10 Key Sales Pipeline Management Metrics For Measuring And Organizing Multiple Pipelines

If you are using an all-in-one CRM software, you will find that there are a plethora of B2C and B2B sales metrics feeding hundreds of inputs into your sales pipeline.
Now each one of these metrics offers a new insight – but even then there is always a limit for evaluating all the metrics needed for optimizing your sales pipeline management skills.
This is because monitoring too many metrics in the pipeline can easily confuse your team’s analysis and soon become a hindrance to the sales growth of your company.
Moreover, an influx of data can create miscommunicated information, rendering those metrics irrelevant to your primary business goals.
Therefore to help you achieve the ultimate success in sales we as one of the award-winning vendors of sales CRM software have pulled together a comprehensive list of B2C and B2B metrics to help sales managers fundamentally figure out what all they need to understand to know the performance of their present sales teams with multiple sales pipelines and thereafter implement improvements to find unforeseen results and rapid revenue growth. 

1. New Opportunities Gained

This primary and one of the most important metrics for optimizing sales pipeline management skills measures what fuel your team’s sales pipelines.
This is because understanding how many leads and prospects are entering your pipeline and from where is the golden key for understanding whether they are coming for marketing or from other outbound sales activities.
Moreover, your managers even require this most critical metric to understand the success of their sales reps throughout their entire pipeline and thereafter calculate many other vital sales stats based on this. 
Additionally, metrics like new opportunities gained also offer insight into your brand’s market dominance (your businesses’ reach and the demand of your offerings). 
Hence, it is best to ensure that managers must understand the precise number of opportunities gained from all channels for finding rapid business growth. 

2. Leads Qualified

This is another important metric for sales pipeline management that can easily portray the success of the first stage in your sales pipeline – how many of the sales opportunities that your team members have gained have turned into qualified leads?
Therefore, this metric found in most business CRM software offers precise insights into the quality of your team's outreach efforts as more opportunities that are appropriate for your brand and offerings prove a focused and successful lead generation approach. 
Additionally, this metric also helps businesses to understand how rigorous and effective your lead qualification processes are since if you qualify a very large number of leads but nevertheless fail to achieve high win rates you need to ask whether your present lead conversion process is good enough to align with your company’s essential product criteria or contract terms. 

3. Win Rate

This powerful metric illustrates the percentage or number of wins that your sales reps’ have achieved based on the opportunities gained from your marketplace. 
For example, if your sales teams have gained 50 fresh business opportunities, and achieve 20 conversions from them, which implies you have a 40% or 2 in 5 win rate.
Now understanding and monitoring this measurement can help businesses to best reflect on the success (or failure) in their sales pipelines which can be used as a motivational KPI (Key Performance Index) for sales teams, aiding them to work and deliver a dependably strong sales performance. 
Additionally consistently measuring win rates can also help you to quickly understand the number of opportunities that your business needs to meet your businesses’ sales target by working backward to understand how many opportunities are needed to be generated by individual salespersons every day.  

4. Conversions

Now we all know understanding the conversions between each stage of your sales pipeline helps to measure the percentage of leads that are moving from one stage to the next. 
As one of the key vendors of Salesforce Alternative CRM tools we have observed that while it is most common to achieve a lower conversion rate at the start of your sale pipeline, leads that are truly qualified in the first stage achieve around 40-60 percent conversions.
However, the leads that move to the latter stages in the sales pipeline achieve a much higher conversion rate of around 80-90 percent as the leads are further qualified and nurtured using the right sales cadence for your business to follow through with an investment.
Therefore, consistently monitoring your sales pipelines’ conversion rates (on both as a team and individual levels) helps to quickly identify specific pipeline stages which are failing to deliver the desired results whereby you can immediately implement changes in your outreach strategies and content to prevent further loss in subsequent revenue growth.  

5. Revenue/Deal Size

Indisputably measuring revenue is always regarded as the most essential sales metric in a CRM software tool since it feeds directly into any businesses’ targets for growth. 
However, it is also important that as a sales manager you must always look beyond the large revenue number and consider deal size for proper evaluation of your sales strategies that you have implemented for business growth. 
Therefore try to look into the following aspects in sales which include:
How much revenue is each deal bring in that is getting converted inside your sales pipeline?
What is the major difference followed between high-value and low-value deals?
What kind of investment, time, and efforts are required to secure bigger deals?
This is because, even though just looking at a single metric like revenue does depict the total revenue benefitted by your business, but this insight does not help to help to improve the sales pipeline management skills at a granular level, and so understanding the size of your deal size is a critical metric for boosting revenue gain and drive future sales strategies to increase pipeline efficiency over time. 

6. Average Order Value

This is an interesting metric that acts as a hybrid between win rate and deal size, helping sales teams to understand the worth of the average value of their deals. 
In other words, this is a metric that provides add-on insights when finalizing revenue targets, portraying on average how many sales need to be accomplished to make sure that the needed revenue is gain within a specific length of time. 
Measuring AOV is also a great way to gauge the improvements in sales processes and lead quality over time. 
Therefore studying your brand’s AVO quarter to quarter or month on month offers insights into the success of your long-term business growth strategies helping businesses to pinpoint where their team experience slumped and bring up questions as to what strategic business growth ideas were lacking or under-delivered by the managers in their sales teams. 

7. Sales Cycle Length

In the B2B (Business to Business) landscape the length of purchase is a defining feature in such companies. This is because in many high-value B2B sales scenarios the cycle can last even more than 12 months. 
Therefore the length of the sales cycle is a key metric since any healthy sales strategy should consist of a short or medium sales pipeline. 
Now do not assume that we are saying that you must aim to secure your sale on the very first call. Nevertheless dragging prospective leads through a plethora of unnecessary stages in the sales pipeline can hinder success, as the potential buyers might get bored and distracted or even hijacked by competitors in the marketplace. 
Hence it is prudent to measure your sales cycle length to understand the effectiveness of your sales pipeline management skills, considering the stages used o ensure that your sales processes are optimized for the ultimate sales results in the minimum period of time. 

8. Sales Velocity

After taking into account all the variety of sales pipeline metrics that we mentioned above, this metric tells businesses how much revenue is generated by your sales team on a day-to-day basis. 
Now as we have expressed even before that some of the B2B sales can even take a very long time to come to fruition, hence measuring sales velocity aids businesses to understand the worth of their sales team’s daily efforts. 
This is because a high sales velocity signifies that your business is capable of securing a very large amount of revenue in a very short time window –which is a winning combination for any business in this present marketplace. 
Therefore even though your sales pipeline management skills are not completely dependent upon sales velocity, nevertheless we suggest checking this figure intermittently to ensure that your sales teams in maximizing their time and regularly following the leads in their sale pipelines to deliver strong results. 

9. Return On Investment

The last explained metric sales velocity even additionally helps businesses to determine their ROI. 
This is because in modern times B2B sales can become increasingly costly since present sales reps on average use five different sales software solutions like automation software platforms, cloud-based CRM tools, and even third-party sales pipeline management software solutions to provide enhanced business for their companies. 
Hence measuring ROI helps businesses to understand how much revenue return is lost or gained from their budget expenditures. 
For example, if any business has invested in an easy to use CRM solution or a new sales pipeline management tool, it is natural that the newly procured business growth technology will bring unfound benefits for their business- otherwise, their teams will have to toil harder to simply recover the budget lost. 
Now measuring ROI is not just important to securing the optimal pipeline, but it is also important to every department in any business since without securing the right ROI all businesses will struggle to generate enough revenue to promote their targeted business growth. 

10. Customer Retention Rate

Do you think that once your sales pipeline has done its work well in transforming an opportunity into a customer – its duty is over?
Now while this might seem true in a practical sense, it is of utmost necessity to remember that a pipeline management process that influences sales also has impacted retention.
This is because a well-executed strategy in sales not only generates loyal customers but it also increases their lifetime value with the company.
This means once you retain your existing customers they tend to spend more on brand and thus offer your business a reliable revenue stream that businesses can count on. 
Therefore, understanding CRR or retention success helps to drive more new sales into the pipeline that does not only produce new customers but even manages to keep the existing ones asking for more.

Conclusion

Hence if you are keen to achieve improve sales results, why not use these sales pipeline management metrics which can not only help your business to gain an invaluable understanding of your business and but even drive impactful improvements that can enable success in sales and revenue growth.