The 10 most important metrics for every sales manager and how to track them effectively

In today’s competitive world, sales managers are faced with an ever-increasing volume of data and information that they must analyze and use to make strategic decisions. Business analytics systems, which in recent years have become a must-have tool for management, greatly accelerate and facilitate this process.

Business Intelligence (BI) solutions enable the aggregation, analysis, and visualization of vast amounts of company data. They provide quick and reliable answers to a range of strategic questions, uncover unexpected market opportunities, and alert to potential challenges.

Through a large set of visualizations and the ability to view data across different cross-sections, BI tools greatly accelerate and facilitate timely data-driven management decisions. They are widely used in the automation and optimization of business analytics across various units in an organization, and in the sales channel, they are highly recommended.

The 10 most important key performance indicators (KPI) for every salesperson

From our years of experience in implementing business systems, we can distinguish 10 key sales performance indicators (KPIs) that every sales manager needs to monitor for effective business management and development.

In working with many clients in the country’s leading industries, we know that every company monitors these 10 KPIs to optimize resources and boost results:

1. Revenue – with and without VAT
2. Quantity – in various units such as count, kilograms, pallets, etc.
3. Discounts
4. Net Revenue
5. Cost per product
6. Gross Profit
7. Gross Margin – value and percentage
8. Price – delivered, selling, standard
9. Inventory – retained, unrealized, and its measurement in value and quantity
10. Receivables – invoices, customers, overdue periods

And here comes the questions:

– How exactly are these KPI’s tracked?

– How effectively and quickly?

– How clear and accurate is the data about them?

– What specific actions does tracking them lead to, and does it lead to any conclusions at all?

– How long does it take to produce a report for a given indicator?

For the most effective tracking of these and many other key metrics across different business areas, come to…..

Business Intelligence to help salespeople

Since 2006, our team has implemented over 460 BI system implementation projects for more than 120 companies in Bulgaria and abroad. Based on this experience, we can note that one of the key areas where business intelligence solutions are most useful for companies is the sales area.

BI systems collect, process and present data from various sources, which provides the ability to quickly and easily track key metrics.

With business analytics solutions, reports are produced automatically and in minutes, without the need for IT and sales administration intervention. This saves significant time for key employees by allowing them to focus on analyzing the data rather than processing it. 

Business analytics systems aggregate and unify different types of data from internal and external company sources over a large period of time. This turns the BI system into a single source of truth about the overall state of the business.

Our experience shows that one of the most common advantages of BI tools used by management is the ability to compare data for certain periods – current versus last month, current year versus last year to the same point and many others. Thus, management can very easily orient how a product, product group, subgroup, brand is performing and accordingly assess in which directions to invest efforts.

Another element that we have noticed to be extremely useful for sales teams is the ability to quickly and easily track and analyze the performance of goals. BI tools allow with a few clicks to assess the performance of the targets of the sales teams and salespeople individually. Targets can be tracked by time (month, year), by customer, by product hierarchy or any other metric important to the company.

Key sales KPIs are not only important to define and track, but can be examined in different cross-sections and dependencies on each other.

It is key that KPIs can be analyzed simultaneously in dashboards or reports, and can be filtered according to available nomenclatures such as:

• Day, Week, Month, Quarter, Year;
• Product, product group, subgroup, brand/brand;
• Geographic – countries, regions, cities, objects;
• Customers, customer group, distribution channels;
• Types of promotions, marketing activities;
• Sales team/merchant, etc.

At Balkan Services we have expert knowledge of business, technology, and legislation, and we speak all three languages. We will listen carefully and advise you on choosing the right business system for your needs.

Balkan Services has been implementing business software solutions since 2006 and has completed more than 690 projects, of which more than 420 are in the area of BI tools. We follow a proven implementation methodology with clear steps and best practice know-how.