3 fundamental sales KPIs that can be automated - new opportunities

3 fundamental sales KPIs that can be automated

It’s hard when the whole business doesn’t use Salesforce because they don’t have access to the same rich data that you do. It’s even harder when they are looking for insight on the performance of your sales department. If you are a sales manager in a company where Salesforce is a silo (or island) or you are running a company and feel like you don’t get the right KPIs out of your Salesforce system, read on.

The best way for independent teams to gain visibility into their each other’s activity is to collect and measure performance through KPIs that are aligned with the company’s vision. Luckily for us consultants, your company’s vision probably includes increasing the number of people that are benefiting from your solution (aka “sales”). There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to sales strategy, but there are certainly 3 fundamentals activities of sales: generating opportunities where relevant, communicating value, and showing prospective customers how benefits can start today.

1. New Opportunities

Without a question, this number is already presented at board meetings and executive staff reviews. Opportunities are items which sit within the sales funnel, which is the domain of sales. You won’t see leads mentioned in this post since it’s not a marketing KPI article, this is just about sales.

If your salespeople have been given training and your CRM is configured with appropriate validation rules to ensure data quality, then your new opportunities metric can be sliced to tell you about the health of many parts of the sales organization:

• Group by Opportunity Source: Is marketing appropriately fueling the sales engine?
• Group by Month: Is there a yearly cyclical pattern being observed that we can overcome?
• Group by Owner/Team & Created Date: Monitor for an individual contributor or group issues
• Group by Account Type: Are we encountering a new market segment and are we prepared for it?

As you can see, grouping a simple KPI by other attributes can tell you a lot. Our suggestion is to add this number into a dashboard and copies of this KPI with filters until you feel like you know everything about top of the funnel health.

Automation tips:

Ensure that duplicates are managed with Salesforce built-in duplicate management and our lightning component for “Potential Duplicates Component”

Use report-sender to make sure partners always know what you have in your pipeline for them.