Data is the lifeblood of sales, and knowing which data contributes most to your business growth is a great way to empower your team to generate more revenue. In a previous article, we discussed 5 CRM Core Metrics that every company should be tracking within Salesforce, and due to popular demand, we have created a list of 5 more  CRM core metrics that you should keep an eye on.

Earlier this year, Salesforce listed some of the most important KPIs to monitor in Salesforce. While this list is excellent, we want to add a few more metrics that we have found to be critical for growing businesses, including our own.

By monitoring these metrics, you can inform and empower your sales team to create effective strategies that win deals and help improve your sales and marketing alignment, which is essential in the complicated sales cycles of today. Let’s get into it.

Lead Conversion Rate (LCR):

Lead Conversion Rate (LCR) is the rate at which your teams are able to convert leads into opportunities and subsequently, customers. Tracking this metric in Salesforce is one of the simplest and most effective ways to keep your sales and marketing teams on the same page about how to effectively generate, nurture, and win opportunities.

LCR data gives valuable insights as to what marketing and lead generation efforts are effective in producing qualified leads. While bringing in lots of leads is great, it is far more important to bring in leads that salespeople can actually win, not leads that waste their valuable time. LCR can also give insight into the sales team’s ability to close qualified leads. Together, this information enables GTM teams to review and devise market strategies that produce results and identify areas in the sales and marketing funnel that need improvement.

Opportunity Win Rate (OWR):

In a similar vein, tracking Opportunity Win Rate (OWR) in Salesforce is a good way to visualize the effectiveness of your sales team individually. Once a lead is deemed as a qualified opportunity, it is in the hands of the sales team to close the deal, and tracking OWR provides an acute glimpse into the effectiveness of your sales process.

While every team will inevitably have low periods in terms of close rates, being able to track trends over multiple quarters as well as analyze individual rep win rates helps sales leaders understand where they should focus their efforts and what improvements can be made across their teams.

Sales Cycle Length:

Tracking Sales Cycle Length is an excellent way of gauging how efficient your sales team is. While closing deals is the goal, opportunities that are slow to close can kill the momentum of your team and lower their sales efficacy. Ensuring sales cycles don’t drag on too long helps enable your reps with more time for additional revenue opportunities.

Having a clear view of sales cycle length is also beneficial when you begin to track stage duration as well. For example, say that you notice your reps are spending a lot of their time trying to schedule a demo but easily closing after that point. With this information you can allocate more time and resources into the slower stages, allowing you to introduce strategies that avoid bottlenecks and empower your team to cruise through critical steps in the sales funnel.

Lead Source Performance (LSP):

Every opportunity begins with a lead, but not every lead will become an opportunity. Tracking Lead Source Performance allows marketing teams to determine which sources are generating the highest quality or quantity of leads, allowing you to pivot and invest in those channels. Because this is not as obvious of a revenue driver, it is one of the most frequently neglected CRM metrics.

Different lead sources will work for different companies. Oftentimes marketing teams will find themselves stumped because they can’t figure why they aren’t getting leads. Tracking LSP enables marketers to make informed decisions about how to spend their money to generate the most opportunities possible. 

In addition to sheer quantity, it is also important to analyze the quality of opportunities from each lead source. For most companies, any sale is a desired sale, but it is important to establish a benchmark for lead quality and aim for higher-quality leads.

Email Engagement Metrics:

Email isn’t going anywhere, and it is continually heralded as one of the most effective marketing channels due to its extremely low cost and therefore, high ROI. Once marketing teams have generated rich email lists, they can consistently nurture prospects and existing customers through customized engagement campaigns that help their contacts through the marketing funnel. Salespeople also regularly follow up with prospects by email. Tracking Email Engagement is a fundamental component of ensuring these processes are as effective as possible. Having a large list means nothing if nobody engages with your emails.

By tracking this metric, marketing and sales teams can experiment with different types of content, email copy and sending strategies to determine the best way to nurture their leads.

Conclusion:

These 5 metrics are a great display of the interconnectedness between sales and marketing teams. While being able to analyze them individually is important, tracking each of these key metrics comprehensively can help consolidate your team’s selling efforts and turn your organization into a sales machine. 

If you are curious about how to effectively track these metrics in Salesforce or simply want to learn more about how Strong CRM can help your business exceed your revenue goals, contact us today.