The Perfect Sales Dashboard: 11 KPIs You Can't Miss

Operating a data-driven organization is essential in today’s modern business environment. This is especially true in sales, where KPIs and performance metrics inform strategic decisions and contribute to larger initiatives such as organization-wide revenue forecasting.

Sales KPI dashboards are key enablers of these capabilities, providing centralized and visual representations of sales performance and progress toward goals. Powered by CRM systems and AI-supported sales management software, sales dashboards provide real-time insights that allow sales employees to make decisions with confidence.

In the sections that follow, we’ll explore 10 of the most commonly-used sales KPIs, why they’re important to include in your sales dashboards, and how they can support key sales team roles at your organization.

Quick Takeaways

• Sales KPIs are strategic in nature and connected to specific sales objectives.
• Sales KPI dashboards turn insights into visible, actionable narratives for sales teams.
• KPIs such as sales activity volume, lead conversion ratio, and sales velocity indicate how well sales teams are performing and leads are moving through the pipeline.
• Customer acquisition cost and customer lifetime value help sales leaders pinpoint the right level of sales investment and maximize profit.
• Tracking monthly and annual growth rates contribute to RevOps efforts by showing long-term sales trajectory and revenue potential.

What are sales KPIs and why should you be tracking them?

Sales KPIs are measurable, data-driven metrics used to track sales performance. They keep sales teams aligned and focused on reaching the objectives set by sales leaders at their organizations. 

Unlike standard data metrics, which are often tactical in nature, KPIs are strategic and connected to specific goals. For example: lead conversion ratio is a commonly-used sales KPI measured against a target rate to drive performance improvement and growth.

It’s important to note that sales KPIs are not the sales targets themselves, but rather the data points used to measure progress toward those targets. With the right sales management software tools in place, KPI tracking drives better decision making and more agile strategies to ensure teams can achieve their sales goals.

What is a sales KPI dashboard?

A sales KPI dashboard is a data visualization tool that turns data insights into an easily digestible narrative — one that makes KPIs actionable to those working to achieve them. This includes sales leaders, managers, reps, and other peripheral contributors, such as marketing or business development reps.

Sales KPI dashboards often look different depending on who the dashboard is designed for (i.e. executive leaders vs. managers vs. reps). Most companies today design multiple dashboards to align with what each team or individual in the organization needs to know. 

While the exact combination of KPIs included in a sales dashboard may vary, there are several metrics generally agreed upon as the most critical indicators of sales success. Let’s walk through each of them in more detail.

10 Sales KPIs to Include on Your Sales Dashboard

Number of Qualified Leads

As any seasoned sales professional knows, lots of time is wasted on unqualified leads without the right frameworks in place to prevent it. These include lead scoring and qualification standards applied to all generated leads as they officially move into the sales pipeline. Qualified leads is an important KPI for sales leaders and managers in particular as it tells them two important things:

• Whether or not their lead generation efforts (usually conducted in partnership with marketing) are yielding viable prospects
• How sales rep responsibilities need to be allocated to handle qualified leads in the pipeline and/or if additional reps need to be hired

Sales Activity Volume

Sales activity volume is an effective way for sales managers to track productivity. It’s an umbrella term that encompasses more specific KPIs like number of meetings booked, phone calls made, demos conducted, etc. Monitoring these types of activities in an ongoing way helps managers to see how well their teams are executing the sales process and drill down into individual team or rep performance when necessary.

Sales leaders should decide which activities are most important to their company’s sales process so that the right sales activity volume KPIs can be included in their dashboards.

Lead Conversion Ratio

Lead conversion ratio is one of the simplest and most core KPIs to include in your dashboard. It measures how many qualified leads are moving successfully through your pipeline to actually become a closed deal. A “good” lead conversion ratio varies greatly by your industry and type of business you run. Across the board, however, it’s a solid indicator of whether or not your sales strategy is sound and your sales team performing effectively.

Sales Velocity

Sales velocity analyzes how quickly leads move through your pipeline to generate revenue as closed deals. It’s critical to include on your sales KPI dashboard for two key reasons. First, sales velocity is another indicator of sales process effectiveness. If deals are getting stuck or moving too slowly along the pipeline, either your process is flawed or your team is not executing.

Second, sales velocity helps you put a timestamp on when to expect revenue from the deals in your pipeline. When you perform a pipeline analysis, you use sales velocity to pinpoint time to revenue for each individual stage. Ultimately, understanding sales velocity also makes for more informed and accurate sales forecasts.

Customer Acquisition Cost

The first of a few customer-focused KPIs on our list, customer acquisition cost (CAC) measures the total financial investment required to acquire a new customer. Tracking CAC as part of your sales KPI dashboard helps sales managers keep budgets under control, understand spending needs, and make decisions to earn the highest possible ROI from sales investments.

Customer Lifetime Value

Customer lifetime value (CLV) measures the total average value (i.e. revenue earned) from a customer over the span of their entire relationship with your company. CLV is one of the most strategically critical KPIs to measure because it helps to determine where your sales efforts should be allocated (answer: the products/services and customer segments that earn you the most revenue).

Customer Retention and Churn Rates

Customer retention and customer church are two sides of the same coin — the former measures the rate at which customers stick with your business over specific time periods, and the latter is the percentage of customers who stop using your products or services during a given timeframe.

Customer retention and churn rates are important for every business, but they’re particularly relevant today for SaaS companies that depend on subscription-based business models and ongoing renewals to grow revenue.

Average Deal Size

Average deal size is the average amount of money a customer spends on your products or services in a single deal. It tells you how well your pricing strategy is working and it helps you set the right tactics for reaching your sales targets.

By monitoring average deal size on your sales KPI dashboard, you’ll always have an accurate idea of how many deals need to close in a given time period to reach your sales goals.

Average Revenue Per Sales Team/Rep

Revenue earned per sales team and/or rep is a key part of measuring overall sales performance. When it’s included as a visible KPI on your sales dashboards, it serves as a motivator for teams and reps to stay on target. From a leadership standpoint, it’s a way to see potential performance issues and proactively support reps to improve.

Monthly/Annual Sales Growth

Last but not least, measuring growth is essential for enterprises that want to execute integrated RevOps strategies. For most organizations, sales is by far the largest contributor to revenue, which means sales growth is a reliable indicator of wider company growth (or lack thereof). By tracking growth closely, you can stay informed about your company’s revenue trajectory and implement measures for continual improvement and optimization.

Putting it all Together

No matter which combination of KPIs you use or how you prioritize them, there are a few keys to success every dashboard needs to be effective:

Accessibility - Keep your dashboard accessible through the right CRM or software tools used by your sales teams.
Visibility - Utilize data visualization capabilities to make insights clear and actionable for employees at every level.
Customization - Your executives need different insights than your sales managers or reps. Design each sales dashboard for the audience it will serve.

To maximize the ROI you get from your sales dashboards, know which KPIs drive success for your organization, keep the above best practices top of mind, and utilize your dashboards as tools to inform everyday sales decisions.

Level Up Your Sales Management Capabilities with Xactly

Xactly’s comprehensive Intelligent Revenue Platform (IRP) empowers business leaders to make data-informed sales decisions, manage sound budgets and finances, create accurate forecasts, and drive more resilient and profitable revenue.

Ready to learn how Xactly can benefit your organization? Schedule your demo today!