4 Crucial Sales Team Performance Metrics (with Benchmarks)

Every high-performing sales funnel has a steady and consistent flow. And while each sales environment is unique — especially in the complex and nuanced world of B2B tech — there are a few key areas you should look at if you really want to understand your sales team performance metrics.

Full disclosure: there are a lot of articles out there with a sprawling litany of sales KPIs, obscure metrics, and one complex equation after another.

This is not one of those articles.

Here, we’ll cut through the clutter and give you a short list of 4 sales team performance metrics you should focus on if you truly want to understand the effectiveness of your efforts. Those metrics are:

1. Activities to engagement
2. Engagement to meetings conversion
3. Meetings to pipeline opportunity conversion
4. Closed-won opportunities percentage

We even provide some gold-standard industry benchmarks so you can see how you stack up.

Let’s dive in.

Team Performance Metric #1: Activities to Engagement

At its highest level, understanding your sales team performance metrics really starts with your sales engagement strategies. While it can be tough to nail this one down with all the variables (market awareness, ICP targeting, etc.), understanding and tracking interactions between your sales team and prospects is essential.

Don’t Forget About Quality
It’s not just about the activities, but the quality of those activities. QA scores help ensure the right message is being delivered to your prospects.

First, consider all the activities that go into your top-of-funnel prospect engagement process. It probably includes most, if not all, of the following:

• Channels: How are you connecting/communicating with prospects? Emails, social selling, phone calls?
• Content: What materials are you creating and using to persuade the prospect and move them through the funnel?
• Automation: Is your process (or parts of your process) automated for more efficient workflows?
• Platforms: What software are you using to optimize your workflows (CRM, data quality, email, appointment scheduling, etc.)?

Ultimately, you can’t begin measuring your performance metrics until you truly understand the effectiveness of the activities that are most likely to lead to sales engagement. Begin with an audit of each activity to identify what’s working, what needs to be optimized, and what should be eliminated altogether. Then go a step further and determine the number of activities your reps are engaging in each day.

With the average number of touchpoints being around eight before a sale is closed, the higher your volume of activities each day, the better your odds of moving prospects through the pipeline.

Team Performance Metric #2: Engagement to Meetings Conversion

Once you have a baseline of which (and how many) activities are effectively working at the very top of the funnel, you can focus on the next level of sales team performance metrics. While your efforts paid off with an initial bite, how “engaged” is the prospect, really?

There are many best practices for top-of-funnel lead follow-up to convert more customers. Inside Sales Solutions (ISS), for example, has a 24-touchpoint process that mixes emails, calls, and messaging the prospect on LinkedIn.

Regardless of your process here, around 40% or more of the prospects your team engages should move on to a demo, consultation call, or other type of meeting.

Team Performance Metric #3: Meetings to Pipeline Opportunities Conversion

Now that you’ve scheduled and conducted your meeting, how many of those prospects are taking the next step in the sales process and becoming opportunities in your pipeline?

Perhaps it was a detailed and structured sales pitch. Maybe a high-level product demo. Or just a more informal discussion to really get to know the prospect’s needs and pain points. In all circumstances, getting prospects to continue through the sales process after an initial meeting is crucial to any high-performing sales funnel.

On average, the ISS team sees 60-70 percent of their scheduled meetings moving to the next step of the sales process and into the pipeline.

Team Performance Metric #4: Closed-Won Opportunities Percentage

They’re officially in the pipeline, at the bottom of the funnel. You have them right where you want them…time for your closers step in and seal the deal.

What sales team performance metrics should you realistically be hitting during this final phase?

Again, and with B2B tech sales especially, there are a lot of variables at play to overcome sales objections, get a contract signed, and welcome a new customer into your business. But most enterprise sales teams will average 25-40 percent closed-won conversion from outbound sourced opportunities, according to ISS. And these numbers should be much higher when the lead originated from inbound marketing efforts.

Need Help Elevating Your Sales Team Performance Metrics?

Hopefully you now have a better understanding of the metrics that can set your sales team up for success. If you’re unsure how to obtain accurate measurements for each phase of the funnel or need help raising the bar on any of the benchmarks listed above, outsourcing your sales development can be a fast and effective way to hit your goals and drive more revenue.