Just because you can measure it doesn’t mean it needs to be measured.

I see too many sales managers and salespeople measuring things just because it’s easy, and for some reason they think it’s going to make a difference.

I’m going to walk you through 10 metrics that can have a huge impact on your efficiency and success. Are you looking at these?

1. Number of Conversations With Prospects or Customers

This excludes customer service calls — these are true sales calls. This is pretty simple.

2. Number of Calls Made to Prospects, Not Customers

This is key because oftentimes salespeople make a high number of calls to existing customers. Go ahead and include a voicemail or a message left with a gatekeeper. That’s okay in this metric, because what we’re measuring is whether or not we’re making an effort to reach prospects.

3. Number of Prospecting Emails

I break this out separately from phone calls because I want to see a relationship between the number of prospecting emails and the number of calls. There doesn’t have to be a 50-50 balance, it’s going to vary by industry, or what you sell, et cetera. I want to see a correlation between the number of emails and the number of calls made.

4. Number of Conversations It Takes to Close a Sale Once a Lead Is Qualified

After a lead meets your qualifications of a viable opportunity, how many conversations (phone calls, zoom calls, email exchanges) will occur between now and the close?

I want to establish a trend line, because ultimately I want to become more efficient at qualifying better, understanding the customer and being able to shorten the number of steps it takes for me to close a sale.

This is a very valuable metric because it helps me understand my sales efficiency.

5. Length of Time (in Days or Months) It Takes to Turn a Lead Into a Customer

This is going further upstream. From the time it comes in as a lead, how long does it take to turn into a customer? This is a great barometer for you to understand when marketing efforts are going to pay off.

When are my early, top-of-the-funnel lead generation activities going to pay off? This is going to help me determine if I’m trending ahead or behind in my fiscal year. If I dial up my marketing efforts now, when will I begin to see results? Will I see results in time to achieve my goals this fiscal year?

6. Percentage of Leads That Ultimately Become a Customer

Again, we’re talking leads, not qualified prospects. This metric tells me how many leads I need in order to generate a customer. Now, I would hope you’re not leaving these exclusively to marketing, because this is a sales activity.

This helps me understand how to achieve my number for the quarter, or for the year.

7. Percentage of Offers That Never Result in a Sale

Is this trend line going down?

Or let’s say I was closing 60 percent of the customers I presented an offer to, and now it’s down to 40 percent. What’s that tell me? That tells me something’s wrong in my sales process, or I may be qualifying customers improperly.

If it’s increasing, it says I’m doing a better job. If it’s increasing too much, maybe I need to change the offer, or the pricing in the offer.

8. Percentage of Leads That Fail to Ever Engage

You generated a lead, you haven’t qualified them, but they fail to engage. This metric helps me understand the effectiveness of my lead generation process.

You may have a lead generation process which includes webinars and collecting emails, but if I only get two percent of those to ever respond, then maybe the whole webinar idea is not working.

9. Percentage of New Customers Who Generate a Second Sale Within 90 Days of the First Purchase

This tells me a little bit about my satisfaction scores. How can I expect my business to build if I get a high percentage of my customers buying more from me within the first month or two?

This says that I can and should put more money, more effort, more time into developing new customers because I’m going to get more downstream sales.

10. Percentage of New Customers Who Provide a Valid Referral Within the First Six Months

This helps me understand customer satisfaction, and whether I do a good job of asking for referrals. If I have a very low percentage of new customers who provide a valid referral, perhaps I don’t even have a referral process in place.

If I do have a referral process in place and I’m doing a good job of asking, but still not getting any, then something’s wrong with the expectations, the value prop and what the customer’s actually receiving.

MANA welcomes your comments on this article. Write to us at [email protected].