Sales leaders are among the most burdened professionals in the B2B workforce. Not only are they tasked with guiding the strategic performance of a team, they're also responsible for delivering real revenue to the company at large. For many enterprise sales companies, that means setting—and then answering for—multi-million dollar forecasts every quarter. As such, these VPs, directors, and managers have concrete concerns about how to get their jobs done as effectively as possible.
In early 2022, the Strategic Sales Network and Databook conducted their first ever State of Sales Leadership survey. The company asked more than 300 sales execs about which KPIs are commanding their attention, which solution priorities matter most to the effectiveness of their teams, and where they’re seeing the greatest challenges in tackling those priorities. The results show what today’s sales leaders believe they need in order to elevate team performance and reach critical objectives.
Sales Leadership Metrics that Matter Most
One of the consequences of an increasingly large sales tech stack is the ability to track dozens of seller statistics. The problem? Many of them, while interesting, aren’t relevant to what sales leaders actually need to know.
Here are the top metrics sales leaders prefer when evaluating and tracking seller performance across a number of key areas.
Key Takeaways: How Sales Leaders Measure Success
- Speed to productivity is critical for measuring team efficiency. In today's environment, the challenges associated with attracting and retaining sales talent make finding the best people and ramping them quickly even more critical to track than quota attainment.
- To qualify opportunities, the dollar value reigns supreme.
- If you want to know how to convert bigger deals, look to win rates. While sales leaders also track average contract value (ACV) and sales cycles, win rates get the greatest focus.
- Customer lifetime value and net dollar retention are the metrics sales leaders use to keep track of how customer relationships grow. Again, it all comes back to the dollar.
Survey details:
- We collected responses from 303 sales leaders
- Job functions included: CXO - Sales, SVP/VP of Sales, Head of Sales Development, RVP Sales, and Head of Sales Enablement, as well as CSO - Marketing, SVP/VP of Marketing, Head of RevOps
- All respondents answered all survey questions