Selling to Manufacturers? 8 B2B Sales KPIs Your Team Needs

4 MIN. READ

Being successful in B2B sales means being efficient. But you cannot be efficient if you’re wasting effort on the wrong strategies. Key performance indicators, or KPIs, are how the most successful companies keep track of what works in their teams and what doesn’t. Let's take a look at some of the most important B2B sales KPIs you should be tracking.

Finding Each Other

Finding customers can be one of the most difficult parts of sales. A big help in this is knowing where your customers are coming from - the leads by source. If the majority of customers are finding you on search engines, put more resources into SEO and monitoring your rankings. On the other hand, if more customers are finding you through industry journals, it would make sense to bolster your presence in those periodicals.

On the other side of the equation, the number of leads by geography matters too. Knowing where your leads are located is one of the frequently ignored B2B sales KPIs. If you're putting a lot of emphasis on City A when a large number of customers are coming from City B, it may be wise to divert some resources to the more popular locale. Location is easily gathered from any analytics software and can show you where to focus efforts.

What are the Costs?

What is the total cost to acquire and convert a customer? The KPI known as customer acquisition cost (CAC) can help you identify areas in the funnel to tweak to reduce wasteful spending.

For example, if, during one quarter, your company spent $20,000 and gained 80 new B2B customers, your CAC is $250 for that quarter. The amount spent includes all marketing and advertising costs, plus the salaries of the individuals required to bring these customers in.

The process of optimizing the acquisition process through CAC can also be broken down by cost per activity (CPA), another reason why data analysis and monitoring is so important. How many employee hours were spent per new customer? How many minutes of phone conversations did it take to land new customers? Which sales tool was used most effectively? How much time was used on manual tasks like data entry? By separating each financial component through CPA, you can see what segment of acquisition requires more optimization.

Speed is Everything

Lead response time can help your team minimize the interval between initial contact from a lead and sales team response. Shaving several hours off this KPI can place you way ahead of the competition.

If contact forms are a primary method of letting leads connect, be sure to check for new leads several times per day. Letting inquiries sit for days is not conducive to lead conversion. If checking contact forms is problematic, switching to a live chat feature may be a better option. Also, enable notifications for all social media accounts so that messages sent through these channels don't go unnoticed.

Speed-related B2B sales KPIs also include pipeline velocity (PV). This indicates how fast a lead travels through the entire funnel during conversion. PV is important in reducing lead loss due to lack of interest or poaching by a faster, more responsive firm. The less time a lead spends in the funnel, the more likely a successful conversion will result.

Long-Term Vision

Customer lifetime value (CLV) focuses on the long-term customer relationship rather than individual sales. Using this KPI can reveal how much your company benefits from each customer. In successful cases, you may find that the total value delivered over the entire lifetime of the customer relationship is several times more than the CAC.

Are they Right for You?

Sales qualified lead (SQL) conversionis another key indicator. If conversion rates are extremely low, there is a strong possibility that leads are not being properly qualified. Being over-eager to sell without taking the time to qualify wastes the time of the sales team and saps their motivation. Properly qualifying leads also helps to pinpoint which marketing campaigns bring in the highest number of convertible leads.

B2B Sales KPIs Made Easier

If finding and tracking all of this data sounds daunting, there is a resource to improve your KPIs in just a single click. IndustrySelect provides all of the tools your team needs to acquire new leads, convert them and retain them for long-term business relationships. IndustrySelect also gives you the ability to build prospect lists, search and sort over 30 different data fields, and contact key people at any of the nearly half a million industrial businesses in our database.

Improve your sales productivity metrics (and others) by saving your time and energy for connecting with customers and letting IndustrySelect do all of the heavy lifting for you. To try a free, fully functional demo database loaded with several hundred sample manufacturer profiles, get started here.

Article Sources:

https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/b2b-sales-metrics
https://databox.com/b2b-sales-kpis-every-company-should-be-tracking
https://www.industryselect.com/about/compare/