Increase your revenue with these must-have sales KPIs

Fellow salespeople,

We are data nerds at Actiondesk and our sales team wanted to have an in depth understanding of how our funnel was behaving. I think you are probably asking the same questions that we ask about your company’s sales activity:

• How does our pipeline look?
• How are each of our sales team members performing?
• What is our win rate? How is it evolving?
• Are we getting any better?

Today, we would like to share a few tips to identify and track some sales KPIs to help you better understand your team’s sales efficiency in an effort to bring in more revenue. Let’s get started.

What can you do with your data?

We think good data analysis and reporting can support two main objectives:

1. Deeper Understanding
   
   You want to grow? First, you have to understand how your team is really doing, what you are doing well, and what you are doing poorly.
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2. Improved Tracking
   
   Second, you need to identify steps to improve on your weaknesses. After implementing these changes, we will measure whether they worked or not. This is meaningful tracking.

Let’s focus on the second part, by covering three main questions:

→ What is my real business growth?

→ How is my sales team performing?

→ Which sources should I invest in more to develop my business?

If you have any other specific questions you’d like to answer, I suggest you go straight to the end of this article, we have a surprise for you.

The tool that you will need

In order to get you started, first, you will need your CRM’s data. We’ll use Close CRM as our main dataset. By doing so, we will access all the information from our Sales Pipeline:

• Leads
• Contacts
• Opportunities
• Any Activities: Calls, Meetings, Tasks completed, etc.

The second step is to make this data accessible. By accessible, we mean more than just visualizing the data. You should be able to manipulate it, modify it, and get insights quickly. To do this we can use two types of tools:

• Excel or Google Sheets: the best way to manipulate and create reports. The interface is easy to use, no learning curve. But you’ll need to extract CSVs, which is time-consuming every time you want your data live. Additionally, most of the time, you’ll get only partial information as csv extracts do not include everything from your CRM.
• BI tools: They’re strong, powerful and nice to see. But you won’t be able to create week over week reports, or answers to specific question as they’re not flexible. You’ll probably need someone to handle it, or deal with the back-end import.

We will use a third option, which is Actiondesk. Actiondesk is an easy-to-use spreadsheet that connects your data from multiple sources, including databases or SaaS, into one place and allows you to work on your data live. Actiondesk works just like Google Sheet or Excel, that way you don’t have to learn a new tool. In addition, you can pull in live data from your Close account directly through our API.

Check it out here:

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Step 1: Connecting the data

To get started, you will need to connect your Close account, and then import your Close data. It’s a 3-click process that allows you to get your Leads, Opportunities, and Contacts in a table:

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Step 2: Listing the KPIs we’ll need

Question 1 - What is my real business growth

For this question, we will need to understand how my business is growing. We will track this on a month over month timeline and also evaluate it for the year. For a SaaS business type it means getting the following information:

• Total customers
• of new trials
• of opportunities opened
• of new customers
• of demos done
• of reactivated users
• of churned user
• MRR
• ARR

Additionally, we will add our main KPIs which will represent our revenue health:

• Churn Rate: % of total customers who canceled this month
• Gross Growth Rate (new customers + reactivated customers/total customers )
• Actual Growth Rate: Growth (growth rate minus churn rate)

Step 3: Creating the structure of the report

On Actiondesk, we will set up the structure of the report on a new sheet. We listed the columns as part of the KPIs we would like to track and added a timeline by year and month on the left (column B). We now have the structure of the report:

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Step 4: Automating the report

Actiondesk works just like Google Sheets. Meaning, once you have a table with your data on a sheet, and your report structure on another sheet, all you have to do is add conditional formulas in the cell. For the opportunities, use the =COUNTIF() formula where you will have Opportunities as a table to count on and the date and month as the criterion.

Then, repeat the process for the other columns.

Step 5: Analyse

Now that we have a fully automated and complete dashboard we can start to consider what to do with the KPIs:

• The Actual Growth Rate is the main KPI you want to look at every month. If it’s below 0%, it means your growth is artificial and you have more churn than new clients.
• With the last lines of the report, YoY Growth and Year Average, you can better set targets and objectives. This number helps you understand the pace of your growth on a yearly basis.

Step 6: Add auto-digests and enjoy

With Actiondesk, you can create auto-digest reports to keep all your team members and investors up to date. Would you like to share your Monthly Sales KPIs on Slack every Monday at 9am? Click on the Share button, select the cells, and the destination and you’re all set!

Question 2 - How is my sales team performing?

This report tracks every Sales event per Sales Rep on a month-over-month basis, namely:

• of new demos
• of won opportunities
• of of canceled leads
• MRR added
• Close Rate
• Average # of days to close
• Average # of calls
• Average # of emails

It gives us the following report:

With this report you’ll get a pulse of the Sales Activity. You will be able to easily monitor from an individual perspective if a Sales Rep is getting busier by having more emails and calls, and closing less deals, or is getting an average deal value that is decreasing for instance. From that point you can try to understand the root cause of the problem: are my Sales Reps spending too much time on small deals? Do my Sales Reps get overwhelmed?

On a macro-level, you can analyse the underlying factors that are showing some Sales to over-perform, such as, is there any correlation between the number of calls and the Close rate?

Question 3: Which sources should I invest more in to develop my business?

The last report calculates the total ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) generated by each source of the sales funnel. We measured by sources several critical KPIs:

• Total # of leads
• Total # of opportunities won
• Win rate
• Time to close
• Average Annualized Revenue per Won Account
• Total ARR

With this report you will get a pulse of the Sales Activity. You will be able to easily monitor from an individual perspective if a Sales Rep is getting busier by having more emails and calls, and closing less deals, or is getting an average deal value that is decreasing for instance. From that point you can try to understand the root cause of the problem: are my Sales Reps spending too much time on small deals? Do my Sales Reps get overwhelmed?

On a macro-level, you can analyze the underlying factors that are contributing to performance, such as, correlation between number of calls and the Close rate.

With this report, you will be able to build a data-driven strategy for your go-to-market by spending more resources on marketing sources that are driving high-valued deals and converting well.

Actiondesk X Close

We are happy to offer a free data consulting call + a free trial to connect Close and build the most important reports you need from your Close account’s data. Sign up here.

special thanks to Brandon Healey @ Sumoquote & the Close team