You can’t optimize something you don’t measure. Metrics are essential to provide visibility on your sales processes, so that you can improve them. They help you to identify the most promising leads and build efficient lead-to-cash processes. In Salesforce solutions, companies have access to many different metrics. They can also build their own KPIs when needed. Here is a selection of useful indicators that can help you close more deals, from lead assessment to global performance metrics.

3 Metrics to Qualify a Lead with Salesforce Solutions

The first step to increase your sales is to identify the leads on which your company has the best chances to win a deal. These hot leads are the ones your sales representatives need to focus on first. Salesforce provides various ways to find the most promising leads, both in Pardot and in Sales Cloud.

Lead Grade

The lead grade uses explicit information to qualify a lead. To grade a lead, companies can use the standard criteria known as BANT: budget, authority, need and timing. With Salesforce Pardot B2B marketing automation solution, they can also track and collect a lot of complementary information, such as the prospect location, company size and industry, and so on. Then, they can build their own customized metrics to grade a lead according to their needs.

Lead Behavior Score

In Pardot, the lead behavior score measures the interest of a lead according to the various interactions he/she had with the company, such as downloading a price sheet or asking for a quotation. By tracking the activity of a prospect, you can assess its level of engagement. A high score generally means that the prospect is actively investigating your products and services and have a buying intent: this may be a good time for a direct contact.

Einstein Lead Score

When you feel some criteria may be more important than others into your context, but have no idea which ones it can be, you can use Salesforce Einstein advanced scoring capabilities directly into Sales Cloud and Pardot. Einstein analyzes all the deals closed and lost opportunities, to learn what criteria have the most influence for your company. Then, it predicts the chances of success for incoming leads. Because this lead scoring feature is built on machine learning, it improves over time.

6 Global Performance Metrics on the Sales Pipeline

In Salesforce Sales Cloud, users have various options to follow and assess the performance of sales and marketing processes from a lead management perspective. Keeping a close eye on these metrics allows companies to continuously improve their sales practices, so they can convert more leads and close more deals over time. By gathering this information in a dashboard, you will be able to track all the metrics from a single place.

Qualified Lead vs. Lead Converted

In order to continuously improve the funnel, marketing and sales departments have to work in a closed loop. To do so, you must track two key metrics: the number of qualified leads and among them, the number of leads you won. Monitoring the percentage of leads won is the first step to optimize lead management. When your marketing and sales processes are well aligned, the gap between the two indicators should be low. If it’s increasing, it means there is probably some room for improvements.

Leads by Source

Depending on your business type, not all marketing channels are equals. For example, while advertisements still bring good results in some industries, in other areas, especially B2B markets, customized mailing campaigns can show better return on investment.  By understanding where the leads come from, your marketing teams will get useful hints to identify the best channels. Salesforce includes a standard chart to follow these metrics. To go further, you can build a customized report to see the deals closed by lead sources.

Pipeline by Step

The number of leads at each step of the sales process is also an important metric, which helps to detect potential bottlenecks into your sales process. If you have built an efficient funnel, you should have more leads on the first steps than on the last ones, and none waiting for too long at one step. Having too many pending opportunities often means that something is not optimized in your sales process: you will have to investigate it closely, but these metrics give you an idea of where the problem may lie.

Pipeline by Account

For companies that work with big accounts, with many entry points and subsidiaries, this could be a great metric. With it, your sales representatives can have a global visibility of the account value. This helps them to know which customers/prospects are the most critical, in order to coordinate their actions.

Speed-to-Lead

The lead response time, or speed-to-lead, is a key metric. It measures the time between the lead acquisition and the first contact. Salesforce itself makes an extensive use of it. According to them, the best results are observed when sales representatives call a lead less than one hour after it comes.

New Business Versus Upsell

Which part of your sales is made with new customers, and which part comes from existing customers? Answering this question is key. If most of your revenues are tied to new customers, this may imply that you are good to acquire and convert new leads, but maybe you have to work on improving the customer loyalty and retention rate. By the contrary, a poor level of new customers often means that marketing and sales processes need some improvements.