Hate math? Me too – so grab your calculator:

4) Win rate

Next up is win rate – the metric we all love to see because it means converted, paying customers, (thanks to those amazing outreach emails of yours).  In fact, it’s one of the most highly tracked metrics for all you sales leaders out there.

Why? Because your win rate feeds into your team’s pipeline, forecasting, benchmarking, and performance tracking.

As simple as “win rate” sounds, there are multiple contexts to calculating it – just to make your life more difficult. But, here’s the main one where you can assess the number of opportunities converted:

5) Annual contract value (ACV)

Annual contract value or ACV refers to how much revenue a specific contract generates per year. It’s predominantly a metric that’s applied to yearly and multi-year contracts, so you can get that all-important average breakdown of a total contract value (TCV) to keep you on track each year.

The main reason why you should calculate ACV is so you can compare it to other metrics like CAC, (this one is coming up – don’t worry), to work out when that profit is gonna hit.

Here’s how to calculate annual contract value (ACV):

6) Customer lifetime value (CLTV)

On top of calculating the ACV of individual contracts or customers, you should be working out the average of all your clients. Introducing customer lifetime value – CLTV or LTV  some like to call it.

Obviously, you want your CLTV or LTV  to be as high as possible because $$$, and therefore, more return on investment (ROI). This is a sales metric you can – and should – improve on after you close a deal, which is where retention efforts come in, as well as upsell and cross-sell opportunities come in.

This is another thing that Similarweb Sales Intelligence can help you do. With the vast amount of insights that it provides, you can show the value of your solution, how they can use it to its full capacity, and how it can help them reach their business goals. Hello, renewal (and potentially an upsell or cross-sell), and welcome, an increase in CLTV.

So, back to the topic of how to calculate customer lifetime value (CLTV or LTV). Here’s the formula:

7) Customer acquisition cost (CAC)

Customer acquisition cost (CAC) measures how much you spend acquiring new customers. This includes both the sales and marketing efforts that convinced the customer to say “yes”, so the costs that go into things like:

• Advertising
• Your marketing team
• Your sales team
• Creative/design
• Technologies
• Production
• Tracking and reporting

For successful business and revenue growth, you need your CAC to be less than the customer lifetime value.

Keeping your CAC as low as possible by working with engaged prospects and an optimized sales process is the ideal scenario, but we realize this isn’t always possible. That’s why identifying those upsell and cross-sell opportunities can make a real difference to your business.

Here’s how to calculate customer acquisition cost (CAC):

7) Churn rate

The thing is, that sales win won’t count for much if the customer isn’t happy or satisfied with your solution – especially for those that work on a subscription basis.

Yep, we’re talking about the dreaded “churn” – and here’s how to work your churn rate:

Churn happens in every business, but there are things you can do to reduce your churn, and in some specific cases, avoid it completely.

Here are our top three ways to reduce your churn rate:

1. Make sure your prospects fit your specifications for your ideal customer – that way you’re not wasting their time, or your time.
2. Provide valuable, consultative insights about their competitors and industry – beyond your product offering – to prove yourself as an indispensable resource or partnership.
3. Monitor accounts regularly  – so you can flag any problems or any areas of improvement before it’s too late.

Our Lead Generator tool, Account Review and Sales Signals available on Similarweb Sales Intelligence will help you do all those three things, and more.

How Similarweb can help your sales metrics

So, we’ve spoken about how Similarweb Sales Intelligence can help tighten up your sales metrics for an all-round better performance from your sales team.

TLDR? Our Lead Generator tool, our Insights Generator tool, and our Account Review will optimize your sales process, from finding the right leads for you, engaging your prospects with exclusive and highly relevant insights that they will actually care about in your outreach efforts, and our Signals and Alerts features to monitor your accounts.

This will benefit you in a number of ways, including:

• • Less time spent in reaching out to leads that don’t fit your business model
  • Optimized outreach emails for shorter lead response time and improved conversion rates 
  • Become your customers’ trusted advisor with consultative insights
  • Shorter sales cycle length (meaning more time working on new prospects!)
  • Upsell and cross-sell opportunities easily spotted with our Signals and Alerts features
  • Identifypotential of churn before it’s too late using the same monitoring features

See for yourself and find out more here:

FAQs

How to measure success in sales?

As mentioned, there are a bunch of ways to measure success in sales. You can split your metrics into KPIs, activity-based metrics, pipeline sales metrics, lead generation metrics, sales productivity metrics, and so on. You should have oversight into all of these to judge your sales performance.

What are some sales key performance indicators (KPIs)?

We discussed the difference between sales metrics and sales KPIs, but a few of the main KPIs to track for sales success include revenue growth, revenue per client, profit margin, customer retention rate, and customer satisfaction.

How does tracking sales metrics impact performance?

The short answer: positively! By tracking sales metrics, you can monitor your team’s performance, seeing how different processes and projects are working – and maybe not working. You can monitor and make amendments accordingly to ensure the process is as smooth as possible.

If Similarweb Sales Intelligence has stood out to you as a must-have platform for your sales team (we’d have to agree), go ahead a book a demo right here.