Sales Ops Metrics Series: Activity Efficiency Ratios

One of the main goals of a Sales Ops team is to identify, and hold up as an example, the best reps on the sales team. This way, the Sales Ops team can set a gold standard for sales performance that encourages reps to aim high and, more importantly, presents a clear, tangible example to strive for.

There’s only one problem: It’s not always such a cut-and-dry process to identify the best sales rep.

What metrics do you use to make this decision? Number of sales calls made? Number of meetings scheduled? Opportunities created? Deals closed?

The simple answer is that none of these individual metrics is sufficient. Sales performance cannot be boiled down to a single number, and the best Sales Ops teams intuitively understand this.

So what do they do?

The best Sales Ops teams don’t stop at individual sales activity metrics ‒ they look at the numbers between these metrics. They see how these activities contributed to the downstream, truly important metrics like bookings and opportunity creation.

These metrics are called activity ratios, and they tell you a lot more about your sales team’s best reps than a simple metric like talk time or dial totals.

For example, imagine you have a sales rep on your team who is just crushing her dial goal. She’s making almost twice as many dials each day as her next-closest competitor, and she shows no sign of slowing down. She should be rewarded, right? Maybe even promoted?

In an average sales organization, this is probably what happens. She’s promoted to a closing or sales management role and held up as an example of how hard the best sales reps work.

But the best Sales Ops teams aren’t won over so easily. They dig deeper. And what they find is that, while she is making an incredible volume of calls, her other metrics aren’t following suit. The prospects she actually gets on the phone aren’t converting to opportunities, and many aren’t even showing up to the meetings she schedules with them.

So what’s going on? Maybe she isn’t having good conversations, or leaving compelling voice mails, or expressing the value proposition clearly. Whatever the case, it is important for Sales Ops to dive deeper than the simple baseline sales metrics to realize that this rep shouldn’t be held up as a gold standard. In fact, she should be coached to improve the downstream that show she isn’t contributing to the bottom line in the way she should be.

We truly believe that activity efficiency ratios should form the cornerstone of Sales Ops analysis. As such, we put together a one-page guide to show Sales Ops professionals what activity efficiency ratios are, and how they can be implemented to improve a sales team’s overall effectiveness.

Download the guide now. As always, it’s completely free.