For all companies, the generation of sufficient revenues is a process highly correlated with the company’s survival, no matter the product or the service it offers to its customers. Thus it becomes evident why monitoring the performance of the sales team is such a critical point to a manager’s everyday routine.
In this monitoring process, the use of services like Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems can arm your sales team with the information and the tools that are essential for today’s modern sales process and at the same time produce all the necessary data for the computation of specific key performance indicators.
One of the most widely used CRM systems out there is Hubspot and there is a very good reason for this. Using Hubspot a company can centralize all information regarding companies, contacts, and deals into records. All three of these object types can be associated with one another and have properties that can assist you in generating meaningful stories and actionable insights for your business.
That being said, with appropriate key performance indicators (KPIs) a sales manager can get the whole picture regarding outbound reach, pipeline metrics, conversion rates, sales productivity and revenue regain in the blink of an eye.
So far, in our previous post, we have already compiled a more general set of KPIs that are proven to be extremely useful for every sales team and have also computed part of them using data from Salesforce. In this post, we are going to move even further and try to build another sales KPIs dashboard on top of the data that the Hubspot CRM offers.
With this dashboard, the key performance indicators you may want to monitor, as part of the prospecting activity and pipeline flow metrics, include the total number of deals generated in a specific time period, e.g. month or quarter, or even their breakdown based on specific Hubspot pipelines.
Prospecting Activity & Pipeline Flow
Monthly Total Deals
SELECT TO_CHAR((properties_createdate_value AT TIME ZONE 'UTC'), 'YYYY-MM') AS "Month of Properties Createdate Value",
count(properties_dealname_value)
FROM hubspot_crm_deals
GROUP BY "Month of Properties Createdate Value"
ORDER BY "Month of Properties Createdate Value" ASC
With this visualization, you can review how the lead generation process evolves over time and also apply improvements that may help you increase the volume of potential customers reached.
Monthly Total Deals Organized by Pipeline ID
By segmenting the total deals in smaller groups based on their Pipeline ID you can draw even more targeted conclusions regarding specific actions such as inbound or outbound sales or promotion through different channels and how their performance evolves in time.
You can also dive even deeper and monitor in details the flow through your sales pipeline. This can be done with key performance indicators that calculate the total number of leads generated, how many of them were marked as qualified by your sales team and finally what percentage of them ended up as won or lost deals.
These metrics directly reflect the effectiveness of client acquisition approach. The percentage of leads that finally converted into paying customers is an indicator of your salespersons’ performance but can also provide you with other information. For example, if you find out that the conversion rates dramatically decrease after a certain number of touches you can use this knowledge as a benchmark to prevent your team from insisting more than they should.
All deals breakdown
In Hubspot, each deal at any given point in time belongs to a certain pipeline stage as it processes through the sales funnel.
In the more general case, these stages include leads, qualified leads, won or lost deals. Your sales funnel of course can include many more custom-made stages that are specific to your business case but for the sake of simplicity in this post, we assume that only 4 stages, previously mentioned, exist.
By monitoring the number of deals at any of these stages you can easily calculate the conversion and drop-out rates and in case the results are not satisfactory you have to dig deeper in order to reveal what pushes your potential customers away.
SELECT left(date_trunc('month',properties_dealstage_timestamp)::text, 7),
properties_dealstage_value,
count(properties_dealstage_value)
FROM hubspot_crm_deals
GROUP BY date_trunc('month',properties_dealstage_timestamp),
properties_dealstage_value
ORDER BY date_trunc('month',properties_dealstage_timestamp)
Alternatively, you can define contacts as the units of your analysis. Exactly as we did with deals above, you can monitor the total number of new contacts created in a certain time period. You can also change the granularity of such an analysis by switching from daily to monthly intervals based on what is more suitable for your specific business case.
Contacts created by month
SELECT date_trunc('month',addedat),
count(*)
FROM hubspot_crm_contacts
WHERE date_trunc('month',addedat) >='1/1/2017'
GROUP BY date_trunc('month',addedat)
ORDER BY date_trunc('month',addedat)
Sales Productivity
Another important aspect has to do with sales productivity monitoring. Every manager wants to know how well the sales reps are performing in comparison with their co-workers, in order to reward those who achieve good performance and provide further guidance to those who don’t. For this purpose, metrics that are relevant to the distribution of lost and won deals among sales reps can be helpful.
Deals distribution among sales reps
SELECT properties.hubspot_owner_id.value, count(*) FROM deals GROUP BY properties.hubspot_owner_id.value
Deals distribution among sales reps organized by deal’s current stage
SELECT properties.hubspot_owner_id.value, properties.dealstage.value, count(*) FROM deals GROUP BY properties.hubspot_owner_id.value, properties.dealstage.value
In the above-mentioned metrics, each sales rep is considered as a different “deal owner”. By monitoring the relative difference between won and lost deals for every sales rep, a manager can draw interesting conclusions regarding his team such as which representative is more convincing. In case a daily or monthly goal is set for every member of the team in terms of deal generation or deal wins, these metrics are valuable in quantifying the extent to which these predefined goals are achieved.
Conclusions
Once you have defined a basic set of KPIs that suits your business quite well you can start with analyzing the information you can get out of them in order to understand why you get these results, how you can improve your sales team performance and determine if there are other KPIs that you may need to monitor as well.
After all, the establishment of a complete KPIs dashboard is the result of an iterative process and requires constant revisions until the finally selected KPIs directly reflect or are tied to an overarching goal.
