If you’re not already familiar with the term, a “KPI” is a key performance indicator. Teams use KPIs to help identify if a team or an individual is performing as expected, or in alignment with team, individual, or company goals.
For Sales teams, KPIs are generally focused around revenue, and at the end of the day, is our company making as much revenue as it needs to? In this article, I’m going to share ten examples of KPIs that are useful for Sales teams to report on in Salesforce. These KPIs may or may not be relevant to every single business of every size, but they should help guide you on the path to getting started.
Before we get started, though, it’s worth noting that your particular org will need additional filters that are not mentioned here. For example, many Sales teams are separated by “New Business” versus “Renewals”. In this article, I will be exclusively focusing on New Business, even if you don’t see it mentioned in every single KPI. You may also need to split your reporting by geographical region, by team, or by other factors. Work with your Sales leaders to determine what the exact KPIs needed for your particular business are.
1. Open Pipeline
Naturally, one of the first KPIs that Sales Leaders are interested in is the current open pipeline, and considering the typical closure rate, do we have enough pipeline to reach our revenue goal?
This is a fairly simple Opportunity report, essentially just ‘all open Opportunities’ and sum up the Amount.
There are two pretty common ways of displaying this on a dashboard – either as a numerical component or as a dashboard component when compared to an overall goal. If the Sales team has a pipeline goal they’re trying to reach, the second would be the better option.
Another option for displaying your current open pipeline is with a funnel chart, grouped by Stage:
Be sure to work closely with your Sales Leaders to understand what they need and what type of KPI measurement would work best for their situation.
2. Closing Soon
In this KPI, “soon” means whatever time frame is most important to your business. It might be this month, this quarter, or this year. Also, keep in mind that your financial quarters and calendar quarters might be different. We can use a similar report as above, with all Open opportunities, but add a filter for “Close Date = This Quarter”
When looking at Opportunities that are likely to close soon, I’ve found that leaders want a little more detail, so it can be good to also group these by Stage:
3. Age/Duration
This KPI is one of the more ‘forgotten’ ones, or at least, frequently ignored. If a Sales team is going to report on open pipeline and have the expectation that it should move to Closed Won, then it’s critical to understand just how old that open pipeline is. Let’s say you have two Opportunities for $500K, and one of them is five years old, and the other is two months old.
Even if those Opportunities are in the same Stage and Probability, the older one is probably much less likely to close.
You may also want to consider reporting on Opportunities that have been in the same Stage for more than 90 days (or whatever time frame is appropriate for your business) by using “Stage Duration <= 90.
4. Opps with Inactive Owner
Another forgotten KPI is open Opportunities owned by an Inactive User – ideally, when a Sales Rep leaves, their Opportunities get transferred to someone else on the team to manage those deals. But more often than not, this task is forgotten.
This issue is more prevalent in older orgs, but it’s a good metric for all orgs to report on to keep hygiene clean.
These two KPIs (Age/Duration and Opps with Inactive Owners) you may or may not want to see on your main KPI dashboard. If your Opps are fairly clean, it might be good to have them on a separate dashboard for a team like Sales Operations that is going to help with the cleanup and monitor hygiene.
5. Leaderboard
This KPI can be controversial, but some teams have a friendly-competitive nature and like to see it. For this component, we can stack rank our Sales Reps on how much they have Closed Won in the current year (or whatever time period is relevant for your business).
6. Pipeline Generated
Depending on how your team is structured or run, you may also want to identify if your reps have been creating enough pipeline, or historically, what has been created. A report based on Created Date for Opportunities can be a good metric to have.
7. Inbound From Marketing
Similarly, knowing exactly what Marketing typically sends to Sales over time can be helpful to predict future expectations. Every org is different, but in this example, we’re going to take a look at how many Leads typically get converted to Opportunities monthly.
8. High Value Opps
The terminology for this one varies by business – “value” can refer to either the financial amount or to a high-priority customer. Sometimes I hear “Target Accounts” and in orgs using an ABM model, I might be asked to report on “ABM Accounts”.
In this example, we’ll look specifically at the dollar amount. For these Opportunities, KPIs typically include more detail like Stage, Close Date, and Next Steps.
9. Closed Won YTD
This KPI is another pretty straightforward one, you’ll just need a Closed Won Opportunity report, filtered by your needed time period, and summing up your Amount field.
It is also helpful to know the overall goal for the year in order to customize the dashboard component.
10. Win Rate / Conversion Rate
Conversion rates are one of the toughest things to get exactly right in Salesforce. And by toughest, I’m not referring to the math here. The math on conversion rates is simple.
If we look at something like what the conversion rate was from “Opportunity Created” to “Opportunity Closed Won,” it would look like this:
When we get into the details, though, that’s where the trouble starts. Exactly which Opportunities? All Opportunities, or only the ones created in a certain time period? Same for the Closed Won – exactly which Opps, and from what time period? And what about considerations for how long it takes to close an Opp? If we know the sales cycle is 18 months long, how do we manage that when calculating conversion rates?
There are other conversion rates to consider too – the number of Leads converted to Opportunities, the number of Opportunities that convert up through each Stage Name.
For this example, we’re just going to look at Opportunities created Last Year, and Opportunities Closed Won Last Year, to try and get some “Win Rate” data for Last Year, which turns out to be about 32%.
The formula for this one is the following:
RowCount / PARENTGROUPVAL(RowCount, GRAND_SUMMARY)
Final Thoughts
These 10 KPIs are just some examples to get you started. Keep in mind that every single org is different, and may have different KPIs that need to be reported on.
Even within the same org, different Sales teams can have different metrics. Even on the same team, people can be trying to understand the data in different ways.
We’d love to hear your suggestions about important KPIs that you always look for in Sales teams. Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!
