Measuring Sales Performance: Key Metrics for Outside Sales Teams

Building and maintaining customer relationships with face-to-face interactions can be tough for field sales teams. Not to mention, prospecting and qualifying leads can take time away from those face-to-face interactions.

To make sure these sales efforts go without a hitch, are you tracking metrics and key sales performance indicators?

In this post, we offer a complete guide to the key sales performance metrics you should be looking at to help you determine what your outside sales team is doing well and where there’s room for improvement. 

That way, you can tweak your sales strategy so that you’re on track to meeting your business goals.

Sales performance metrics are pieces of data that measure the effectiveness of your sales operations. 

Tracking these metrics can provide you with insights into various aspects of the sales process which will help you to understand what is working well and what areas need improvement. You can uncover weak areas, design incentive plans, calculate commissions and bonuses, set future sales goals, and more from your sales performance metrics.

Sales metrics can either be lagging indicators or leading indicators. 

While lagging indicators help you measure the results or outcomes for past actions, leading indicators offer valuable insights into future trends and help predict future sales performance.

Lagging indicators are reactive because they give you insights after an event has happened. On the other hand, leading indicators are proactive and forward-looking as they provide early warning signs of potential changes or trends.

Let’s look at an example. Sales revenue is a lagging indicator because it represents the revenue your sales team generated over a specific period.

The number of qualified leads is a leading indicator. It measures the number and quality of leads entering the sales funnel. This helps highlight future sales opportunities and forecast future revenue streams.  

Knowing the difference is important because some of the sales metrics we’ll talk about are lagging and leading indicators.

It’s also good to know that sales metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) are two different things. While KPIs are sales metrics, not all sales metrics are KPIs. 

Sales metrics focus on more granular areas of your sales team’s performance, while KPIs give you actionable insights into how well your business is doing overall.

Let’s say you’re tracking the number of sales calls your team makes each week. By looking at this sales productivity metric, you’ll be able to see how active your team is in reaching out to potential customers.

Now, let’s say that your main goal as a business is to increase revenue. A KPI related to that goal could be your conversion rate. In this case, your conversion rate would be the percentage of sales calls that result in a new, paying customer. 

This KPI is key because it helps you see how effective your sales efforts are in converting leads into customers.

In a nutshell? Sales calls made is a metric that tells you how many calls your team makes each week. But the conversion rate is a KPI that tells you how successful those calls are in helping you achieve your organizational goal‌ — bringing in revenue.

We’ll be discussing both sales metrics and KPIs. As you go through the post, take a minute to think about which category each metric falls under. 

Then, consider what makes each one valuable for tracking sales performance and how they align with your business goals.

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It's not just about tracking sales performance metrics. You need to be clever about how you go about it and lay out metrics strategies that will give you a competitive edge over your competitors.

The first thing you want to do is define objectives that align with your organization’s overall goals. If not, you won’t know what to measure your sales performance against. 

Setting goals will help you choose the right sales metrics and key performance indicators. Also, when your sales objectives align with the broader goals of the organization, it creates a unified direction for all departments.

Focus on a mix of leading and lagging indicators to give you a complete overview of your sales performance.  Most sales managers choose between 6–10 sales performance metrics. 

There’s really no magic number, but the key is to monitor enough metrics that’ll give you a full view of your sales performance. But don’t choose too many. This could overwhelm your sales team and dilute the focus.

You’ve chosen your metrics and sales KPIs. Now, set benchmarks and sales targets. Say you want to look at the conversion rate. You find that the average conversion rate in your industry is 10%. So, you set your conversion rate target to 10% or higher.

Don’t forget to look at your historical sales data to understand your current performance levels. 

This will allow you to determine whether the industry benchmarks are realistic for your team and identify areas where you can improve.

You want to regularly monitor your sales metrics to see the progress you made, identify trends, and address any issues or challenges. 

Conduct weekly, monthly, or quarterly reviews to track performance over a specific time period and make data-driven changes to your sales efforts.

Use a customer relationship management system (CRM) to automate your sales performance tracking. You’ll be able to capture and analyze data on leads, prospects, and customers. This will help you make better decisions and implement more effective sales processes.

For outside sales teams, consider using a route planner such as Badger Maps that allows you to track sales activity with automated performance reports. 

With Badger Maps, outside sales reps can automatically plan, route, and maximize their time in the field, cutting down driving time by 20%. 

With core features such as route optimization, lead generation, map visualization, and automated data gathering from the field, Badger Maps helps sales teams save time on their daily planning, maintain better relationships with customers, and get organized.

Follow-ups and advanced reporting capabilities can help you keep track of key customer information. Sales teams have reported that they sell 22% more and drive 20% less when using Badger Maps, in fact, the average team of 10 reps sells $936k more the year they start using the app.

Integrate Badger Maps with your CRM of choice to automatically update customer information from the field, visualize your data on an interactive map, and filter by your top opportunities for the shortest routes to leads. 

You can also enable a two-way, real-time native integration with the most popular CRMs such as HubSpot, Zoho, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, NetSuite, Insightly and many more. 

Additionally, field sales teams increase their CRM usage by 50% when using Badger Maps.

Badger Maps reduces outside sales reps’ average drive time by 20% and frees up an average of 8 hours a week.   

Sign up for a free trial today or schedule a demo to see how you can improve your sales performance with Badger Maps!

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According to HubSpot, the top metrics salespeople say are the most important to track are: 

• Average profit margin: Calculates the average percentage of profit your sales efforts generated from each sale after subtracting the cost of goods sold (COGS). A higher profit margin means your company is earning more for each sale.
• Year-over-year (YoY) growth: Measures how your organization’s sales figures change from one year to the next. This is usually a percentage.
• Conversion rate: Calculates the proportion of potential clients who become paying customers.
• Sales productivity metrics: Measures a wide range of sales activity, including CRM usage, calls made, emails sent, use of sales tools, etc.
• Quota attainment: Shows whether reps have reached their sales quotas or targets within a specific period. 
• Win rate: The percentage of opportunities or deals your sales team won over out of the total number your sales team pursued.
• Customer acquisition cost (CAC): The average cost of converting a lead into a new customer.

Sales teams say that these metrics are important for a reason. That’s because, together, they provide a full view of your sales performance from various perspectives. They cover different aspects of the sales process:

• Business growth rate and trajectory
• Revenue generation
• Effectiveness
• Productivity
• Profitability
• Efficiency

So, these are great sales metrics to look at overall. But let’s take a dive into some metrics that field sales teams can use.

Face-to-face meetings are a key form of contact with customers for field sales reps. Tracking the number of face-to-face meetings your team has gives you insights into their activity level and their engagement with potential customers.

Don’t overthink your next customer visit! Check out our sales meeting checklist here!

Average deal size helps you measure the typical value of sales that your sales team closes on. This is crucial for outside sales teams, in particular, because it helps them better manage their time and resources.  

You don’t want to waste your time on small deals that aren’t rewarding in the long run. It’s better to allocate your time to winning big deals that can yield long returns. Keep this in mind when tracking this metric.

Outside salespeople spend a lot of time traveling between customer locations or waiting for appointments.

So, the total ideal time in the field helps you measure how much time your field sales professionals are sitting idle and not engaging in these activities. This helps you find opportunities to optimize route planning, minimize downtime, and increase productivity.

The call-to-meeting ratio measures your team’s ability to schedule face-to-face meetings with prospects.  

This gives you a clear picture of your sales prospecting and lead qualification processes.

This metric tracks how long your field sales representatives spend directly interacting with prospects, whether through meetings or sales calls.

Measuring time spent with prospects gives you a peek into the level of engagement and rapport that sellers establish with potential customers.

Check out this quick guide that shows you 6 ways you can improve your sales performance!

The cancellation rate is the percentage of scheduled meetings or appointments that prospects cancel. 

There are a few reasons prospects cancel appointments:

• Your sales reps aren’t communicating the value of your products or services properly.
• The targeting or the type of leads your sales team is focusing on isn’t right.
• There were issues with appointment scheduling.

This metric indicates the average amount of time your sales reps spend talking to prospects on the phone.

Average talk time per call is a great metric to look at alongside the call-to-meeting ratio and meeting-to-win ratio. 

Looking at these metrics together can help you assess the quality of phone conversations and the ability to qualify leads effectively.

Meeting-to-win ratio is important because it helps you measure the percentage of face-to-face meetings that result in sales or closed deals over a certain period of time.

From there, you can evaluate the impact of in-person interactions.

Even though outside sales reps spend a lot of time in the field, they often use emails and texts for prospecting, following up with leads, and scheduling meetings.

So, measuring the number of emails/messages sent allows you to assess sales outreach efforts so that your reps can improve customer engagement and follow-up practices.

Check our 7 top tips for improving email open rates!

Sales training equips outside sales reps with the tools, knowledge, skills, and resources they need to win over customers.

Measuring the average level of satisfaction with sales training helps you determine how content sales representatives are with the continuous training they receive, which includes modern methods like training videos using AI voice-overs.

This metric is essential for evaluating the effectiveness of your sales training programs and identifying areas that require improvement. 

The goal of incorporating AI voice-overs is to make training more engaging and accessible, potentially increasing satisfaction levels. 

Tracking this satisfaction allows you to gauge the return on investment in these new training technologies and methodologies. That way, you can feel confident that your investment is paying off, with the sales results to prove it.

Sales metrics can be your roadmap to qualifying leads more effectively, improving interactions with customers, and winning more deals within your sales pipeline. Choose the right metrics and KPIs that align with your company’s goals so that you can measure progress toward achieving those sales goals.

But don’t get so caught up in metrics that you get analysis paralysis. 

Focus on key metrics. Offer clear guidance to your sales team so that they can interpret and learn how to use sales metrics effectively.

So, sales managers, are you ready to boost average revenue and reduce churn rate?

When you start at the top within your sales organization and focus on measuring these metrics in real time, it's only a matter of months until you shorten your average sales cycle length and start closing deals the way you've always dreamt of. 

Author Bio: Ryan Robinson is a blogger, podcaster and (recovering) side project addict who teaches 500,000 monthly readers how to start a blog and grow a profitable side business at ryrob.com.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/theryanrobinson/

X: https://x.com/TheRyanRobinson

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