As a wholesaler or distributor, your sales team is the link between your products and the customer. Their performance is extremely important to track, but what are the KPIs and the exact metrics you should be using to measure it?
You can use the following eight key sales metrics to measure your wholesale sales team’s success. Working to make sure each of these reaches their targets will help you grow your business and ensure that the sales department is running smoothly.
Very simply, how long does it take to close the deal? Generally a shorter sales cycle = more time for more sales, so it’s important to bring this cycle time down to as short as possible.
When looking at your sales team as a whole, this metric helps you measure the overall efficacy of the methods you’re using and the quality of your sales leads. When looking at individual sales team members, it can be used to identify who is closing deals in the shortest time - and how that can be replicated across the team.
Pay close attention to the the average length of your sales cycle over time. That average should remain steady and if there are any sudden changes, it’s worth having a look at all the factors that might be causing that change.
This is the number of quotes sent out compared to number of deals closed. This ratio is a good indicator of whether or not you are targeting the right potential customers. Measured on an individual level of each member of the sales team, it reflects performance, and efficiency in the closing process.
This is a metric that takes all the opportunities identified and tracks how many of them end up as a sale. Use this metric to ensure that no valuable leads are slipping through the cracks.
Tracking the average deal size per salesperson is a metric you can use to track the individual performance of your sales team members. On a higher level, this metric can be compared to your revenue goals and helps you evaluate the quality of leads and whether you’re targeting the right audience.
Do you sell better in one location than another? A variety of factors can go into why your products sell better in certain locations; anything from performance on the sales team’s side to demand for your wholesale product can influence this volume. However, keeping track of these volumes helps you figure out fit for the market, and performance of your sales team within that market.
This metric simply tracks your different product lines and how well they sell. This can also vary by location or sales team, and is valuable information for product development down the line.
This is a high level metric, which looks at the overall percentage of sales team member who achieve their quotas each month. By looking at the sales team as a whole, you can identify any areas that need improvement, and can see how realistic and achievable your sales quotas are.
Product performance helps you keep track of what products are selling the best, or where you should direct your main sales and marketing efforts. When tracking this metric, it’s important to take into account activities within other departments of the company that could be affecting it. For example, if you’re putting more marketing efforts into a certain product, or if seasonal activities could be having an effect.
These metrics can be used across any industry, but the actual numbers will vary depending on the overall volume of your deals and what your customers usually order. If your industry counts on many high volume, high value deals that occur less often, you can adjust your expectations of each of the metrics.
Overall, your sales team’s performance should be evaluated on several levels: individually, as a whole, and benchmarked against other businesses within your industry. All these levels will give you a real sense of how sales are going.
What should you do with all these metrics? Track them for a few months and then use them to both evaluate improvement the performance of your sales team, and identify what can be modified to make things even more efficient. Perhaps if you’re selling offline, you might want to automate some processes, or add selling online to your sales tactics.
Sales performance metrics and KPIs are a big indicator of how your business is going overall - keep a close eye on them to see what you can fix, what’s going well, and how you can grow in the future.
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