11 Essential Sales KPIs for All Sales Teams
Sales is all about results. You need to know how many leads you’re generating, what your close rate is, and which product or service is selling the most. To get these insights, you rely on key performance indicators (KPIs). But with so many possible sales KPIs out there, which ones should you track?
Never fear! We’ve compiled a list of 11 essential sales KPIs that all sales teams should be tracking. From leads generated to win rate, this list has everything you need to start measuring and improving your team’s performance.
So without further ado, let’s get started!
What is a sales KPI?
“KPI” stands for key performance indicators, and it’s a quantifiable metric used to break down larger goals or judge the effectiveness of sales initiatives. KPIs are used in all sorts of industries, whenever you need numbers to represent progress and success. A business owner might use KPIs like overall revenue and profit margin, while an auto parts manufacturer might use number of defects and total parts created.
While any kind of trackable number can technically be used as a KPI, there are standard KPIs used by the majority of sales teams across industries. Unsurprisingly, they usually revolve around sales deals and revenue generated.
Let’s dive in.
Sales KPI #1: Sales revenue
Sales revenue is exactly what it sounds like: how much money comes in from your sales efforts. This doesn’t just help you make sure your salespeople make their quotas, it’s also crucial for knowing how effective the team is overall. By comparing sales revenue to revenue that comes in from other channels, you can get insight into which strategies need adjusting.
Sales KPI #2: New customer acquisition rate
This sales KPI tracks how many new customers a business is acquiring over a given period. By putting this against specific campaigns or sales efforts, you can determine how effective they are at bringing in new customers. This way, you can put a stop to strategies that are obviously not working, and invest more into tactics that are having an impact.
Sales KPI #3: Customer retention rate
Customer retention rate is a sales KPI used to track how your customer base shrinks over time. By keeping tabs on this metric, sales leaders can adjust their tactics, based on how long they can expect to keep a potential customer around. To calculate your customer retention rate, first pick a specific time period you want to calculate this over. Most companies will use a yearly, quarterly, monthly, or weekly time period. Then, use this formula:
[(Number of customers at the end of that time period – Number of new customers gained in that time period) / Number of customers at the beginning of the time period] * 100
#4: Average order value
Average order value — or AOV — is a metric used by sales leaders to get insights on their customer base. Specifically, how much each customer typically spends on a single transaction. This tells you how valuable an individual customer is, which can then be compared to how much it costs to acquire that customer — and determine if you’re using tactics that are too expensive.
Sales KPI #5: Lead conversion rate
Lead conversion rate may just be one of the most important sales KPIs you’ll track. Specifically, it tells you how successful your sales team is at turning leads into customers. This, combined with sales revenue and other KPIs, is a crucial way to measure your sales team’s performance, and can tell you how to adjust your strategy.
Sales KPI #6: Cost per acquisition
Cost per acquisition (or CPA) is a useful metric for calculating how effective your business is at getting new customers. By dividing the total cost you’ve spent for acquiring customers by the amount of new customers you generated, you can determine how expensive a specific tactic or strategy was for each individual customer. Then, by comparing this metric to AOV and other KPIs, you can determine if your strategies are costing you more money than they’re bringing in.
Sales KPI #7: Win/loss ratio
Your sales team’s win/loss ratio shows how many opportunities they successfully turn into new customers. Calculating this ratio is pretty simple. Just divide the number of won opportunities by the number of lost opportunities, and you have your ratio. You can then compare this against industry benchmarks — or competitors — to determine if you need to adjust your strategy.
Sales KPI #8: Upsell rate
Upsell rate is a crucial sales KPI for organizations trying to maximize their profits. It helps sales leaders track how effective their team’s upselling initiatives are by seeing how much they increase a customer’s overall order value. To calculate this, you just need to compare the total value of items sold after upselling efforts take place with the value of items sold when there’s no upselling. You can do this for individual customers, certain groups, or your entire customer base.
Sales KPI #9: Customer lifetime value
Customer lifetime value (or CLV) tells you how much individual customers are worth to your company over the entire time they’ll count as a customer. It tracks every transaction they make, every product or service they buy, and how much they’ve spent for this overall. By measuring your customer base’s overall CLV, you can make better decisions about which sales strategies are worth pursuing and which ones are just too expensive.
#10: Net promoter score
Net promoter score (or NPS), is an important KPI for businesses that want to measure customer satisfaction and loyalty. It quantifies a customer’s likelihood of recommending a product or service to their contacts and gives an insightful overview of how well a product or service is performing. By measuring NPS, organizations can create customer segments and adjust their strategies for each.
#11: Sales velocity
Sales velocity is a metric used to describe how effective a sales team is. It takes a number of metrics into account to calculate how much revenue a sales team can generate each day. The calculation is pretty simple:
Sales velocity = (Opportunities x Deal Size x Win Rate) / Length of Sales Cycle
With this metric, you can track performance broadly across your team or even for individual salespeople.
How to use Unito to report on sales KPIs
What if you could use a single platform to turn any tool into the perfect place to report on your sales team’s performance?
Unito is a no-code workflow management solution with the deepest two-way integrations for some of the most popular tools on the market, including Salesforce, Pipedrive, HubSpot, Asana, Trello, Google Sheets, and more.
The best part? Whenever your data gets updated in any tool, Unito automatically updates it in all others.
So how can you use this for reporting on Sales KPIs?
No matter where you keep your sales data, you can use Unito to sync it to any other platform, like a spreadsheet, a project management tool, or a database.
Need a template?
We built this spreadsheet template that lets you track project progress with burndown charts, sprint velocity graphs, and more. With a little modification, you can turn it into the sales KPI dashboard of your dreams.
You can get it for Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel.
Want to see how easy it is to build a Unito flow? Here’s how.
- First, connect your tools to Unito.
Here, we’re using HubSpot and Google Sheets as an example.
- Use rules to filter out the work items you don’t want in your dashboard.
- Map your fields
Field mappings tell Unito where your data needs to go by matching up fields in one tool to those in the other, even if they have different names.
And that’s it! Now launch your flow and watch as your sales data shows up in other tools.
Mastered these yet?
That’s a lot of KPIs! And we didn’t even cover all of them. These are just some of the most essential KPIs for sales leaders to know about. Having a handle on these numbers can help you make better decisions for your business and ensure that you’re hitting your targets.