The KPI trinity: the numbers that explain your sales.

KPIs are the bumper rails on a bowling lane. They keep production and accountability from rolling into the gutter. Every business already has them. Most just aren't tracking them.

No matter what you sell, your sales KPIs fall into three categories. The specific measures change by business. The categories don't.

The amount that you hustle times your skills is going to equal sales.

Doug Mitchell, Building Great Sales Teams

Prospecting activity: the hustle metric

Prospecting is marketing done by the sales team. Some people call it self gen. It splits into three kinds of activity.

• Activity one generates the lead: doors, calls, emails and messages.
• Activity two is follow up, on open leads and on closed customers you should be asking for referrals.
• Activity three is referral partners.

As a guide, about 70% of prospecting time goes to activity one, 20% to follow up and 10% to referral partners.

Daily volume depends on the sale. On the episode, Doug puts a B2B rep at around 50 to 60 activities a day, an entry level B2C rep at about 100 and a high ticket relationship sale at 30 to 40.

Track it from the CRM, call records or a field canvassing app wherever you can. Paper street sheets work, but they run on the honor system, and reps tend to round up.

Pipeline conversion: the skill metric

Conversion rates show how well a rep turns activity into business. Each one is the later step divided by the earlier step.

• Activity to lead. A lead is a name, number and email. A good rate is about 5% to 10%.
• Lead to appointment. About 20% is a good mark. This speaks to rapport and soft skills, and to lead quality when the lead came from marketing.
• Appointment to close. Or to deposit in a higher ticket sale. This is closing ability, and lead quality again.
• Close to install. The deal actually happened. This one is mostly a quality metric for the whole operation, unless one rep's deals keep cancelling.

The power is in the history. If marketing didn't change and conversion dropped, something changed in sales. Maybe the script drifted, maybe a rep is tired. If marketing changed and conversion dropped, you know where to look.

When I look at a scorecard, it doesn't look like ones and zeros to me anymore. I can see pain points. I can see a lack of training.

Doug Mitchell, Building Great Sales Teams

Sales: the result metric

This is the category everyone already watches. Track the number of deals, gross dollars, monthly recurring revenue if you have it, and cancels and churn. Then divide them out. Dollar per deal tells you about deal quality and how a marketing campaign is really performing. Break those numbers out per rep and they tell you who to coach and on what.

Watch cancels closely. Your best closers sometimes have the worst quality because they push harder or promise more than they should. A rep who keeps throwing a discount at every objection instead of finding the real one will show it in their churn.

Change one thing per quarter

If you change your lead source, your script and your team in the same month, you'll never know what worked. Change one thing per quarter. Ninety days gives you a clean chunk of data to prove it either way. New lead source this quarter, new script next quarter, new hires the quarter after.

Put it all on a scorecard

Every one of these numbers belongs on a scorecard, tracked per rep and rolled up by team and market. Set a goal for each so it reads green when it's on target and red when it isn't. Then use it.

When you sit down for a one on one with data, the conversation changes. You're not guessing and you're not cracking the whip. You've listened to their calls and you can show them exactly where the gap is. When reps see you've invested that kind of attention in them, they tend to give you more.

From there, the same numbers roll up into leadership KPIs, so you can manage your managers by the results their teams produce.

How we do it at Ballast

We build this scorecard for our clients and run it every week inside BOS, the Ballast Operating System. Every Ballast client gets access at no cost. If your sales numbers don't explain themselves yet, book a discovery call and we'll look at them with you.

Adapted from Building Great Sales Teams, The KPI Trinity. Quotes are lightly edited for reading.