The Ultimate Guide for Monitoring Sales — From a Sales Professional’s Perspective

The famous SharkTank entrepreneur, Daymond John, explained the importance of sales monitoring perfectly in this analogy: “Imagine your ship is in a battle, and you have no command center giving visibility on whether or not your ship has been hit until 30 days later, nor visibility on whether enemies are behind or in front of you. What do you think will happen to your shit? You sink.” Pretty much sums it up, doesn't it? In the dynamic world of sales, you need an effective sales process for tracking sales performance. This will provide you with crucial insights that will make you more effective at selling, helping you save time and effort, earn revenue, and, more importantly, boost your sales career. Implementing a sales monitoring system can seem like hard work. But the good news is, it doesn't always have to be. Why Is Sales Monitoring Important? It doesn't matter whether you're a B2B or B2C sales professional—or what size or industry your business is—you need sales monitoring to measure your progress and optimize performance to ensure better outcomes. Moreover, you won't have to second guess every decision when you know the numbers. You can make smart, data-based decisions, which will make you a more efficient and savvy salesperson. Additionally, you don't have to be a sales manager, leading a sales team to take advantage of a sales monitoring system. Monitoring sales performance is also important for individual sales reps too. When you own your key performance indicators, you'll become a sales managers best friend. Monitoring Individual Sales Performance Metrics and KPIs To hit your ultimate revenue goal, you must know what sales metrics your organization's sales management uses to track sales throughout the sales funnel. For this, you'll have to use past sales performance data and work backward up the funnel from the organization's projected revenue goal to set your goals. A good place to start is considering the following questions: * Based on your average deal size and win rate, how many opportunities can you open? * How many discovery calls can you book to open that many opportunities? * How much outreach do you need to do to secure that many discovery calls? Notice the pattern? Besides revenue, you should also be looking at: * Win rate: Considering the number of deals and the size of deals you've cracked, are you on track to hit your revenue goal? * Pipeline creation: Are you creating enough opportunities up the sales funnel to meet your sales quota? * Average deal value: Will the size of your deals need you to close more or fewer opportunities than you already have in your sales pipeline? * Average deal size: Can you improve your performance by increasing the velocity? * Customer acquisition cost (CAC): Is the amount of time and resources you're investing into each deal worth the results you're achieving? * Forecasting consistency: How reliable are your pipeline projections? Are you successfully closing deals within the timeframe you've established for yourself? Measuring indicators of activity level can also come in handy. This includes: * Speed to lead: How quickly are you following up with leads after making contact? * Outreach attempts for contact: Are you nurturing your leads effectively? * Connect to the ratio: How many outreach attempts does it take to get a prospect to respond? How effective is your messaging? With the sales metrics covered, you can next focus on the actual monitoring of sales. 5 Easy Steps to Monitor Your Sales Progress We've discussed the different metrics and KPIs. But before you start measuring them, you'll need to take a few extra steps to ensure accurate results. So here's a step-by-step rundown of monitoring sales effectively.