Back to Posts

A well-conceived sales dashboard gives you an instant, at-a-glance understanding of how the sales operation is performing. Here are the 7 key sales manager metrics your dashboard needs to have.

1. Number of leads

This sales metric doesn’t just provide the sales manager with a snapshot of the state of your pipeline, it’s also a handy workload tool. 

Too few leads and you’ll be in danger of not having enough work for the team. This’ll tell you it’s time to ramp up your marketing efforts or get the team to start focusing on more outbound activity. 

Too many leads showing on your sales dashboard, on the other hand, and you have a different – albeit preferable – sort of problem: the risk of missing out on good opportunities because of insufficient capacity.

Key questions to ask here include: 

  • Do you need to qualify leads more carefully? 
  • Are there seasonal factors that might account for the fluctuation or is this is a genuine upward trend? 
  • Can you get additional short-term resource to support the team? Or could this even be a good time to look at building your sales team and adding an extra permanent recruit? 

2. Lead response times

It’s great to have a pipeline full of high-quality leads. But that pipeline is only as good as your ability to process these enquiries in good time. A qualified lead means your prospect is in market right now for products and services like yours, which also means they are most likely considering some of your competitors’ services too. 

So fast follow-up is essential – simply getting your response in first can mean you get to frame the conversation from the start, giving you an edge over the competition. 

Lead response time needs to be looked at both a team and an individual. Issues in either may prompt slightly different remedies. An individual with a below-average response time, for instance, may need some coaching in time management, whereas a team shortfall here could point to a more serious process issue. 

3. Number of follow-ups

This metric is very helpful for a sales manager who wants to give targets with other dimensions than simply hitting a figure – and is especially useful for new or junior staff. It can take persistence and practice to learn the right number of interactions required to close a deal, and being able to demonstrate the communication techniques that convert your prospects into customers can help govern your whole team. 

Over time, you can also start to profile customer segments – what’s the average number of follow-up calls or emails required by product or service type? Does it vary by industry? Being able to demonstrate the average number of contacts on leads that convert can be an eloquent and powerful way to drive this point home. 

4. Conversion rate

This, the percentage of leads that turn into customers – and how this number is trending over time – is a powerful indicator of how effective your sales operation is overall. 

It’s a quick way of working out which lead sources are working hardest for you, so you can allocate time, money and effort accordingly. It’s also a great way give individual salespeople meaningful targets too – a benchmark conversion rate can be a much more effective objective than just a target figure. 

Different types of sales strategy will have very different ideal conversion rates – target conversion from an outbound campaign, for example, is likely to always be lower than from face-to-face meetings. Not hitting this target conversion can indicate under-performance around follow-up. More seriously, there could be a mismatch between initial prospect expectations and how the detailed offering is perceived.  

5. Percentage of target

This metric is the sales version of a clock: everyone in your team should be consulting it regularly to see where they’re at. It’s a simple but very powerful nudge to keep efforts focused on the main goal – getting over that all-important finish line. The essence of any dashboard, it’s the starting point for any plan about how to get where you need to be.  

6. Open pipeline

The open pipeline indicates the volume and value of potential sales in your funnel. These are qualified opportunities where a prospect has shown some interest and there is some selling to be done. 

This sales metric shows where your revenue is likely to come from, so you can create an action plan to get you to 100% of target.

7. Actual closed sales

No sales dashboard would be complete without a clear picture of closed sales, or closed won opportunities. Every salesperson wants to be able to see, at a glance, the amount of revenue that has been signed off already. It’s a sign of achievement, as well as a powerful incentive to greater efforts. 

Closed sales can be viewed in a variety of different ways, such by lead owner or lead source. Both of these views, of course, provide insights that can inform future sales strategy and team management. 

Get everything in one place

A growing business needs a good Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application. It helps you manage critical customer information in one place — including yout key sales metrics, and gives you a complete view of your business. Download your copy of the Complete CRM Handbook and begin your journey to getting everything in one place, and closing more deals.