Key CRM Metrics ’ What Should You Measure?

The information that is collected and spit out by your CRM solution can be overwhelming. You know that one of the keys to sales success is having accurate and measurable data that allows you to repeat what works and improve what doesn’t, but knowing where to start with that data may not be so obvious. There are some essential CRM metrics that will help you narrow down how your team is succeeding and what needs to be done better, and provide you with valuable information for forecasting sales. The following list of CRM metrics is a good place for you to start.

Outbound Calls Made

The sales call is the heart of nearly every sales process. Unless you have sales leads beating down your door each day, you understand the importance of sales calls. Measuring the quantity of calls made can tell you a lot about your team and your business. Whether your business makes few sales calls or hundreds a day, the important thing is to be able to track them. By tracking calls on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis, you will be able to identify trends and act accordingly. For example, the number of sales calls decreasing can be a sign of issues, or it can be a sign that your salespeople are spending more quality time with sales leads leading to more closed sales. Tracking and analysis will help you determine which it is.

Sales Closing Rate

It’s important to know how many prospects are turning into actual sales. This metric tells you how successful your sales team is at closing deals. Of course, the higher the better, and hopefully it increases over time. Looking at this metric for each salesperson will allow you to coach each person individually to have the best success.

Sales Cycle Length

This metric measures the amount of time from when a lead is first identified to the time that the sale is closed. Depending on the type of enterprise, this cycle could be anywhere from the same day to weeks or even months. The goal when coaching to this metric is to shorten the sales cycle, thereby allowing your salespeople more time for cultivating additional prospects.

Customer Retention Rate

Because it costs more to close a sale on a new customer than it does to retain a current one, it’s important to make customer retention a priority in the sales area. Measuring how successful your team is at keeping existing customers allows you to see when improvements need to be made, and also tells you why some customers stay while others leave ’ which is essential to growing your business.

Customer Value

There are two metrics that you should pay attention to regarding customer value: the value of the individual customer and the value of your average customer. Knowing what a customer is worth to the company gives management sufficient information to make good decisions regarding things like logistics, productions, personnel and other business expenses.

Up-Selling and Cross-Selling

Is your team selling existing customers additional products and accessories? This metric will tell you. It is more cost effective to sell additional services or products to current customers than to cultivate new ones. So it’s vital that salespeople are cross-selling and up-selling to your existing customer base.

Marketing Campaign ROI

Whether your marketing campaigns are paid advertisements or smaller community-minded activities, the purpose is to generate sales. Each and every campaign should be assessed so that you know how many leads were generated, how many of those leads resulted in closed sales, and how much revenue was generated versus the cost of the campaign. This will help you to know which type of marketing works best for your company, and which you should abandon.

The is a whole world of information when it comes to CRM data. These are just a few that will get you headed in the right direction with your sales team. But once you have a handle on these, it is worth it to expand to other areas as well. The more you know about your team, the more you will be able to coach them to increased success.