5 Key Sales Reports for a Winning Team

Sales is a metrics-driven contact sport. By tracking the right metrics, you’ll be able to analyze trends in your results with more clarity. By doing so, you will be able to focus on the best sales opportunities in the pipeline and set your sales team up for success.
So, what are the metrics you should be tracking? Great question!
Here are 5 key sales reports that you should use to evaluate your sales team’s performance and results.

Open Opportunities

The number of open opportunities each rep is working at any given time.
Figure out how many opportunities are available for your sales reps to work on. If you notice your reps don’t have enough open opportunities in the pipeline, you know you’ll need to grow your pipeline as rapidly and effectively as possible. If your reps are running too few opportunities, they won’t close enough business and you will have less revenue.
You can also use this metric to make sure your sales reps are not carrying too many opportunities. Reps working too many open opportunities will become ineffective because they won’t have sufficient time to work them all and prospects will feel neglected and you risk losing them.
How many open opportunities a sales rep should work on at once depends on deal size, experience level, and time needed to service an opportunity. The balance can be difficult to pinpoint, but you can achieve it through effective reporting and analytics.

Closed Opportunities

The number of opportunities your sales team closed, including both closed-won and closed-lost opportunities.
Is your pipeline steadily growing over time? Are your reps opening and closing enough deals? If you see that opportunity creation is low, for example, then check MQL count, prospecting activities (like dials and emails), channel referrals, trial downloads, and anything else that generates lead flow for your sales team.
You’ll benefit from looking at this historically and following it for a sense of whether your team worked enough pipeline to hit your goals.

Deal Size

The average sales price of all your closed-won deals.
In the short run, this metric will make it easy for you to spot opportunities that fall outside the normal deal size and flag them as at-risk. Opportunities in your pipeline that are significantly larger (3x or greater) than your average deal size should be flagged because, typically, larger-than-average deals tend to have smaller win rates and longer sales cycles.
In the long run, average deal size over time will help you track when and by what margin you move up-market and begin winning bigger deals. If your average deal size increases significantly from your historical average, your pipeline may be changing. It is time to dig in to your lead generation efforts and figure out why you’re attracting larger deals.
A change in average deal size isn’t good or bad – it just means you need to dig into your historical data and pipeline generation efforts to figure out how (and whether) to react.

Win Rate

The number of closed opportunities that you won.
Formula: (Closed-Won Opportunities) / (Total Opportunities that were both Closed-Won + Closed-Lost).
Win rate tells you the success rate of your sales team. To increase your reps’ win rate, you need to find where they have the most difficulty converting opportunities from stage to stage. If conversion rates are low in the early stages, your team will need help with such skills as rapport building, better qualification, or maybe product knowledge and demo skills. And if conversion rates are low in the later stages of the sales funnel, you may want to start coaching skills such as managing objections, gaining commitment, negotiation skills or perhaps even closing skills.
As a sales leader, you should always be trying to increase your team’s win rate. It’s not always simple, but through setting a solid sales process, consistent training, good sales coaching, and sales and marketing support, this is possible to increase gradually and over time until a point that it is sufficiently good and steady.

Sales Cycle

The average duration (typically in days) it takes your team to win a deal.
Top sales managers will also want to glean how long individual stages of the sales process take (also known as “duration in stage”). Your sales cycle is the sum of all the durations within each opportunity stage in your pipeline.
Keep historical data about your average sales cycle to better identify likely buyers and at-risk opportunities. The amount of time an opportunity spends in a stage has a high correlation to its likelihood of becoming a won deal – if your opportunity has been stuck in the pipeline much longer than the typical won cycle then this opportunity is less probably to be won.
Minimize your sales cycle by identifying at which stage in your sales funnel you are seeing bottlenecks. This will inform you which skills you should coach and improve. Each stage is unique and some take longer than others – it is important to identify which stages need improvement when compared to historical benchmarks.

Takeaways

As a sales team leader, your main goals are to hit your revenue number and manage your team successfully. To do this, you’ll need to focus on a few of the most critical sales metrics. The 5 metrics above are the ones that really matter for your sales pipeline and results. And with the right CRM software, you will be able to easily track all 5!
Zoho CRM provides more than 40 different standard reports for the users’ benefit. These reports are distributed across different modules in Zoho CRM. You can use the standard reports or customize them as per your business requirements.
With Zoho CRM, you will be able to measure the 5 key sales metrics, build historical data for each category, track your progress over time, and set your goals, forecasts, and coaching strategies accordingly — all of which will allow you to WIN!
TO BEGIN A FREE TRIAL OF ZOHO CRM, CLICK HERE!
Category: Sales
Tags: , , ,