What Reporting Metrics Do You Use to Measure Your Inside Sales Team?

Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt of a chapter from our recently published eBook, The Ultimate Inside Sales Prospecting and Management Success eBook. If you're interested in reading the 35-page handbook, click the link above.  

There are 5 important categories to measure from a reporting standpoint to ensure top performance from your inside sales team. The goal is to push your reps to excel in all 5 categories to guarantee their optimal success. The most important categories to pay close attention to are:

Prospecting Skills

Prospecting skills describes how resourceful your inside sales reps are and how quickly they can get to the decision maker. The more quality conversations or talk time your rep has speaking with the correct person, the better their prospecting skills are. An inside sales rep who spends more time speaking with contacts in an account opposed to blindly leaving voicemails and emails will get to the correct person more quickly and identify an opportunity faster.

Measure each team member’s Connect Rate: The Connect Rate is the amount of quality connects and conversations your rep has in comparison to their call volume. While continuing to maintain a healthy volume, a successful inside sales rep has around a 12-15% connect rate each day. Quality connects and conversations signify progress. Whether your rep is pointed to the decision maker or has a healthy conversation that will progress the sales cycle with an account, an increase in the connect rate will lead to an increase in opportunities.

Information Gathering Skills

One of the most important skills for an inside sales rep to develop is their ability to gather important information as it relates to the target accounts they are calling. Inside sales reps need to gather Critical Account Intelligence (CAI) from their prospects, such as the appropriate decision maker and title, what current technology/solutions they have in place, and what their time frame for re-evaluation is, assuming there are no active projects. This data is extremely valuable to your sales and marketing team as they prepare future targeted campaigns and nurture programs.

Phone Skills

The best inside sales reps are fast at creating next steps. Opportunity Conversion Rate will help to determine how many conversations they are converting to opportunities. The higher this rate, the better your inside sales reps will be at generating interest and converting accounts to opportunities based on their conversations.

Measure each team member’s Opportunity Conversion Rate: The Opportunity Conversion Rate is the amount of leads your rep uncovers in comparison to the amount of connects they have. While it is important that your rep has a lot of productive conversations, it is essential that a healthy rate (5-7%) of these connects are being passed over as qualified leads. If your rep has a high Connect Rate, but low Opportunity Conversion Rate, you may want to sit in on scheduled calls and hear if they are having difficulty creating next steps with qualified prospects. If your rep has a low Connect Rate and high Opportunity Conversion Rate, this means that they are great at converting their conversations to an opportunity. In that case, it is time to circle in with them and strategize on how to bring in more quality connects each day.

Work Ethic

While inside sales prospecting is not merely a numbers game, it is important that you are ensuring a consistent flow of outbound activity with each of your reps. Make sure you are staying on top of the activity number and consistency with average calls/day. The best inside sales reps go the extra mile with their outbound activity on a consistent basis and not only make a large quantity of calls, but infuse those calls with quality resulting in passed qualified leads.

Measure each team member’s Average Activities/Day: Average Activities/Day is the amount of outbound activities your inside sales reps are completing on a daily basis. This should be a combination of conversations, voicemails, and emails. With all outbound activities combined, it is important for a successful inside sales rep to achieve at the minimum 100 activities/day. For this to be most effective, at least 70% should be calling efforts as opposed to email activity.

Competitive Drive

Most importantly, any high-performing sales rep is competitive. With all of the other skills in place, you should see that excellent inside sales reps are always meeting or surpassing their goals. The desire to win the prospect over and be the best among their peers will influence their selling ability. In order to increase your inside sales reps’ competitive drive and motivate them further, it might be a good idea to incorporate sales contests that advocate for friendly competition and/or keep a visible lead board so inside sales reps can measure their progress against others.

What reporting metrics do you use to measure your inside sales team's performance? Don't forget to download our eBook to learn more prospecting and management strategies!