Monitoring Inside Sales Productivity

Jesse Hopps

Most organizations have a very difficult time quantifying the productivity of their inside sales departments. If you don't have a phone system that captures accurate dialing, contact, and other productivity metrics, use a simple manual process instead. Download our Sales Productivity Metrics (Daily), Sales Productivity Metrics (Monthly), and Sales Productivity Metrics (Quarterly) reporting tools.

How can you Measure Inside Sales Productivity?

  • Dials - this is the simplest form of productivity measure for inside sales. A solid performer should make over 100 dials per day on average. Top performers can achieve 150-200 dials per day, depending on their contact %.
  • Email Samples - many decision-makers prefer to have an introduction with a preview of your product/service sent via email, rather than take a sales call directly. While this form of contact is not very effective, it should be tracked.
  • Set Appointments - top performing sales people generally have 2-3 appointments booked per day, and set 2-3 new appointments for later in the week. Respecting your prospect's time shows a lot of professionalism.
  • Demonstrations - product demonstrations are an excellent key performance indicator (KPI) that should be measured acutely. The more times you pitch your product and the better you become with your pitch, the more likely you are to generate sales or advances to the sales cycle.
  • Sales (Closed Won) - this is the most important metric that seems to receive all of the attention. While measuring sales is clearly important, don't neglect all the previous activities (dials, samples, appointments, demos).
  • Closed Lost - if your sales representatives can't demonstrate that they are closing opportunities as lost, they aren't getting enough actual decisions.
  • Efficiency Ratios - checking ratios such as dials/sales, dials/demos, and demos/sales, is a great tool for motivating staff to improve their skills.

Action Plan:

  1. Start Measuring Productivity - mandate that all sales reps complete a Daily Productivity Report. Compile this data into a Sales Productivity Metrics tool on a monthly basis, and transfer results into a Quarterly report.