12 sales metrics you need to track

One of the most important question when running a business is: Which metrics should I track?

Whether it’s about team performance, or pipeline performance, or competitor or product performance, it all takes a few metrics to keep track to ensure business visibility.


How quickly will I achieve my goals?

Do I need to speed up my sales process?

Is their a team which needs more attention?

Is their an account that I’m losing?

Are we improving?


Metrics should be shown on a dashboard, big and visible! It can be shown on a TV or big displays.


So, here are 12 sales metrics that you need to show on your Sales dashboard.

Image source: SalesForce.com

Metrics include: Lead by source, Pipeline, Sales cycle, Closed opportunities, New business vs. upsell, Win/loss rate, Product gaps, Open opportunities, Open activities, Open cases, Opportunities past due and Sales by closed date.

Only 12 metrics and you are done with your sales tracking!

But,

Which tool should I use?

How do I extract the data?

How do I plot these?

Which visuals should I use?

How should I show sales deal stage funnel?

You will be amazed to see how the metrics have been placed with the right choice of visuals and the layout in this Power BI report developed by us using HubSpot CRM data.

Sales Dashboard in Power BI using HubSpot data

If you see the report here it is divided into several views:

  1. Overview report – Shows your key metrics and sales funnel. Here we track open revenue, deal owners, sales cycle time along with deal details
  2. Deal Geo analysis – Here you can clearly identify Asian regions not performing well with won rate less than 30%
  3. Deal Region analysis – Imagine an executive interested in Region level performance? This view gives a clear picture where his team needs to focus
  4. Deal Details report – Last but not the least, a detailed report to call out specific deals and work with the account owners to understand progress

The CRM source could be HubSpot, SalesForce or even Microsoft Dynamics.

The tool we have used is Microsoft Power BI to pull, model and visualize raw data.

Interested in viewing the live Power BI report?


Image source and inspiration: Sales Force

Real time reporting with Power BI

Real time reporting with Power BI

By 2025, close to 30% of the data will be real time – IDC

We have 6 years before we hit that, but I must say real time data or rather ability to report it real time is key for business success even now.

Imagine a scenario where you could view production plant quality metrics real time on a TV?

A grid operator tracks electricity flows in real time. Metrics like Power, Voltage with trends and power lines plotted on a geo map and viewed LIVE!

Sensory data, campaign performance (as they happen), field sales activity, and many more examples of real time data and real time reporting needs.

Some of the above examples are definitely real time but customers also ask for near real time – as soon as my new data is available I need to view it in my reports and dashboards within couple of mins.

How do we achieve real time and near real time reporting scenarios with Power BI Platform?

There are couple of solutions to achieve this:

  1. Power BI Scheduled Refresh (near real time, 8 refreshes per day for Pro, 48 refreshes per day for Premium/PPU)
  2. Power BI Direct Query or Live connection
  3. Power BI Push data sets
  4. Streaming data sets in Power BI

Next, we will cover real time and near real time reporting scenarios and discuss possible solutions along with limitations/pros & cons. Each scenario and solution is unique, and you can use any of the proposed solutions based on your needs.

Scenarios:

a) I would like to have my sales dataset refresh every 2 hours or I would like to have my Google Analytics dataset refresh every 1 hour.

When your dataset refresh time gap between two refreshes can be more than 30 mins, you can go ahead with scheduled refreshes. This assumes you have imported the data in a Power BI dataset and you would want to refresh that dataset.

Based on our experiences when you present schedule dataset refresh options to customers they are not taken aback. Scheduled refreshes have limits on the number of refreshes per day but once you schedule them to occur more frequently in business hours, it helps.

With Power BI Pro Licenses you can setup 8 refreshes a day per dataset. So you can setup refresh times to be: 7AM, 8AM, 9AM, 11AM, 2PM, 3PM, 4PM, 5PM

Total 8 refreshes spread out in business hours.

With Power BI Premium/PPU Licenses you can setup 48 refreshes a day per dataset. So you could do refreshes every 30 mins! Power BI Premium is definitely costly (read USD 60K/year) but you get more refreshes, more capacity and enterprise level features (AI and more). Update: March 10, 2021. Power BI Premium per user, a new offering, is priced at $20 per user per month.

Or, you can put the workspace where your dataset resides in an Embedded Capacity (Premium/Non-Premium) and get rid of refresh limits. In this case you will have to use Power BI REST APIs to refresh the dataset. Quite simple to invoke. Read more on this capability here.

You can even use Power Automate and trigger refresh based on events.

More on Power BI Refreshes in this Microsoft post.

b) I would like to have my dataset refresh every 1 min (or LIVE)

Assume you have a data source which can be directly queried from Power BI, you can achieve this scenario.

Sales data stored in a SQL box (Azure or on-prem), you setup direct connection to this data source in Power BI. Your Power BI Report is now directly connected to the data source.

If you are viewing this report on a browser you can hit browser refresh and it would fire query live to the source, fetch latest data and show on your visuals.

You can even automate the browser refresh using a Chrome Plugin. Read more here on how to achieve this.

List of data sources which can be directly queried from Power BI Platform here.

c) I would like to have my production plant quality metrics to be shown live

This assumes the data source where your quality metrics are stored is not direct-queryeable by Power BI.

In this scenario you need to push data from your data source to either a Power BI Push dataset or to a database. This push can be done every 1 min or so. This push can be done by setting up Azure Functions.

Once the quality metrics are pushed to a Push dataset or to a database, you can setup Power BI reports on top of it and view the data live.

Power BI Push datasets have some limitations as mentioned here.

How to setup Push datasets? You can read this external blog post here.

d) I would like to see electricity flows and their Voltage and Power metrics live on my TV

If you need something real and live, something like electricity flows or sensor data, you can setup Streaming datasets in Power BI.

Once you have streaming datasets setup, you can view them through Power BI dashboards. These datasets do not store historical data. They will store limited data in temp cache.

You can open these dashboards in a browser and put them on a TV. No need of browser refresh as the tiles would refresh “live”.

How to setup Streaming datasets? You can watch this YouTube video by Patrick (MSFT) here.

Read more here on Power BI Push and Streaming datasets.


Did we cover all the possible solutions? Ok, let’s check it once more.

Additional Scenario 1: We are a global organization and we would like to view our Google Analytics data every 1 hour. The dataset is shared with our global marketing team spread across every continent.

Solution suggested: In this case instead of going with scheduled refreshes, you can go with pushing GA data to either a Power BI Push datasets or to a database and setting up direct DB connection. Or, if you are an enterprise with Power BI Premium licenses you can set 30 mins refresh intervals.

Additional Scenario 2: I have more than 5 plants where I need to view live data. Should I setup one dashboard with filters?

Solution suggested: You can view data from streaming datasets only in a dashboard. Dashboards do not support filters yet. In your case you can setup 5 dashboards and share these URLs.


Any other solutions you want us to include?

Let us know.

Thanks

Ranbeer Makin