The top 18 sales KPIs for modern sales teams

Sales has always been about influencing through relationships.

While some basic sales KPIs remain in place, modern sales teams now embrace new, dynamic sales KPIs to track their performance.

Let’s look at SaaS for example. SaaS focuses on month-to-month product and service offerings. This business model means that sales teams are no longer judged by landing huge one-off deals. Modern sales teams focus on turning sales qualified leads into customers, and expansion MRR and customer retention rates. All KPIs that will help sales teams—and their companies—grow.

How do you monitor sales targets? 

You can measure your sales KPIs on a dashboard. A sales dashboard is a visual representation of your sales data that you can segment, filter, or view over different time periods. Most importantly, a sales dashboard displays your sales metrics and KPIs at-a-glance and in real-time. 

How do you create a sales dashboard?

Sales dashboards can take the form of a spreadsheet or in a dashboard and reporting tool—or anything in between. A dashboard tool brings all of your important sales data together in one place and updates automatically so you’re using the latest information to make your data-driven decisions. 

What should be on a sales dashboard?

Here are 18 of the top sales KPIs used by modern sales teams. Some of these sales KPIs may have overlapping qualities. The effectiveness and selection of each KPI should always depend on the business and marketing and sales models that are in place. Learn how to define your organization's KPIs.

1. Trials
2. Sales Qualified Leads
3. Sales Opportunities
4. Number of Monthly Onboarding and Demo Calls
5. Call Volume per Rep
6. Sales Cycle Length
7. Sales per Rep
8. Contact to Customer Conversion Rate
9. Trial Conversion Rate
10. Sales Bookings
11. Lead-to-Win Rate
12. Average Cost per Lead
13. Customer Acquisition Cost
14. Average Selling Price
15. MRR Growth Rate
16. New and Expansion MRR
17. Customer Lifetime Value
18. Retention and Churn Rates

1. Trials

Trials is a KPI that applies to both marketing and sales. Trials counts the number of account starts within a specified period of time. This KPI can serve as a way to rally marketing and sales to work together. The higher volume of trial starts that marketing can encourage, the higher volume of leads that sales can qualify and eventually close.

2. Sales Qualified Leads

Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) are a direct result of trials. Sales teams qualify trials as Sales Qualified Leads when a lead meets certain conditions defined by the sales process. Before becoming an SQL, they are identified as a Marketing Qualified Lead. Sales Qualified Leads are prospects who signal intent to buy. This KPI is important for sales teams to track because the larger your pool of SQLs, the larger the pool of opportunities that could convert to a customer.

3. Sales Opportunities

You might be asking yourself, "What's the difference between a Sales Qualified Lead vs Opportunity?"

Opportunities allows sales teams to see all pending opportunities and determine which opportunities are high-intent and worth pursuing.

This sales growth KPI organizes prospects based on opportunity value and the probability of a closed deal. Each prospect has an estimated purchase value associated with them to help your team prioritize their efforts.

Sales prospects can be ranked according to likelihood of win, assuming the sales team has collected enough data from their current customer base to have an understanding of what makes for a probable close.

4. Number of Monthly Onboarding and Demo Calls

Onboarding calls signifies how many onboarding and/or demo calls the sales team completes in a month. Onboarding and demo calls can be a critical step in closing a deal, so this sales enablement KPI is an important one to track.

Like many of the KPIs throughout this article, you can segment this metric to track individual employee performance.

5. Call Volume per Sales Rep

For outbound teams, call volume is a look into how many calls (or outreach like email) each sales representative has made to potential customers.

This KPI can be further broken down into whether the call was answered (or the email was opened), the length of time spent on each call, the level of interest, and how many potential prospects were discovered per # of calls.

6. Sales Cycle Length

How much does the average sale generate, and over what length of time? Sales cycle length helps sales teams see on average how long it takes to close a deal.

This sales growth KPI will help you set sales targets and forecast revenue, while providing a timeframe and required efforts and resources required on average to win each customer.

7. Sales per Rep

Sales per employee, or sales per rep, allows sales leaders to see, on an employee level, how many sales were made per rep. This KPI can be helpful in establishing a sales baseline (and setting personal goals) and determining the strengths and areas of improvement for each rep.

For example, a sales representatives may take a longer time to close a deal, but the deal could be higher value and retain the customer longer.

For the sake of sustainability, it's important not to use the sales per rep KPI to create a culture of competition and comparison between reps, but instead used as a performance metric per employee.

8. Contact to Customer Conversion Rate

Contact to customer conversion rate is a modern sales KPI that tracks the number of contacts that have converted to sales. Contacts are typically existing customers, past customers, or qualified leads who have some form of a relationship with your business.

Sales teams should use this sales conversion KPI to quantify how efficiently the sales process secures and grows existing customer relationships. Sales teams can also use this KPI as a way to evaluate customer relationship management.

9. Trial Conversion Rate

The trial conversion rate measures the percentage of users that have converted to a paid account from a trial. While this KPI may only be applicable to SaaS sales teams, it’s still an important one to keep an eye on.

Trial conversion rate can help to identify your target audience, too. By looking at trial conversion rates, sales teams can identify the demographics and companies that are likely to have the highest success with the product and focus on attracting the highest converting users.

10. Sales Bookings

Sales bookings calculate the total "wins", in a dollar value, as determined by either a close deal or a signed/committed sale within a specified time period. Bookings is a sales KPI that modern SaaS sales teams are driven by, and it can be split out into a variety of categories—such as sales bookings per region and sales bookings per employee.

11. Lead-to-Win Rate

What's the ratio between closed deals and the number of leads? Lead-to-win rate helps sales teams understand product-market fit, pricing structure, and if the sales approaches taken should be used to close future deals.

This is a KPI that should be shared to align marketing, sales, and product teams. It’s also worth noting that lead-to-win rate is an account-focused metric, so unlike contact to customer conversion rate that measures existing customers, lead to win rate measures leads only.

12. Average Cost Per Lead

Cost per lead answers the question: How much does it cost for us to generate a single lead? Modern sales teams want to be efficient in their time and spending to acquire new leads. This sales KPI is important to track because it will impact your customer acquisition cost.

As a note, the most accurate average cost per lead KPI tallies up all marketing expenses (including employee salaries).

13. Customer Acquisition Cost

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is an important sales KPI because it measures the cost your business incurs to acquire new customers. Sales teams should care about this metric as it is calculated by adding all sales and marketing costs divided by the number of new customers in a specific time period. The lower your CAC, the higher your efficiency in acquiring customers. Sales teams should look at customer acquisition cost across customer segments to understand which customers are more profitable and which may take more time and cost to acquire.

14. Average Selling Price

Average Selling Price measures the average value of each sale, and therefore helps the sales team place a quantifiable value on each potential opportunity. Sales teams can apply this metric to a product or a service, or even to an entire market.

This sales KPI, in conjunction with other metrics associated with pricing models, is how a sales team can estimate the true dollar value of each lead.

15. MRR Growth Rate

Monthly sales growth measures the increase or decrease of your sales revenue on a monthly basis. For most SaaS sales teams, monthly MRR growth rate is a reasonable projection, although it can be expressed using an annual time frame.

Monitoring sales growth from month-to-month helps modern sales leaders see and act on sales revenue trends as they're happening versus reflective reporting.

Setting attainable sales revenue goals both on an individual and team basis can inspire performance and keep sales efforts aligned.

16. New and Expansion MRR

MRR, monthly recurring revenue, is the number of paying customers multiplied by the average amount of all customers.

New MRR is the additional monthly recurring revenue that you gained over the month.

For SaaS businesses, expansion MRR is an important metric. Expansion MRR measures additional MRR from existing customers that have upgraded their plan.

The work of a modern sales team doesn't end with a closed deal. Nurturing a relationship with your existing customers can lead to both new and expansion MRR. As a benchmark, best in class companies achieve expansion MRR ratios that are anywhere between 20-40% of top line revenue every month.

17. Customer Lifetime Value

It's important for sales teams to understand not just the dollar value of the deal, but how much revenue that closed deal brings to the company over time. This ensures they know the "true" impact of a win.

The Customer Lifetime Value KPI is calculated as:

Lifetime Value = Gross Margin % X ( 1 / Monthly Churn ) X Avg. Monthly Subscription Revenue per Customer.

Customer Lifetime Value is a popular metric beyond sales teams, too. Hear why LTV is important to founders on the Metric Stack podcast.

18. Retention and Churn Rates

Churn and retention rates are important sales KPIs to track after the deal closes. Churn rate is truly the mark of how today's sales teams are changing. For many modern sales teams, the job doesn’t end after the deal closes. Sales takes partial responsibility for ensuring customers remain happy, and doesn’t churn. Another way to look at churn is through the lens of renewal and retention, with metrics like Gross Revenue Retention Rate. Learn more about churn rates.

Track your sales KPIs on a PowerMetrics dashboard

Now that you know which top 18 sales KPIs and metrics to track, you need a PowerMetrics dashboard. A dashboard brings all your data together in one place, provides visibility and transparency into your numbers, and can increase productivity with near-realtime insights. Get started with PowerMetrics today!

This post was originally published in July 2017 but has been revamped and updated for accuracy.