You can’t manage what you can’t measure. This is not news to you. You’re tracking a few KPIs for your team, but how do you know they’re the right ones? Or, are they even enough? When your metrics have bigger holes than your dad’s socks, you’ve got some problems. If you’re missing chunks of data, that you don’t even know is missing, you can’t read the whole story behind the decisions you’re making.
Let’s plug that gigantic hole with some smart team-based KPIs. Here are 16 of the top ones to track:
1. Number of Prospects Visited
This is an indicator of how much effort your team is putting into creating new business, which helps you meet your goals. Use this data to figure out how much focus your team is placing on bringing in new business or to identify if they’re only chatting up existing customers.
2. Number of New Opportunities Opened
How successful is your sales team at selling new prospects? Winning new opportunities gets your product in front of more potential customers and increases market saturation. A sure indication of growth and a healthy sales team is when you see an increase in new opportunities.
3. Opportunity-to-Win Ratio
You want to build a team of winners. And they’re visiting prospects, but how many of these prospect visits turn into new customers? If this number is low, it could mean that your team is made up of great networkers, movers, and shakers, but may need some help with closing strategies and getting signatures.
4. Rejection Codes When Deals Don’t Close, or Accounts Churn
When your sales team isn’t successful at closing deals, or worse, when accounts are churning more than your grass-fed butter, there are reasons why and tracking these will help position your team for learning what worked and what didn’t so they can apply these lessons in the future. Gather intel into why accounts aren’t closing so you can monitor trends and focus on areas where the same rejection codes keep coming up.
5. Number of Sampling Events
Sampling events are a great way for your team to see what products are popular and what’s exciting consumers. Use these numbers to determine which sampling activities are the most effective, and how many samples of each flavor or product they gave away.
6. Number of Additional Placements Secured
Tracking how many new placements your team is securing is a key sign that they’re building relationships and visiting accounts with perfect cadence. This is also a sign that your sales team is great at closing additional sales with current accounts, and helps you identify which stores are selling more of your product.
7. Number of Additional SKUs Sold
A wide variety of products drives additional sales volume, so understanding just how broad your product’s presence is in stores gives you the data you need to focus your sales team on adding additional SKUs. This information can also show how many varieties each location carries compared to the average of all stores and also shows that store's sales performance compared to other stores.
9. Amount of Marketing Materials Sold to Retailers
Tracking the volume of marketing materials, such as brochures, shelf tags, signs, posters, and stickers helps give you an idea of how well your marketing materials are grabbing consumers attention. If stores are constantly replenishing these items, this means they’re resonating, and your sales team has a good understanding of the best circumstances for using each of these.
10. Which Marketing Materials Are Referenced
Monitoring which marketing materials your team is using during visits could point to which materials were most influential in final sales. When you have insight into the most effective marketing materials, you can share this information with your marketing department so they can keep creating impactful materials.
11. Store Sales Volume
Collecting sales data the stores your team is operating in might point to the ultimate measure of success — your sales goals. This will tell you which stores are bringing in the most total sales and which products are selling best in certain stores.
12. Frequency of Store Visits
Tracking how often your team is visiting stores helps make sure they’re balancing their work with your company goals in mind, and are working to expand your brand’s presence within existing outlets. If your team is consistently visiting existing customers, this means they’re growing trusting relationships, and if they’re not checking in on store needs, this could reduce their trust level and increase the chances of them looking to competitors.
Going Deeper: Advanced Field Sales KPIs
Now that you’re set with the top KPIs to track and plugged some big holes in your metrics let’s turn some on their side or combine some basic metrics and take a fresh perspective. (If you want to go even deeper with creating / modifying your own KPIs, check out this post for the seven most important characteristics of effective KPIs).
13. Number of New Opportunities Opened Per Visit
Looking beyond just the number of new opportunities, but combining this data with the number of opportunities opened per visit can give you perspective on how efficient your team is with time management. Here, you could look for opportunities to help your team make the most effective use of their time.
14. Number of Visits Per Hour
Measuring how well your team is fostering strong relationships tricky, but if you track how many visits your team makes per hour, you can get insight into how much (or how little) time they’re spending by key account. If they’re spending a disproportionate amount of hours visiting just a few stores, this could clue you into a deeper problem — maybe your customer isn’t making enough time for your people, or your team is spending too much time talking about little Billy’s soccer game.
15. Store Sales Volume by Product
Since store sales volume is the top measure of success, when you compare it with other metrics such as product, it can help to pinpoint which activities are having the greatest impact and if your team is skilled at driving results. Both pieces of information will help you focus their efforts to help track towards your goal.
16. Customer vs. Team Satisfaction
Finding ways to measure the strength of the relationships your team is building is key. By surveying your customers and surveying your team to you can figure out if there’s a gap in satisfaction between customers and employees. If the gap is huge, your team may be happy, but customers might not be satisfied with the level of service. If there’s a small gap, you can work on ways to increase your team's satisfaction, especially since this can translate into better service.
Having a set of goals scribbled across your whiteboard is one thing. Having a set of KPIs unique to your team’s success and your company goals, ready for you at a glance can help set you up to help your teams be successful.
If your team isn’t hitting their KPIs, you need to address it quickly. Starting these conversations can be difficult though. Good thing we’ve prepared a bunch of scripts that you can just cut and paste into your email to get started. Check them out in this easy-to-use swipe file.
