Are you struggling to keep an eye on how your team is performing? Missing out on vital statistics, or unsure what you need to measure to know if your team is reaching their potential? Want to learn of some useful software? Want to get better at tracking sales performance? Look no further.

Having a sales team do their best comes down to more than just their hard work. Even when you believe in your team, it isn’t enough to get them to reach the goals you want. It requires goals, targets, communication, effective meetings, rewards, and time management.

To ensure your team does the best, you need to check how they perform in sales. So, how to track sales performance? We answer this question here.

How to track sales team performance: Quantitative approach

To keep track of your team performance, you have to look at the numbers. Without any tracking of sales activity and other useful statistics, any progress to any goals you set, and the usefulness of the goals themselves, will be pretty much pointless. So what sort of numbers do you need to track?

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

A KPI is a goal you set, and a barometer of your team’s success, effectively a type of sales goal tracker. When you set a KPI, whether it’s sales, conversions, new customers, or whatever other goals you are focusing on, it gives a clear and concrete focus for your team. This should be visible to everyone, clear, and can be viewed daily by your team.

What KPIs are best?

If you want to track sales, and you are setting a KPI, you may want to know what sort of KPI is best and how to find them. Well, here we can offer some advice. Here are five popular KPIs:

• Monthly Sales Growth: This KPI helps you see any increase, or decrease, in sales over the month, which, unlike yearly sales stats, gives a closer look at the figures, and for newer companies just getting started, is much more useful.

• Average Conversion Time: This tracks how quickly a customer agrees to pay for a product or service, as a slow conversion rate, even with high customer interactions and sales, can still cause big problems for your business.

• Average Profit Margin: By tracking profit, you can see a general success, which is particularly useful for companies that have flexibility in sales, a diverse range of products, and offers sales and upgrades to existing customers, as profit is perhaps more important than new customers.

• Monthly Sales Bookings: This focuses on closed deals and confirmations, and itself can be broken down into different areas, such as per region, per salesperson etc.

• Sales Closing Ratio: This tracks how many sales are in comparison to quotes and offers. Lots of calls and quotes may indicate some success, but at the end of the day, it’s all about closing.

How to track KPIs?

There’s plenty of free and affordable KPI software, to ensure that management or your sales team performance can view the statistics, and this can also be shared with shareholders to ensure transparency. By using third party sales performance tracking software, you can enter the KPIs, and get detailed data on whether they are being met or not, in an easy to read format. One example is Sisense, which allows you to see detailed data on any aspect of the business.

Sales metrics (Sales performance metrics)

Sales metrics are often confused with KPIs, but they aren’t quite the same. Although they are still very useful for tracking sales performance. In simple terms, all KPIs are sales metrics, but not all sales metrics are KPIs. KPIs are essential parts of understanding the success of your business, your team performance and should be what drives it forwards. Metrics may not be as important but are still important data aspects to monitor. Nonetheless, to track your sales team and success, sales metrics can be good indicators. Here are some good sales performance metrics to keep an eye on, which have a relation to sales, but are not as essential:

• Customer satisfaction score: Satisfaction doesn’t mean your company is doing well, or badly, necessarily, but it’s a core part of any business’ success long term.

• Revenue Growth: this may seem like a KPI, but the growth of revenue alone won’t tell you if your company will necessarily succeed when for example there is a low conversion rate or low retention of customers.

Qualitative approaches to tracking your team’s performance

There’s more than just numbers to tracking sales rep performance. How effective are your sales team at communicating? Do they use a good sales method? How productive are their meetings? Are they happy? Numbers alone can’t tell you this.

Without good communication with customers, your team may not be reaching their potential and failing to meet the KPIs, so this is something that absolutely needs to be understood by management. Badly crafted emails, calls and meetings can be a major cause of problems within a company. An unhappy team will also struggle.

So, how can we improve and check these, and how can you do that without spending lots of time? We have you covered!

Regular Performance Reviews

Check-in with your team members regularly, to see what they are struggling with and what they feel competent at. By keeping a regular eye on things, problems can be solved quickly by identifying problems and giving a voice to your employees.

Use these as opportunities to praise your staff as well, as this will make them happier to continue working and give them motivation. In addition, any negatives should be used as learning opportunities, for the whole team as well!

You can identify areas where staff need further training, and you can in turn use your team to teach each other. Have one member who is great at closing? Get them to help others who struggle. Are others better at efficient communication? Use them to share their tips!

Track and Automate Sales Funnels

The numbers can give so much, but you need to see how your team approaches sales. What is necessary is to track how your sales funnel is followed.

Funnel gives sales teams a step by step process to the sales approach. By creating an effective funnel, and seeing if your employees work with it, you can monitor how effective they are at sales techniques, and see how the process works. The funnel can be used in any business area, for sales, the end goal should be a purchase.

To explain, for each step of the funnel, you can set clear steps for the team to achieve each part of the funnel process. Each interaction with a client can be in mind of this funnel stage, with specific requirements on the team member to follow in their engagement.

Team members can confirm they have followed each step in the process from (for example) awareness to purchase. If there are difficulties in any particular step, then either consider giving constructive feedback to the member or consider modifying the funnel.

How can you track this? It is best to record interactions with clients, and meetings. We will come to that shortly. Additionally, it is worthwhile considering some automation. For example, Active Campaign automates sales processes, and tracks the interactions with clients. The sales team can control each step of the process, and you can observe what is taking place. This allows you to ensure the sales funnel is being followed and what sort of results are being achieved.

Tracking Cold Emails

If cold emails are not as effective as they can be, you will be missing your targets. How your team cold email potential customers is a cornerstone of sales and this needs to be measured. A good cold email should be the following:

• Quick and to the point, no one wants to read lengthy emails;

• Personalized: People want to feel it is made for them, so as not to look like spam;

• Engaging: They need to draw the reader in.

However, when you’re talking about sales, lots need to be sent out and to personally write hundreds of emails takes time. So what’s the solution?

Provide a cold email software that allows for personalization, to ensure that emails provide the key information with a personal touch while streamlining the process through automation. A good CRM software can help through automation of the process. Other software or sometimes the CRM, such as Hubspot can track your emails, so you can see how the team is conducting their cold emails.

These softwares, combined with KPIs, can allow you to see what sort of ROI you are getting. If you see how many emails are being sent out, can check them, and see what results are being made, you can track your team’s process, and good CRM software can do just that.

Checking the Quality of Sales Calls

Calls in addition to emails need to be of good quality. Personalized, efficient, and to the point as well, it’s essential to know if your team’s calls with potential clients are their best, that they communicate well in settings, and do all they can to close the sale.

While you can and should use software to help with scripts for calls, that are personalized and easy for the sales rep to follow, it’s essential to check how they are if you want to track their performance.

Notiv is a software that can record any online meetings, whether they are between clients or staff, and unlike rival services which focus on transcribing whole meetings, Notiv can focus on the key facts from any meetings, so when you want to find what took place, it will be an easy and quick task. This way, you can observe what is taking place in meetings, to ensure that your team is doing their best.

Conclusion

There are many solutions you should consider to track your team performance. KPIs, metrics both provide clear goals and remind your team what to achieve. Provide funnels, have regular reviews with your staff, and focus on things outside the numbers too to keep an eye on progress. Cold call and cold email scripts help the team achieve better results as well. Last but not least, meeting recording software such as Notiv, can all help with tracking sales performance and checking up on meetings when you cannot be present. Chat to us today, to see how much time you can save, and keep track of your team’s sales approach.