Keeping track of sales effectiveness is something that has been an issue since the dawn of sales. As a manager, how can you know exactly what your sales team are doing, how active they are, and what activities positively correlate with results? KPIs.
Here are 5 KPIs that typically reflect on end-results, and should be included in your HubSpot CRM reporting strategy:
Activity reports track how many emails are being sent, how many calls are being placed and how many meetings are being booked. This report can show you exactly how proactive your salespeople are, which typically correlates to the end-result.
Obviously, volume isn’t everything and this report will highlight that. For example, you may have a colleague who is placing 30 calls a week, versus a colleague who is placing 100, but is still winning more sales. This could highlight the fact that the quality of that person's interactions are much better or they are going after better-fit leads. These types of insights are invaluable for training and sharing ideas - colleague A could share tips with colleague B.
An important indicator of both sales and marketing effectiveness is the Lead to Opportunity report, which highlights, out of the number of leads being passed to sales, how many are successfully turning into sales opportunities. This can indicate two things:
1. Sales effectiveness: How good are your sales team at converting the leads that marketing are generating into opportunities? Are they following them up in the right way or do they require more training?
2.Marketing effectiveness: Is your marketing generating the wrong sort of leads? Do sales and marketing need to work more closely? Do sales need to feedback lead-quality information to marketing to help them refine?
Used correctly, the HubSpot CRM can give you complete visibility of marketing and sales. All this information can be used to train your sales team, refine your marketing strategy and increase your Lead to Opportunity rate.
A sales performance report spells out exactly what you need to know:
This report gives managers the insights they need to know, but also highlights, for sales people, that there are open leads to pursue (or not to pursue, depending on the circumstances).
For example, if there are lots of open leads that haven’t been contacted, then why is that? It could be the case that leads are poor quality or that your sales team haven’t been alerted to it.
With the HubSpot CRM, you can auto-assign leads to sales people and sets tasks/reminders so your sales team never miss out on an opportunity.
A key way to track your performance against your targets is by creating forecasting reports in your CRM. These forecasts draw upon your lead pipeline and look at how many opportunities are currently at each stage of the sales process. Each stage should have an associated ‘probability of closure’. For example, a lead at the start of the sales process may have a 10% chance of turning into a customer, whereas an opportunity that has received a proposal may have a 60% chance of turning into a piece of business.
A forecast report will draw upon this data and work out your projected revenue for a given time frame. If your forecast is below your target, then there is work to be done. If it’s above your target, then great - your sales team can start building your pipeline for the next month while working on existing opportunities.
A closed vs. lost report shows just that - what you’ve closed in a given time frame versus what you missed out on. This report works out by linking to your deals pipeline, and monitors the amount of revenue that drops out of the funnel, versus the amount you take all the way through to become a customer.
If you’re losing out on a lot of revenue put into the funnel, then this may be a sure sign that not enough qualification is taking place, or that your sales people aren’t adding value that allows potential buyers to make a decision based on your businesses USPs.
Obviously, an effective CRM reporting strategy all depends on how well a CRM is used. The number one cause for CRMs not being used properly is because sales people view it as too much of a hassle, or the system is too complicated to understand.
Learn how HubSpot makes sales people want to use the CRM by giving them the tools and insights they need to be able to sell better. Book a free CRM consultation with us, and we’ll walk you through how to use the Hubspot CRM effectively and give you insights into how your sales teams are performing so you can help them succeed and grow your business.