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Understanding your key sales metrics and effectively tracking them is crucial for monitoring performance, identifying opportunities, and guiding data-informed decisions. In this post, we'll explore the top 5 KPIs you should track in your B2B SaaS sales dashboard based on our work guiding data strategy for +100 startups.
You can frame these 5 sales metrics as one North Star ⭐ and its 4 levers:
To increase your Booked Sales:
Lever 1: 🔼 Pipeline Value
Lever 2: 🔼 Average Deal Size (ADS)
Lever 3: 🔼 Win Rate
Lever 4: 🔽 Average Sales Cycle
Booked Sales is the value (or count) of won deals in your CRM.
It deserves prime real estate on your sales dashboard. This metric is essential for tracking and forecasting revenue. It provides a clear picture of the revenue that has been secured, and can help predict cash flow based on the expected payment schedules of the booked deals. It's also great for evaluating the performance of sales teams, individuals, and strategies, indicating how effective they are at closing deals.
Before you make your dashboard, ensure that all sales are recorded accurately and promptly in your CRM. This helps provide a real-time view of revenue. Clearly define what constitutes a 'Booked Sale' – is it when a contract is signed?
Pipeline measures the total value of active deals.
Any sales team that wants to achieve consistent growth needs to maintain a healthy pipeline. This metric is critical for forecasting revenue and is useful for sales planning. For example, if your pipeline value is high, you might invest more in sales enablement tools or staff to ensure you can effectively handle and convert these opportunities.
Your dashboard should allow you to check that your pipeline is balanced in terms of the numbers of deals at each stage. A heavily weighted pipeline at the final stage will dissipate quickly whilst a pipeline that's all in the first stage could take a long time to reap rewards. Regularly review and remove dead leads from your pipeline to keep it clean and focused.
Average Deal Size (ADS) refers to the average revenue expected from each closed deal.
This metric is great for predicting revenue streams, informing pricing strategies, and assessing sales effectiveness – especially in up-selling and cross-selling. It informs whether to pursue higher volume with smaller deals or lower volume with larger deals. Successful companies leverage ADS to tailor their sales approach, improve LTV, and refine target market strategies. It's particularly useful when evaluating customer segments or assessing the impact of pricing changes. The best dashboards let you analyse ADS by customer type, sales channel, or product to prioritise the most lucrative deals.
Win Rate represents the percentage of closed deals that are won.
This metric gauges your efficiency in converting leads at the top of your sales funnel into customers. It's a great indicator of alignment between product offerings and market demand. A high Win Rate may signal that a product's features, pricing, and quality align with what target customers seek.
Ideally, your dashboard allows you to break down Win Rates by individual sales reps or customer segments to identify and benchmark top performers and customer segments. This helps in understanding the effectiveness of different sales strategies, tactics, or approaches employed by different team members.
Average Sales Cycle (ASC) measures the average time from deal creation to deal close for won deals.
Tracking this metric allows you to identify bottlenecks and areas for improvement in their sales process. By identifying stages where deals take longer to progress, you can work to shorten your sales cycle. ASC is great for forecasting sales and revenue. Lower values of this metric typically reflect more sales efficiency and pipeline effectiveness.
Together these metrics give an excellent overview of sales health. If you can move the needle on these levers, Sales is bound to increase. For more information on +65 SaaS metrics, head to our Metrics Dictionary.
Now you’ve got a grip on the most important leadership metrics, let’s outline what makes a great dashboard.
1. Simple but not simplistic.
It should clearly convey information to your team without oversimplifying to the point of triviality.
2. High signal/noise ratio.
Your dashboard should have a high amount of useful information (signal) versus less useful data (noise). The most common dashboard mistake we see is metric overload. Focus on a few metrics that most directly affect your team’s performance.
3. Clean, clear, and glanceable.
It should be easy to understand the key takeaways at a glance without straining your eyes. This is key in reducing attention deficit and keeping your number-shy team members engaged.
4. Benchmarked.
Viewing data relative to history gives crucial context, which helps you to understand whether a metric is improving or worsening. Benchmarking is also useful for setting and tracking goals.
5. Easily investigated.
Great dashboards allow users to manipulate the data to drill down and explore different perspectives at a deeper level. This is important when you need specific answers to specific questions. Interactivity can be added through menus, splits, and filters.
6. Accurate & up-to-date.
If you’re operating from a spreadsheet that’s updated once or twice a month from different teams, you’re operating in the dark and susceptible to errors in human data input. Having an up-to-date, accurate dashboard is crucial for fast-paced environments where timely decisions can significantly impact business performance.
7. Shareable.
What use is your data when it’s siloed? Data is best used cross-functionally. Making your dashboard sharable helps to align team members around goals, keep everyone informed, and stops you sharing ugly screenshots in Slack.
What if you could connect your SaaS tools in minutes to get beautiful, strategic dashboards and a feed of automated sales insights? Check out Calliper’s sales dashboard:
We believe everyone should be able to leverage data in their decision-making, no matter their technical skills. So we made a plug-and-play business intelligence solution for SaaS operators. It connects to data sources like Stripe, Hubspot, and Mixpanel out of the box with no coding – setup takes minutes. It’s pre-built around the most important metrics for each department, so you can focus on metrics that help you grow. Unlike other BI tools, Calliper provides a feed of automated insights based on trends in your data. Check it out here.
P.S. Want a free, personalised list of investors for your startup? Try Investor Match 💞
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