Once you’ve closed a round of funding, investors will want to see a return—and quickly. You might be tired from the constant pitch meetings, late nights updating decks, and long days, but now that you have the money in hand, the “real work” is about to begin. This means not only growing and building your business but also keeping investors updated on the metrics that matter to them. 

To help you start off on the right foot, we’ll take a look at the sales metrics that will put you on track to leverage your funding and continue to grow sustainably for years to come. 

But first things first…

Why establish metrics so early? 

The strategy of "building the plane while it's flying," works great for a lot of things in a startup but data collection isn’t one of them. Your metrics will help you organize and track data that will help you make better decisions as you grow. You may need to add to what you are measuring or make changes as you grow, but utilizing data to drive those decisions is critical. 

Having a good infrastructure is essential to scalability. So while you might be excited about building, launching, and growing, you need some baseline criteria against which you can measure success. Remember, your data is only as good as how you organize it, so messy and incomplete data won’t help you drive action or scale. 

Establish CRM Hygiene 

Before you turn your team loose to start collecting and tracking data, you will need to set up a system and process to do so. This is where your CRM is going to become important. You’ll need a tool that is easy to use and can be updated in real-time. 

As a sales leader, you should be regularly looking at the data in your CRM. This is not only important for you to understand the data, but also to show your team that their work matters to you and to the success of the company. 

While you want your sales team to be spending most of their time selling, making sure they have the time and space to keep the CRM up to date is critical. Remember to factor in time for these tasks when setting goals and benchmarks for them. Provide proactive management and sales support where you can to ensure your sales team is spending the most time with prospects and customers. 

What are some good metrics to start with? 

Here are a few of our favorite metrics to look at why they are important. 

Lead velocity

You will want to be tracking how quickly leads are coming in and where they are coming from. Is it from participation in industry events, your website, word of mouth, or a platform like LinkedIn? If leads are not coming in quickly or drop off sharply, you’ll want to be sure you fully understand why.

Lead quality 

Getting a lot of leads is only part of the equation. If your leads aren’t turning into booked business, you have a lot of work to do. 

Tracking lead quality is essential. In addition, asking reps to try to get potential customers to tell them why they are saying no is going to help you get more quality leads in the future (or at least point you in the right direction). For example, if you are selling software to HR reps and 75% are telling you they aren’t purchasing it because they cannot implement it—you know you need to spend time figuring out how to help them implement it. 

Cost of Acquisition

Your sales and marketing teams may use various methods to get new customers in the door. Some of these methods, like word of mouth and referrals, cost you nothing. Others like hosting events, paid search ads, and special offers can be pricier—especially if you are in a competitive market. 

Your team should be tracking the cost of acquisition with an aim to keep this number as low as possible—and if you ever discover that the cost of acquisition is higher than what you are charging for your product or service, you might need to re-evaluate your methods or pricing structure.

Churn

Having a sales team who can close deals is only half the battle. You want to track how long your customers stay with your product or service. If you find that many of your clients terminate their contracts at the 90-day mark or within the first year, it’s important to investigate why they’ve made that decision. Having the data to see the patterns and then exploring the why behind it will help you get out of the churn faster than just trying to guess. 

How Product and Marketing fit into your growth engine

“The best sales folks ‘fill in the gaps’ in the org to make things happen — they collaborate effectively across all functions and bring them together,”  explains Meka Asonye, an experienced GTM leader turned investor. “What they bring to the table is the mindset, energy, and specific mandate to close business — along with the skills and the functional expertise to do that.” 

You don’t want your teams working in silos. It is important to create ways for internal teams to work together and share information. If your sales team is talking to customers every single day, have them put the insights they are gaining somewhere for marketing and product teams to leverage. If the marketing and product teams have insight into what worked well, they will design better products and campaigns to get you more of those conversations. 

Using consistent metrics 

All of your teams should be using the same metrics and the same language to talk about them. This helps build a shared understanding of the data and puts it into the culture of your organization. 

Asking all teams to use data to drive their decision-making will help accelerate the pace of creating a data-driven culture and the kind of feedback loops you need to continue to grow and scale into the future. 

Establishing the right metrics early will put you on the right path but having a holistic view of the data is a time & sales management game changer.

With Saleboat, you’ll get data from all of your platforms in one place so that you can easily view which interactions are moving your team further down the pipeline and closer to the metrics you’ve set for them.

Finally, a sales tool built for smooth saleing.

Climb aboard.