As hard as it is to believe, driving sales for your website is not all about what Google has to say. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) include a boatload of information that you can use to measure your B2B company’s success and how you can grow that success.
A high-performing sales team has a good strategy, dedicated team members, and a solid understanding of their customers’ wants but the data is where the money is at. If you are not taking a look at your past, there is no way you can create the best strategy for your future.
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What exactly are B2B Sales KPIs?
B2B sales KPIs include performance indicators that your team can interpret to plan ahead for the year. B2B KPIs in specific allow sales leaders to take a step back and see how the company is performing in comparison to the goals the sales team is setting.
So, if your yearly revenue is not meeting the number you forecasted, you need to figure out what is missing and how you can fix the problem. Tracking the right sales KPIs at the right time can give you invaluable data to help you do just that.
What is the best way to go about selecting B2B eCommerce KPIs?
The first thing you need to do to target the right KPIs for your business is to take a step back and understand what your company’s goals are. This does not just include the goals of the sales team but rather of the company as a whole. What do you want to achieve a year from now?
Having the answer to that question will allow you to narrow down on a few primary KPIs that you should focus on at all times. These two or three KPIs are going to be your primary focus and all of the other KPIs you choose to measure will be secondary.
So your primary goal as a B2B company is likely to be one of the follows-
- Gaining more customers
- Increasing your yearly revenue
- Increasing your conversion rate
Now that you have your primary goal, you can select the KPI you want to focus on. All of the other B2B metrics you will be targeting will be decided based on that.
9 Sales KPIs Your Company Should Be Tracking
There are a few KPIs that your company should absolutely be keeping a track of if they are in the B2B sector. Here are some of them:
Sales from new business ventures
It is important to keep track of your new business ventures or product launches so that you can decide whether you want to invest more time and money in that venture. Taking a look at the total revenue your new business has brought in is one of the best B2B eCommerce metrics to track.
Sales by product
Tracking the number of sales that are coming in for every product that you have on the market is one of the B2B product metrics worth tracking. It will give you a bird’s eye view of what is working for your business by showing you which products or services are serving as your company’s cash cows.
It will also show you what products may be worth pulling from your online store.
Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) to Sales Qualified Leads (SQL) Conversion Rate
A Marketing Qualified Lead(MQL) is one of the KPIs for B2B marketing that you should ideally use alongside your sales KPIs. Looking at your MQL alongside your Sales Qualified Leads (SQL) will also allow you to see how effective your funnel is.
Here is how it is done –
An MQL is a lead that has just entered your sales funnel by doing something like signing up for an opt-in freebie, subscribing to the company podcast, or signing up for one of the company’s webinars.
A Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) is a lead that is ready to hop on a call with one of the members of your sales team because they are potentially interested in one of your products.
The Marketing Qualified Leads that convert into Sales Qualified Leads will show you how much your marketing efforts are paying off.
So, for example, if 1000 people sign up for a freebie opt-in through your website and 150 of those 1000 people convert into Sales Qualified Leads (wanting to get in touch with your sales team to learn more about your product) it means that you have a 15% MQL to SQL conversion rate.
This is one of the B2B marketing metrics that matter for not just the marketing team but the sales team as well so that both teams can build a better relationship and align their goals with more ease. Coming together to fill in any potential gaps in your strategy will allow the company to take advantage of every marketing lead brought in.
If you use the Cyfe business dashboard to visualize your KPIs, you can integrate your HubSpot account into your dashboard like so-
This will allow you to see your entire Contact Lifecycle Pipeline at a glance. This includes all SQL, MQL, customers, opportunities, and subscribers that have been brought into the business during a certain time period.
Sales by Region
Keeping track of exactly where your sales are coming in from is a good way to know which regions you should be focusing your business efforts on. This KPI will allow you to see the volume of sales for your services/products from around the world.
If you keep track of this KPI, it will allow you to see if you are meeting your sales goals for each region. For example, 1500 sales from Canada could be a goal you could track using the KPI.
For example, if you are running a language learning website like Preply (traffic comes from multiple countries), it becomes even more important to know where your sales are coming from. This will help you understand the languages people want to learn the most and which parts of the world are most interested in learning a second language.
Orders Canceled With a Reason
Knowing the reason behind an order cancellation should help your company potentially solve a recurring issue. This will benefit your sales goal long-term. If there is one particular reason customers keep canceling an order, it can easily be dealt with once you know what the problem is by analyzing customer feedback.
If you are using a Cyfe dashboard to track your sales, you can integrate Shopify, Salesforce, or HubSpot to track the percentage of orders that were canceled due to a particular reason.
Opportunities by lead source
An opportunity is a sales lead that has already spoken about a problem that your product or service could potentially solve. This makes that lead an opportunity and your primary aim now is to convert them into a qualified sale.
Knowing which route most of your opportunities are coming through could help you understand what to focus on as a company. So, for example, if most of your opportunities are coming from webinar conversions, it would be wise to double down and focus on webinars more.
Once you know which lead source is sending you most of the opportunities coming your way, you will understand what to focus on much better. This is one of the B2B sales metrics that really help you make more money and save time in the long run.
You can track this B2B KPI by integrating your HubSpot account into the Cyfe business dashboard which should give you a bird’s eye view of the lead sources that are sending in opportunities to your sales team.
Monthly Sales Growth
This is one of the SaaS B2B metrics that show you what the growth in sales volume is like on a monthly basis. Are the changes you are making working and are there any sales trends you should be focusing on more? These questions are often answered more easily by looking at your monthly sales growth and reflecting on the sales decisions you have made that led you there.
KPIs That Can Help Set Personal Goals for Employees
Most of the KPIs we have targeted so far will help benefit the sales team as a whole but it is also important to focus on Key Performance Indicators that can aid the growth of each individual employee and track their progress individually.
- Sales Per Rep– The number of qualified sales each sales rep is making needs to be looked at individually to see whether they are improving as time goes on and meeting their overall sales goals.
- Monthly Calls Per Sales Rep– A good KPI to track would be the number of calls each sales rep is making every month and how many of those calls convert into prospects. This can also help the company decide whether this outbound technique is worth spending more or less time on.
- Percentage of time spent on data entry– Knowing how much time each employee is spending on data entry will help you see how many hours are actually being used productively.
- Sales by contact method– The contact method that is converting the best for different reps on your team may be different depending on their strengths. One employee may find it easier to bring in sales by sending out cold emails while another may be more comfortable over the phone. Tracking the sales by contact method allows you to figure out which method is worth focusing on for each rep individually.
Sales Cycle Length
The sales cycle length is one of the B2B funnel metrics that track how many days it takes for a lead to convert into an order. This will allow a sales team to take a step back and try to figure out ways to shorten the length by being more productive.
You might even find areas where individual reps could improve such as- spending more time on calls, focusing more on certain types of leads, or even using one productivity tool over another.
Wrapping it up
Most sales teams today already know the many benefits of having data to learn from.
Tracking the right B2B SaaS metrics for your business and focusing on making changes based on what you have learned looking at the data is one of the most affordable ways to grow as a company.
The value of tracking the right B2B KPIs cannot be overstated. No matter what sort of business you are, the difference between tracking metrics and not tracking them is watching your company grow over the years as compared to seeing your yearly revenue either stay the same or go down as other companies stay tuned with the trends.
Simply having the data in front of you is not enough, you need to take a deep dive into it to figure out ways you can improve, what you should focus on more, and what is already working for you.
You can use a sales dashboard like the one available on Cyfe to get a bird’s eye view of all of your business metrics starting today.