Running a high-performing sales team isn’t only about individual victories; it's about creating collective wins.
In this guide, we'll detail the strategic steps to not only track but improve your sales team's performance using Capsule.
Sales goals are not things carved in stone; they're collaborative ventures. We encourage involving your team in goal setting, helping to foster ownership and motivation for your sales team.
To measure sales performance effectively you'll need to identify key performance indicators (KPIs) such as activities completed, pipeline statistics and sales metrics.
Here’s how to track your KPIs within Capsule:
1. The art of interaction: Activity Reports
Activity Reports
Your first port of call for monitoring your sales team performance will be scrutinizing the activities that contribute to getting prospects into your pipeline and moving them along your sales funnel.
The Activity Reports in Capsule is the key tool to use to track your reps' efforts and identify opportunities for refinement and growth.
The number of calls or customer visits your team makes paints a detailed picture of their engagement level. The Sales Activity Report is your lens into this realm, offering insights that are more than just numbers.
The ideal scenario involves your reps closing a large number of deals relative to their prospect interactions. If, for instance, a rep meets with ten prospects daily but closes none, the Sales Activity Report is your trouble-shooting tool. It allows you to dissect the process and ask: What activities are leading to sales? Are some techniques or reps not performing as well as expected? Are some reps failing to close quickly? The activity report allows you to dig into what you can improve.
If your reps are closing deals at an impressive rate, the report can highlight successful strategies. By identifying what's working, you can distribute these learnings across the team, iterating and improving your sales process.
2. Seeing the future: Pipeline Forecast
Pipeline Forecast
Our Pipeline Forecast Report is your crystal ball—an indispensable tool that helps you peek into the future. This report shows the value and count of all the Opportunities in your sales pipeline, calculating the probability of winning each Opportunity and breaking this down month-by-month.
You can chop up this report by owner or team and for a certain timeframe so you can see if your team will meet their goals.
With the foresight gained from this report, you can proactively plan your sales initiatives. Anticipate potential roadblocks, identify high-impact opportunities, and tailor your approach.
3. Identifying star performers: Pipeline by Owner
Within every sales team, there are standout performers—the MVPs who go above and beyond.
Capsule's Pipeline by Owner feature identifies these champions, showcasing the individual triumphs of each team member.
Besides accolades, Pipeline By Owner reveals the Pipeline Value of Opportunities owned by each salesperson at different stages of the sales pipeline.
This insight, coupled with the probability of winning each opportunity, provides a detailed view of where your team stands with individual sales opportunities. It's not about recognition; it's about actionable data that helps you help your team win better and smarter.
The bar chart presentation offers a visual narrative of the number of sales opportunities owned by each team member.
It's a dynamic tool that facilitates quick assessments and enables effective follow-ups.
As a sales manager, you can identify trends, pinpoint areas for improvement, and provide timely support to ensure you keep up momentum in your team.
4. Cultivating collective success: Pipeline by Team
You can also track Pipeline By Team, helping you understand the sales status of your team as a whole.
This feature showcases the Pipeline Value of Opportunities assigned to each team for every milestone in the sales pipeline. It's a tool for managers to understand the dynamics of team performance and answer questions like why is one team performing better than the other, why has this team's performance dropped this quarter vs. last quarter or why has one team more opportunities at the beginning of the pipeline rather than being balanced across the whole process.
5. New opportunities added: Pipeline Growth
This report illustrates the growth of your sales opportunities over time. When you split it out by the opportunity owner or team, you can see how many new potential deals a team member has added in the past months or quarters and make sure they are hitting their targets.
6. Learning from the past: Won/Lost Opportunities
Successes and setbacks all have stories to tell. Capsule's Won/Lost Opportunities feature serves as a narrative guidebook, allowing you to delve into the stories behind both successes and setbacks. In the pursuit of continuous improvement, understanding the nuances of each won deal and dissecting the reasons behind lost opportunities are invaluable steps towards optimizing your sales team’s performance.
By analyzing won opportunities, you gain insights into the strategies, approaches, and factors that led to successful conversions. Uncover patterns of customer satisfaction and identify high-performing sales tactics. This knowledge serves as a guide for replicating success across the team.
Equally important is the ability to learn from lost opportunities. This report combined with the Lost Reasons Report lets you dig into unsuccessful sales opportunities, whether it be pricing issues, competitor influence, or other challenges.
By understanding the root causes of losses, your team can adapt strategies, refine pitches, and address common pain points. Turning setbacks into learning opportunities positions your team for resilience, ensuring that every loss contributes to the evolution and strengthening of your sales approach.
7. Smooth sailing: Leaking Pipeline Report
Leaky pipelines are the bane of sales. The Leaking Pipeline Report serves as an insightful perspective on potential revenue loss and areas of your pipeline requiring immediate attention.
This report delves into the sales pipeline, identifying points of attrition and potential revenue leakage. It allows you to analyze stages where prospects may disengage or face hurdles, allowing sales managers to implement targeted strategies for retention and conversion.
By spotlighting areas of vulnerability, the Leaking Pipeline Report acts as a guide for teams to strengthen weak links in their pipeline and ensure a seamless flow from prospecting to deal closure.
The leaking pipeline report highlights bottlenecks in your pipeline so you can investigate any common delays and setbacks in the conversion process. If you’ve not done so already, you could start to tag leads based on factors that you see in the leaking pipeline. Maybe a certain demographic, industry or job role needs to be approached in a different way.
8. Optimizing time for success: Average Time to Won
The Average Time to Won Report is a lens into the time Opportunities spend at each milestone in your sales pipeline. It focuses on Opportunities that you have moved through the pipeline and won during the selected period.
This report helps you understand the nuances of your pipeline, investigating what might be causing delays at specific stages of your pipeline. By pinpointing areas where things tend to slow down, you gain actionable data to streamline processes, remove bottlenecks, and optimize the efficiency of your sales operations.
Beyond providing a total overview for all users, the Average Time to Won Report offers a granular breakdown per user. This feature lets you understand individual rep performance and detect any areas of concern if someone's sales get stuck at a particular point in the pipeline longer than another sales rep’s.
9. Unlocking growth: Average Sales Value
The Average Sales Value Report enables you to identify patterns in your sales value over time. By studying fluctuations in average sales value, you’ll be able to pinpoint specific periods that contribute to lower or higher averages.
You can customize the report to show either an opportunity owner or team view. This functionality enables you to scrutinize if certain team members or teams are consistently winning sales of a higher value. It's an investigative tool that prompts a closer look into successful strategies, leading to insights that can be shared across the team for collective improvement.
10. Learning from Setbacks: Lost Reasons Report
The Lost Opportunities by Reason report offers a detailed breakdown of the reasons why your team didn’t manage to close their deals.
These can be things like price sensitivity, competitor offerings, lack of trust in a brand, complex buying processes, changing customer priorities or other factors. This report gives you insight on what leads to lost opportunities. If certain reasons consistently surface, you'll have feedback to address these objections.
You can customize the report to view either individual team members or the team as a whole. This helps you to identify if certain team members consistently face specific challenges. It's an investigative tool that facilitates personalized coaching and collective learning.
Sales team insights unlocked
Our goal is to empower sales managers with a robust array of reports. From the details provided by customizable Activity Reports, unraveling the layers of engagement levels, to the strategic foresight granted by Pipeline Forecast and the recognition of individual victories via Pipeline by Owner, we present a nuanced understanding of team dynamics and performance.
Our comprehensive suite encompasses reports such as Pipeline Growth, Won/Lost Opportunities, Leaking Pipeline, Average Time to Won, Average Sales Value, and Lost Reasons Report, each delivering targeted insights to streamline processes, pinpoint growth prospects, and extract valuable lessons from setbacks.
Ready to elevate your sales game? Get started with a free 14-day trial of Capsule.
