10 KPIs All Sales Reps Should Track and Why

The best sales reps care about more than just hitting their sales quota; they want to excel in their role and grow both their own numbers and the numbers of the company they work for.

After all, these numbers are literally the make-it or break-it between driving growth and watching your revenue plateau (or plummet). So knowing which KPIs to measure, why they matter, and what to do with the results is just what your business needs to ensure its long-term success.

And by encouraging sales reps to keep track of their individual KPIs, they’ll gain a thorough understanding of their unique impact on your overall sales quota. This can be super motivating to your reps because they’ll see exactly how their work impacts the company—everyone really does make a difference!

As sales leaders, we want to support our reps in their career development. Teaching them which KPIs to track and how/why is a big part of that. So, I’ve put together this guide to explain what KPIs are, why they matter, and 10 KPIs our sales reps track here at Copper that your team will benefit from as well.

Sales KPIs are things you look at to measure how your business is performing.

For example, if your goal is to make a $1M profit next quarter, the KPIs you’ll want to track to get there are:

• Your revenue sold to-date (to see where you’re at and how much you have left to go)
• Average deal size and close rate (to help you forecast if and when you’ll meet your goal)

KPIs are hugely helpful because they put a number value on things, making them quantifiable. This helps both sales managers and reps:

• Track goal progress
• Identify trends
• Give data-based performance evaluations (or self-evaluations)
• Compare salespersons’ performance (a little healthy competition never hurt)

In short: your sales KPIs tell you how your sales—and sales reps—are doing in a way that’s quantifiable. A tool like Copper makes tracking KPIs easy for everyone on your team (I’ll show you some examples of how below.)

Here are 10 KPIs all sales reps should monitor to develop both their own skills and support the growth of the company they work for (and they’re the KPIs Copper’s very own sales reps monitor).

1. Revenue sold per rep (their number)

“What is your individual sales number, and how does it rank against your colleagues?”

Okay, this is an obvious one but an important one to include nonetheless. Your reps should be tracking the dollar amount of their sales made on a regular basis. They should then take this KPI and compare it to how much they sold the previous month, for example.

The point of this is to:

1. See just how much of your company’s total revenue for that period was a direct result of them (always a great feeling) and
2. Aim to increase their number continuously; recording the KPI will let them physically see their improvement over time.

2. Average deal size

“How big are the deals you normally close?”

Also known as “Average Deal Sale” (ADS), “Average Sales Price” (ASP), or “Average Transaction Size” (ATS), this KPI tells your reps the average dollar amount of the accounts they close. Because size definitely does matter when it comes to sales.

There are a few benefits of tracking this KPI for sales reps. For one thing, it highlights how big the deal sizes are. It also incentivizes them to not only focus on small accounts because they’re “easier” to close. And of course, by tracking this data regularly, they can compare each month to their last to track their improvement over time.

3. Time to win

“How long does it take you to win a sale?”

Knowing how long it takes to close a deal from the beginning of the sales cycle to winning is critical to a reps’ long-term success. We only have so much time to meet our sales quotas. How long it takes you to win a deal determines how many deals in total you can close within that limited amount of time.

4. Close rate

“How many of the opportunities you deal with do you ultimately win?”

It doesn’t matter how high the number of leads you manage is—if you’re only closing a tiny amount of them, that number is useless.

Close rate can be divided into two general categories:

• New customers: (a.k.a. new business/new logos acquired) These are your brand new accounts you’ve closed.
• Existing customers: (a.k.a. expanded customers, upsell customers, expansion dollars) This is the number of existing customers you’ve upselled to a new product or upgraded their existing subscription tier.

Your reps should keep track of both of these to get their total close rate. An example of how to do this is through Copper’s Leads dashboard.

5. Number of follow-ups until appointment

“How many times do you need to contact a customer before you’re able to set up a sales call or meeting?”

Fun fact: About 80% of sales require at least five follow-ups.

So, the art of the follow-up and scheduling them appropriately is definitely something worth mastering if you want to shorten your sales cycle and close more deals.

If your team’s follow-up emails aren’t working (or if you’re not following up at all), check out this article to learn how to craft the perfect follow-up email.

Make sure your reps know this statistic—and how not to become a part of it. Finding your initial “magic number” to follow-ups and then monitoring this KPI over time will empower your reps to design an ideal sales cadence that works best for them. This will add predictability to their efforts.

For example, if a rep’s magic number for follow-ups is 6, they won’t give up—or feel discouraged—too early, like at the third or even fifth touchpoint.

6. Number of discounted sales

“How many times did you use a discount offer to close a deal?”

Sometimes in sales, you could have everything a prospect is looking for: you’ve demonstrated the value your product can give them; you've countered all of their rebuttals, and you’re just SO close to closing the deal.

But the prospect is still hesitant. So, you pull out the good old discount offer.

“Tell you what, I can give you 50% off the regular subscription rate for the first three months if you sign up right now.”

And sometimes, it just does the trick.

The problem is, every time you sell your product at a reduced price, you’re not only losing money but also inadvertently admitting that you don’t think your product is worth full price.

So, we want our number of discounted sales to be low. By measuring this KPI, your reps will know not to get too trigger-happy with their discount power and only use it in emergencies (if at all).

The last thing any of you would want to see is half (or more) of a rep’s generated revenue come from discounted sales.

7. Number of sales by subscription type

“How many of each subscription tier did you sell?”

For SaaS companies and any other businesses with subscription-based revenue models, your number of subscriptions is the lifeblood of the organization.

For example, I want to know how many monthly plans vs. how many annual plans are sold—and of course, annual makes me happier because it means we got X chunk of customers contractually obligated to pay us for a year versus on a month-to-month basis.

It gives peace of mind and adds real numbers to our annual recurring revenue (ARR) forecast rather than us just hoping X, Y, and Z companies will stay with us a year. Obviously, we hope—and work hard to make sure—they do, but without the annual subscription contract, we don’t know they will, you know?

This number also shows me that a rep can clearly communicate the value that our product will give to the customer convincingly enough to get them to pay up-front for a longer term. It means they gained the customer’s trust, which is huge not only for sales in general but for business longevity. (Hello, retention.)

Reps should be tracking this KPI for the same reasons. The more higher-tier or longer-term subscriptions they get, the better.

8. First response time

“How long does it take you to make that first contact with an inbound lead from when they first come into our system?”

Humans love instant gratification. They also are prone to lose interest in an idea quickly unless there is information readily available about that idea.

When a lead enters your database, it means that at that moment, they’ve expressed interest in your company. We want to talk to them while their attention is still piqued, so we want to reach out to them ASAP.

So, your reps should be tracking how soon they’re contacting them. Ideally, I want all of our inbound leads contacted within one business day. If you get a large number of inbound leads, consider setting up live chat on your website. It’ll allow you to convert leads in real time or at least get them to set up a meeting—which is fantastic.

9. Opportunity to win ratio

“How many of the qualified leads you contacted did you end up winning?”

Remember what I said about, even if the number of accounts a rep closes is high, if a big chunk of that number is made up of discounted sales, it loses wow factor? Well, a rep’s opportunity to win ratio is kind of similar to that: closing 50 deals out of 100 is impressive but closing 50 out of 500? Not so much.

By keeping track of this KPI, reps might realize they're good at acquiring opportunities, but the stage they struggle with is closing—but they can only work on this if they're aware of it.

(Here are some tips on helping your reps close more deals.)

10. Customer churn rate

“How many of the customers you closed end up canceling on us?”

Last but not least: the dreaded churn rate.

We’ve all probably had one bad experience in our lives on the other end of a sales call. Does this sound familiar?

A sales rep tells you you’re going to get $300 of bill credit on your first cell phone bill if you agree to switch over to them from your current provider. End of the month comes around and guess what, no credit. So you call them again, and a different rep tells us you aren’t eligible because you didn’t meet certain criteria. What criteria? Cancel my service immediately.

In this example, the sales rep might have won you over in the moment—but you end up canceling anyway because they did so by manipulating you and well, just being shady.

This is not the type of behavior we want to instill in our own reps. Do not “do whatever it takes to close a deal.” I repeat: don’t do it. This will result in churn.

If a rep has a high churn rate, it could mean they haven’t been setting accurate expectations or building positive, honest relationships with the prospects from the start. It could also mean they don’t fully understand the product themselves and therefore aren’t able to explain its value as well as they could.

A common misconception sales reps have about tracking their KPIs is that “tracking” them is all they have to do. Having a list of KPIs to monitor is great and all, but you also need to make sure you’re taking action based on them. (That’s kind of the whole point of KPIs—they’re not just for decoration or for fun!)

For example, say your “close rate” KPI shows that you’re actually over-delivering on your lead conversion rate! Nice! This shows that:

1. Your lead qualification method is on point
2. Your sales process is going stellar

Buuut your “average deal size” KPI is showing the total number of deals you’re currently closing still isn’t enough to meet your quota. The action to take? Tweak your marketing and bring in bigger leads (like more enterprises and less SMBs) and focus on those bigger accounts instead. Simple fix.

Good thing you caught it early.

Okay, now your sales reps know precisely what to track for personal career and business growth. Awesome.

Next up: sales manager KPIs. Kent, our Sr. Sales Director, breaks them down in this post.