10 KPIs for Your Small Business Sales Dashboard

Surely, you know whether your revenues are increasing or decreasing. But which KPIs (key performance indicators) are most important for your sales team's dashboard.

Actually, here are 10 of them, care of Quentin Poiraud, a community manager at ClicData...

For the Sales Department:

1. New Leads: The number of fresh leads coming into your sales department each month

2. New Opportunities: The number of new, qualified opportunities created in the month.

3. Conversion Rate: New customers divided by the number of qualified leads.

4. Real Revenue: New accounts, additions to existing accounts, and new renewal business.

For Each Member of the Sales Team:

5. Lead Response Time: How quickly does your team respond to inquiries

6. Rate of Contact: How many opportunities are your reps generating per 1k calls?

7. Rate of Following up Leads: How many calls are logged per lead?

8. Clicks from Sales Emails: How many links to meaningful content is the rep embedding in follow-up emails that actually re-engage customers?

9. Social Media Usage: The more involvement with social media, the more effective the rep.

10. Close Ratio: An exceedingly important metric to measure sales performance.

Overall Business KPIs: What Works?

Also of note: Small businesses that leverage real-time KPIs tend to outperform rivals that lean more on historic data. And as the world increasingly shifts to subscription services, new KPIs for MSPs, VARs and cloud services providers (CSPs) have emerged.

Of course, the KPIs your business tracks can vary from one department to the next. And just like a gym membership -- KPIs are only valuable if you actually use them. Alas, half of all small businesses ignore their KPIs, according to Geckoboard.