You're having trouble tracking sales performance. What's the best way to measure it?

2 Choose relevant and meaningful metrics

There are hundreds of possible metrics to track sales performance, but not all of them are relevant and meaningful for your situation. You need to choose the ones that are aligned with your objectives, provide actionable insights, and show the cause-and-effect relationships between your inputs and outputs. For example, you might want to measure your sales pipeline, conversion rates, average deal size, revenue, profitability, customer satisfaction, retention, and loyalty. But you also need to consider the quality, accuracy, and timeliness of your data sources, as well as the tools and methods you use to collect, analyze, and report them.

3 Use a balanced scorecard approach

One of the challenges of measuring sales performance is to avoid focusing on only one aspect or dimension of it. For example, if you only look at revenue, you might miss the factors that influence it, such as customer needs, preferences, and behavior. Or if you only look at customer satisfaction, you might neglect the costs and efficiency of your sales process. To avoid this, you can use a balanced scorecard approach, which is a framework that helps you monitor and evaluate your sales performance from four perspectives: financial, customer, internal process, and learning and growth. By using a balanced scorecard, you can balance your short-term and long-term goals, as well as your quantitative and qualitative measures.

4 Communicate and visualize your results

Once you have your metrics and data, you need to communicate and visualize them in a way that is clear, concise, and compelling. You need to tell a story with your numbers, highlighting the key findings, trends, and insights that matter for your audience. You also need to use the right format and style to present your data, such as charts, graphs, tables, dashboards, or reports. You should use colors, labels, legends, and annotations to make your data easy to understand and compare. And you should use best practices for data visualization, such as avoiding clutter, distortion, and ambiguity.

5 Review and improve your performance

The final step of measuring sales performance is to review and improve it. You need to compare your actual results with your targets, benchmarks, and expectations. You need to identify the gaps, strengths, and weaknesses of your sales performance. And you need to take action to address the issues, celebrate the successes, and implement the feedback. You should also review and update your objectives, metrics, and data sources regularly, as well as your tools and methods for measuring and reporting them. By doing this, you can ensure that your sales performance evaluation is accurate, relevant, and useful for your sales operations.