Sales

2016 Sales Performance Index [eBook]

April 11, 2016

Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpted chapter from Ambition’s 2016 Sales Performance eBook. Download it here

Most sales organizations define their core personnel in one of three ways – Business Development, Account Executives and Sales Brokers.

In the case of Business Development and Account Executives, the key sales KPIs assigned to each role are largely similar across different industries. Broker KPIs are more varied based on industry, though you can still find some core commonalities.

The 3 Types of Sales KPIs

In every organization, there are always three types of performance metrics: Activity metrics, Objective metrics and Moneyball metrics.

Activity metrics are daily “hustle” metrics (calls, emails, conversations) proven to drive longer-term Objective metrics (revenue, contracts signed). Moneyball metrics (or Advanced metrics) bridge the gap between Activity and Objective metrics, showing how efficiently your team is operating.

Here’s a look at the performance benchmarks today’s industry-leading experts recommend you measure across your sales team – broken down by role.

Business Development

Business Development leaders are under the 8 ball nowadays to harness and guide the fastest-evolving role in the sales landscape.

The emergence of Sales Development as the new lead generation bellwether has been a blessing for analytics-savvy sales organizations, since BDRs are the first sales position primed for data-driven performance evaluations. Companies with a fully-developed market position, segmented selling process and modern sales technology can easily track performance across the most important Sales KPIs.

With that said, it’s worth reviewing TOPO’s analysis of the BDR position in its 2015 Sales Development Report, where it set forth the following pre-conditions for success:

“A successful framework must be rooted in a firm understanding of your target market, average lead volume, and sales process. This begins with your SQL definition, which is the founda:on of the sales development organization.”

Once that is accomplished, the report finds, “the most successful SDRs exhibit commonalities in their outreach cadence and live call execution, across areas like inbound lead response time, number and types of touches used, lead pursuit duration, and live call length.”

From a Moneyball Metrics standpoint, leading organizations are already finding compelling advanced metrics that cut to the core of personnel performance.

As an example, a study the Bridge Group performed with QuotaFactory discerned Reach Rate (percentage of accounts that engage in a meaningful, forward-progressing conversation), Pass Rate (percentage of accounts passed to a sales counterpart) and Pipeline Rate (percentage of accounts accepted into the sales pipeline) as the ultimate arbiters of SDR success.

Learn what success looks like for Account Executives and Sales Brokers by downloading the full eBook here. 

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Marketing Director

Jeremy is the Director of Marketing at <a href="https://ambition.com/">Ambition</a> where he publishes and distributes content on all things sales, talent management, data analytics and enterprise software.