Key Lead Generation and Sales Metrics Your Business Should be Tracking

One way that the OpenView Labs team added value to our portfolio this year was to collect data from the different companies around benchmarks for lead generation and metrics. As you may recall, I wrote a post at the end of Q3 sharing some interesting findings from our indexing efforts. Here were some nuggets of info that we were able to extract from the portfolio:

Overall, I think that the benchmarking exercise was a success, and we will definitely be doing a similar project again next year.

But here’s the thing: to a certain extent, even though we invest in B2B SaaS companies that are all at the expansion stage, it is not exactly like comparing apples to apples. Each company has unique buyers, segments, and sales cycles.

Regardless, everyone wants to know how they stack up against their peers. It’s the competitive sales mentality at it’s finest. So for the sake of making a bit more sense of the data, we did ( and will continue to) group companies that average less than $50k in first year contract value and those with an average greater than $50k annual contract value. Even if you are NOT part of OpenView’s portfolio, I encourage you to reflect on the following metrics for your BDR and/or sales teams each quarter, and see if your conversions improve over the course of the year.

Lead Generation Metrics

• Calls/Day (Total number of calls in the quarter/business days/reps in the period)
• Conversations/Day (Total number of conversations in the quarter/business days/reps in the period)
• Appointments/Month (Total number of completed in in the quarter/three months/reps in the period)
• Opportunities/Month (Total number of opportunities in a given period/three months/reps in the period)
• Call-to-Conversation Conversion Rate (Total calls in a quarter total conversations in the quarter)
• Conversation-to-Appointment Conversion Rate (Total Conversations in a quarter/total appointments completed in the quarter)
• Appointment-to-Opportunity Conversion Rate (Total Opportunities created in a quarter/total appointments completed in the quarter)
• Cost per appointment (Fully loaded cost of the lead generation team for one quarter/total number of appointments)
• Expected expense ratio (Fully loaded cost of the lead generation team for one quarter/expected bookings based on average deal size and conversion rates)Number of New Business Opportunities Per Rep Total number of open opportunities with “close date” in the current quarter/total number of sales reps

New Business Sales Metrics

•  Number of Closed New Business Opportunities Per Rep (Total number of opportunities closed in the quarter/total number of sales reps)
•  Number of Closed/Won New Business Opportunities (Total number of opportunities closed/won in the quarter/total number of sales reps)
•  Number of Closed/Lost New Business Opportunities Per Rep (Total number of opportunities closed/lost in the quarter/total number of sales reps)
•  Attainment (New business bookings/new business bookings goal)
•  Closed Rate (Total number of deals closed/total number of opportunities)
• Win Rate (Total number of deals closed/won/total number of deals closed)

What other metrics will you be collecting and reflecting on next year for your sales organization?