15 Sales Performance Metrics Every Leader Should Track

In today’s competitive B2B landscape, intuition alone won’t drive sustainable revenue growth.

The most successful sales organisations leverage data-driven insights to identify opportunities, diagnose problems early, and make strategic decisions that compound over time.

Yet many sales leaders find themselves drowning in data without clarity.

Dashboards overflow with vanity metrics that look impressive in board presentations but fail to predict future performance or guide meaningful action.

The difference between good and great sales organisations isn’t the volume of metrics they track; it’s their ability to focus on the right ones.

This guide explores 15 essential sales performance metrics that matter most for mid-market B2B sales teams.

These aren’t just numbers to report; they’re diagnostic tools that reveal where your sales engine is performing well and where strategic intervention will yield the highest returns.

The Foundation: Revenue Metrics

1. Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) or New Business Revenue

What it measures: The lifeblood of your business, the actual revenue generated each month from new customers or contracts.

Why it matters: This is your scorecard. While lagging indicators alone won’t predict the future, tracking revenue trends over time reveals whether your sales engine is accelerating, plateauing, or declining.

For subscription businesses, MRR provides a normalised view that accounts for different contract values and lengths.

What good looks like: Consistent month-over-month growth that aligns with your strategic targets. More importantly, predictable revenue that you can forecast with confidence 60-90 days in advance.

Common pitfall: Celebrating revenue wins without understanding which activities and behaviours drove them. Revenue is the outcome—the metrics that follow help you understand the inputs that create it.

2. Average Deal Size (ACV/TCV)

What it measures: The average value of closed opportunities, typically measured as Annual Contract Value (ACV) or Total Contract Value (TCV).

Why it matters: Deal size directly impacts how many opportunities you need in the pipeline to hit revenue targets.

A team closing $50,000 deals needs twice as many opportunities as a team closing $100,000 deals to generate the same revenue.

What good looks like: Average deal size should increase over time as your sales team improves qualification (pursuing larger, better-fit opportunities) and value articulation (justifying premium pricing).

Track this by rep, by product line, and by market segment.

Strategic insight: If average deal size is declining, you’re likely experiencing one of two problems: poor qualification leading reps to pursue smaller opportunities, or weak value articulation forcing discounting to close deals.

3. Sales Growth Rate

What it measures: The percentage increase in revenue over a defined period (month-over-month, quarter-over-quarter, or year-over-year).

Why it matters: Growth rate contextualises raw revenue numbers.

A $500,000 month looks very different for a $2 million business (strong growth) versus a $10 million business (concerning decline).

What good looks like: Sustainable growth rates depend on your market maturity and growth stage, but consistency matters more than raw percentages.

Erratic growth (60% one quarter, -10% the next) signals underlying execution problems.

Watch out for: Growth that comes at the expense of profitability or customer success.

Chasing growth at any cost creates a ticking time bomb of customer churn and margin erosion.

Pipeline Health: The Early Warning System

4. Pipeline Coverage Ratio

What it measures: The ratio of total pipeline value to your revenue target.

For example, $3 million in pipeline against a $1 million target equals 3:1 coverage.

Why it matters: This is your most important leading indicator.

Pipeline coverage predicts future revenue with far more accuracy than activity metrics alone.

Insufficient coverage gives you time to intervene before revenue problems materialise.

What good looks like: Most B2B organisations need 3:1 to 5:1 coverage, depending on win rates and sales cycle length.

If you close 25% of qualified opportunities, you need 4:1 coverage.

Higher velocity sales cycles can operate with lower coverage ratios.

Critical insight: Track coverage by time period (this quarter, next quarter, six months out) and by sales stage.

Healthy pipeline coverage in early stages but weak coverage in late stages signals a qualification or conversion problem, not a pipeline generation problem.

5. Pipeline Velocity

What it measures: The speed at which opportunities move through your pipeline, calculated as: (Number of Opportunities × Average Deal Value × Win Rate) ÷ Average Sales Cycle Length.

Why it matters: Pipeline velocity synthesises multiple metrics into a single indicator of sales engine efficiency.

Improving velocity—whether through higher win rates, larger deals, or shorter cycles—multiplies revenue capacity without adding headcount.

What good looks like: Increasing velocity over time. Benchmark your current velocity, then track how strategic initiatives (better qualification, improved value selling, optimised sales process) impact the number.

How to use it: Pipeline velocity is your “score” for sales engine health.

When velocity increases, you’re getting more efficient. When it decreases, investigate which component is degrading: Are win rates dropping? Is the average deal size shrinking? Are sales cycles lengthening?

6. Win Rate by Stage

What it measures: The percentage of opportunities that successfully move from one stage to the next, and ultimately to closed-won.

Why it matters: Overall win rate is useful, but stage-by-stage conversion reveals precisely where opportunities are dying.

A 50% win rate from qualified opportunities sounds healthy until you discover that 80% of opportunities qualify, but only 30% make it from proposal to close.

What good looks like: Progressive qualification—conversion rates should increase as opportunities advance through stages.

If 70% of opportunities move from discovery to qualification, you’d expect 75-80% to move from qualification to proposal, and 85-90% from proposal to close.

Diagnostic power: Low conversion at early stages indicates poor qualification (you’re pursuing opportunities you shouldn’t).

Low conversion at late stages indicates competitive displacement or weak value articulation; you’re losing deals you should win.

Activity Metrics: Quality Over Quantity

7. Sales Activity Rate (Quality-Weighted)

What it measures: Not just the number of calls, emails, or meetings, but meaningful sales activities that progress opportunities: discovery meetings conducted, qualified demonstrations delivered, business cases built with customers, and executive presentations delivered.

Why it matters: Traditional activity metrics (number of calls made) create false confidence.

High activity that doesn’t progress opportunities is motion without progress.

Quality-weighted activity measures actions that statistically correlate with closed business.

What good looks like: Consistent execution of high-value activities.

Top performers don’t make three times as many calls—they have twice as many meaningful conversations with decision-makers, conduct more thorough discovery, and create more compelling business cases.

Implementation tip: Define 3-5 “quality activities” for each stage of your sales process.

Track completion rates, not just attempt rates.

Did your rep attempt discovery, or did they successfully complete a discovery meeting that uncovered the customer’s decision criteria?

8. Time Allocation: Selling vs. Non-Selling

What it measures: How sales reps actually spend their time—prospecting, conducting discovery, presenting solutions, negotiating, versus administrative work, internal meetings, and CRM updates.

Why it matters: Most sales reps spend less than 35% of their time in genuine selling activities.

If you’re paying for full-time sellers but getting part-time selling output, you have a massive efficiency opportunity.

What good looks like: 50% or more of a rep’s time allocated to direct selling activities.

This requires removing barriers: streamlining proposal generation, automating administrative work, and protecting selling time from internal meeting creep.

Strategic leverage: A 10% increase in selling time for a 20-person team creates the equivalent of two additional full-time sales reps.

Before hiring more headcount, optimise time allocation for existing team members.

 

Customer Acquisition Metrics

 

9. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

What it measures: The total cost to acquire a new customer, including marketing expenses, sales salaries and commissions, tools and technology, and overhead.

Why it matters: CAC determines the viability of your sales model.

If it costs $50,000 to acquire a customer who generates $60,000 in lifetime value, you have a marginal business model at best.

What good looks like: CAC should be less than one-third of Customer Lifetime Value (LTV), or equivalently, LTV:CAC ratio should exceed 3:1.

This ensures you’re generating sufficient margin to fund growth while maintaining profitability.

Watch for trends: CAC creeping upward over time signals increasing competition, marketing efficiency decline, or sales productivity issues.

Address early before unit economics break.

10. CAC Payback Period

What it measures: How long it takes to recover the cost of acquiring a customer through gross margin from that customer.

Why it matters: Even if overall CAC is healthy, extended payback periods strain cash flow and limit growth velocity.

Fast-growing companies need capital to fund expansion—if it takes 24 months to recover CAC, scaling becomes difficult without external funding.

What good looks like: Payback periods of 12 months or less for most B2B models.

SaaS businesses should target 12-18 months.

Longer payback periods can work if you have patient capital and strong customer retention, but faster payback provides more strategic flexibility.

Improvement levers: Reduce payback periods by increasing deal size (more upfront value), improving win rates (lowering CAC), or expanding existing customers faster (increasing early lifetime value).

Sales Cycle Metrics

11. Average Sales Cycle Length

What it measures: The time from first meaningful contact with a prospect to signed contract, typically measured in days or weeks.

Why it matters: Sales cycle length determines capacity.

A rep who can close one deal per month generates 12 deals per year.

Shorten the cycle to three weeks, and that same rep delivers 16 deals—a 33% productivity increase without any additional activity.

What good looks like: Decreasing cycle times over time as methodology improves and reps gain experience.

More importantly, predictable cycle times by opportunity type.

Enterprise deals may take 6-9 months, mid-market deals 2-3 months—variability within segments signals process inconsistency.

Critical diagnosis: Track cycle length by rep.

Consistently long cycles for specific reps often indicate skill gaps in qualification or customer mobilisation—they’re pursuing poor-fit opportunities or failing to create urgency.

These are coachable skills.

12. Time in Stage

What it measures: How long opportunities spend in each stage of your sales process before progressing, stalling, or closing.

Why it matters: This metric reveals process bottlenecks.

If opportunities consistently stall in the proposal stage for 3-4 weeks, you likely have a procurement bottleneck or insufficient deal urgency.

If they stall in discovery, reps are struggling to get access to the right stakeholders.

What good looks like: Consistent time-in-stage metrics that align with your defined sales process.

If your methodology says discovery should take 2-3 weeks and most opportunities spend 6-8 weeks in this stage, either your methodology is unrealistic or reps lack skills to progress deals efficiently.

Actionable insight: Opportunities that exceed expected time-in-stage by 50% or more have dramatically lower win rates.

Use this as an early warning signal to intervene, re-qualify, or reallocate resources to higher-probability opportunities.

Forecasting and Predictability

13. Forecast Accuracy

What it measures: How closely actual results match forecasted results, typically measured as a percentage variance between forecast and actuals.

Why it matters: Forecast accuracy determines whether you can make confident business decisions. Accurate forecasts enable strategic resource allocation, realistic board commitments, and appropriate team sizing. Poor forecast accuracy forces reactive management and erodes stakeholder confidence.

What good looks like: Within 10% accuracy for current-quarter forecasts, 15-20% for next-quarter forecasts. More mature sales organisations consistently achieve 90%+ accuracy 30 days before quarter-end.

Root causes of poor accuracy: Inadequate qualification (reps forecast opportunities that were never real), lack of sales methodology (no consistent criteria for assessing deal health), optimistic sales culture that penalises realistic forecasting, or insufficient pipeline coverage forcing wishful thinking.

14. Quota Attainment Rate

What it measures: The percentage of sales reps achieving their assigned quota in a given period.

Why it matters: This metric diagnoses whether you have an individual performance problem (a few reps missing quota) or a systemic problem (most reps missing quota). It also validates whether quotas are realistic and territories are fairly distributed.

What good looks like: 60-70% of reps achieving quota in any given period, with consistent performers at 80-120% of quota. If everyone hits exactly 100%, quotas are too easy. If fewer than 50% hit quota, you have a systemic issue with quota setting, enablement, or territory design.

Customer Success Indicators

15. Customer Churn Rate and Net Revenue Retention

What it measures: The percentage of customers who discontinue service (churn) and the net revenue impact of existing customers over time, accounting for both churn and expansion (Net Revenue Retention).

Why it matters: In recurring revenue models, retention is as important as acquisition. A 10% monthly churn rate means you lose half your customer base every seven months—you’re running on a treadmill, signing new business just to replace lost business.

What good looks like: Annual gross churn below 15% for SMB customers, below 10% for mid-market, and below 5% for enterprise. Net Revenue Retention (NRR) above 100% signals you’re expanding existing customers faster than you’re losing them—the hallmark of efficient growth.

Sales connection: High early-stage churn (customers leaving within 6-12 months) almost always traces back to sales problems: poor qualification, oversold capabilities, or misaligned expectations set during the sales process. This metric creates a feedback loop that should inform sales coaching and methodology refinement.

From Metrics to Action: Building Your Sales Performance Dashboard

Tracking 15 metrics sounds overwhelming—because it is. The goal isn’t to monitor everything simultaneously, but to build a tiered dashboard that provides clarity without complexity:

Tier 1—Weekly Focus (Your “Daily Dials”):

• Pipeline coverage ratio
• Weekly revenue achievement vs. target
• Sales activity rate (quality-weighted)
• Forecast accuracy for current month

Tier 2—Monthly Review:

• Win rate by stage
• Average deal size
• Sales cycle length
• Quota attainment rate

Tier 3—Quarterly Strategic Review:

• Pipeline velocity
• Customer acquisition cost
• CAC payback period
• Net revenue retention
• Sales growth rate

The most sophisticated metrics in the world won’t improve performance without action.

Use these metrics diagnostically: when performance deviates from expectations, investigate which input metrics have changed.

Is pipeline coverage declining?

Are win rates dropping at a specific stage?

Has sales cycle length increased?

The Sales Performance Snapshot: See Your Numbers in Context

Understanding which sales performance metrics to track is one challenge; knowing whether your numbers are good, bad, or average is another entirely.

SalesPerformance Group brings enterprise-class B2B sales methodologies to mid-market growth firms and corporate divisions.

Our implementation-focused approach helps B2B sales teams build predictable, scalable revenue engines that deliver consistent results.