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Sales Metrics From a Pipeline

Building on the sales pipeline post from last week, a pipeline is about understanding the state of sales. Providing a structure to the sales process enables a team to assess key sales metrics (read: “performance”).

A few metrics to track once an opportunity is created:

  • Close win/ loss rate – what is the ratio of opportunities that are won/ loss
  • Sales stage aging – how long are opportunities in sales stages
  • Close rate by prospect source – based on how the prospect became a lead and then an opportunity, what is the ratio of opportunities that are won
  • Sales cycle time – how long does it take to close opportunities
  • # of close date moves – that is, how often are close dates adjusted for opportunities? This can reflect poor sales forecasts
  • Total win amounts – simply, how much money is generated
  • Conversion rates at every stage – how often are opportunities moving beyond the first stage? Second stage? Etc.

The above sales metrics can further be grouped or aggregated on finer details including:

  • By sales professional – which sales professionals are closing more, less
  • By date(s) – aggregated by months, weeks, quarters, etc.
  • Other standard or custom attributes of opportunities and accounts –fields beyond the above including opportunity size, opportunity creation, account size, account geography, or other custom fields on the opportunity or account level

Then, if data is captured well, a sales leader can go deeper by understanding the activities involved…

  • How many meetings were completed to close a deal?
  • How many people were involved in the sales process? Buying process?
  • How well do customers continue buying services/ products later? That is, understand the renewal rates, cross-sells, and up-sells

There are many sales metrics available once a structure is created and data is gathered. The important element of metrics is keeping them focused and driving action. Consider all the sales metrics mentioned above are gathered. Are there specific areas that need attention this month? Are there specific sales pods or professionals who need more coaching? Stay focused, and have your data inform how to achieve better performance.

Tags: sales, metrics, sales leaders, pipeline

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Seeing Progress and Making Decisions Through Instrumentation

I was thrilled to see great progress with one of the startups I’m advising. In our meetings early on, there were questions from the entrepreneur and her team about what to do and where to go next. It was difficult as an outsider to give a good direction without specific industry experience. Instead, I recommended some best startup (business) practices including the importance of instrumenting their platform and using data to drive roadmap and business decisions.
In one specific example, the company wanted to immerse users in the experience of the platform. Their initial UI hid away menu options. However, they found users were not customizing their experiences very often. They finally knew, however, how long users stayed on the platform, what they did, etc. The team hypothesized that users would engage with the platform even more and for longer periods of time with more personalized experiences through customization.
So, the team started making cues to the menu options including explicit instruction during first-use onboarding. It worked. Engagement of the new menu increased as has customizations. Their goal of greater and longer app usage also increased.
Users are now seeing buying options more often. Their next goal is to drive increased sales.
The team is studying engagement data to help answer questions, create hypotheses, and make decisions to accomplish specific goals. It’s great to see progress.
P.S. You can check out related articles on instrumentation and metrics in “Don’t Know What Metrics to Track? Start Asking the Right Questions”, “Metrics vs. Instrumentation”, and “Metrics for the Early Stage Startups”.
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5 Highlights from Measuring B2B Tech Engagement Talk

I am a big fan of data, analytics, metrics and… you get it. So much so, I’ve recently published several posts:

Fitting that one of my colleagues shared a talk by the Director of Marketing, Diana Smith, of technology startup Segment: “Measuring for B2B Engagement”.

In this talk, Diana shares what and how to measure engagement in technology products/ services, especially (my favorite). It’s a quick sub-14’ video, but if you’re looking for the highlights, I’ve got you covered.
  • Develop a Tracking Plan. What events to track? Why? What properties should be captured? Location of the events to track (i.e. website page, app screen)?
  • Key to the Tracking Plan is defining a naming convention. The naming convention should start with the Object (i.e. user, account, document) and the action (i.e. signUp, delete, edit). Consistent naming conventions enable teams to easily and quickly align on metrics. Examples: userSignUp, accountDelete, documentEdit.
  • Question WHY you want to track. Understand WHAT you want to track and why. Start with 3-5 events. Diana recommends these three areas to start: Discovery(how the user has displayed interest), Engage (how users explore top feature(s)), and Convert (where users pay).
  • Pre-signup, be simple. When considering what to track pre-signup, track the origin of people hitting entering the site and conversion. Use Google Analytics.
  • Think about the important events of an app/ user from the very beginning. This enables everything downstream to be smoother and easier.

Diana gave a decent high-level talk on tracking without getting too technical. Check it out, and ensure your tracking aligns enables your business/ growth strategy.

What are your thoughts on event tracking and analytics? What are the metrics you care about and why? 
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Don’t Know What Metrics to Track? Start Asking the Right Questions

(Scene from I, Robot. image source: https://i.imgflip.com/fwri0.jpg)
It’s often best to start with what goals you want to achieve when deciding what metrics to track and events to instrument. This, then, drives key questions. So welcome to today’s post – the prequel to Tuesday’s “Metrics vs. Instrumentation”.
Almost every facet of a business – technical, business, financial, operational, etc. – should have some strategy in place for improvement. As such, there is a need for an understanding of where the company sits today, in the past (if available), and the goals for the future. The natural thing to do, then, is to ask the right questions.
Here are some questions that can help determine the instrumentation and metrics needed:
  • At what rate are we losing existing customers (churn)? à can highlight product-market fit issues, education issues, misaligned expectations, complex UI/ UX, etc.
  • What is the lifetime value of a customer? à help determine the ROI of marketing strategies, especially against the cost of acquisition
  • What is our server uptime service level? à understand if service levels and how that may impact existing customers
  • How often are our users using Feature X? For how long? à help determine roadmap and UI/ UX issues, unnecessary feature sets, etc.
  • How are we acquiring website visitors, and at what rate are we able to convert these visitors to some call-to-action? à test the efficacy and messaging of marketing efforts
  • How often are users visiting our knowledge base? Is there a particular article that is visited most often? àbetter upfront knowledge sharing/ education, better UI/ UX opportunities

Goals and strategy of the company leads to questions on where the company sits today, and how to achieve tomorrow. Then, instrument as needed to capture status and improvement.

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Metrics vs. Instrumentation

I heard some confusion recently about: what exactly are metrics? What’s instrumentation? How do they differ?
Definitions from dictionary.com)
  • Metric: a standard for measuring or evaluating something, especially one that uses figures or statistics
  • Instrument (-ation): a means by which something is effected or done; a device for measuring the present value of a quantity under observation.
With yesterday’s 4th of July and 47th Annual Peachtree Road Race, I’ll use running as an example to illustrate the differences.
Important metrics for runners:
  • Time
  • Distance
  • Average speed
  • Heart rate
  • VO2 max (lung capacity)
Examples of how to instrument:
  • GPS (for distance)
  • Heart rate monitor
  • Stopwatch (time)
  • Metabolic cart (VO2)
As you can see, instrumentation (“instrument”) is the way to which results can be captured to provide insight — metrics. They are not the same, but rather, one feeds and enables (instrumentation) the other (metrics).

Instrument early on to answer questions and drive the startup forward — backed by data. Check out these 8 metrics for startups from proper instrumentation.
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Metrics for the Early Stage Startups

My friend, David Vandegrift (Associate at Pritzker Group Venture Capital), just co-wrote a couple articles on SaaS metrics that he and his VC colleagues pay close attention to – Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and Customer Lifetime Value (LTV).
They highlight the importance of CAC and LTV, specifically, as VCs are looking for sustainable businesses that have shown good handles on burn rate and revenue economics. Gone are the days of “easy millions” for startups with just traction. VCs are wary of bubbles and downturns, and thus, are watching for investments that can weather storms.
CAC and LTV are great metrics to have good handles on, but can be difficult for early stage companies, as noted by the authors. Specifically, lifetimes of customers can be quite short while CAC can be hard to measure as companies iterate their acquisition strategies.
One metric I assess that is less focused on economics is engagement/ retention (i.e. D1, D7, D30). Engagement is a hugely telling figure, especially for early-stage companies. Engagement helps identify the stickiness and value of a product while also providing great insight into features and usage which can help determine direction.
Following engagement, I evaluate churn. Churn is inherently included in LTV, but can be more operational and easier to gauge for customers. I like to review churn, especially, because it measures the value of a product/ service with existing users. It can also underline a “hole in the bucket” issue where strategies to drive new customers can be for naught if existing customers continually exit.
Check out David and Sonia’s post to learn more about CAC and LTV. Then, check out four other metrics (in addition to the two I listed) that are key to success – “8 Metrics from Proper Instrumentation of a Business and Its Product”.
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8 Metrics from Proper Instrumentation of a Business and Its Product

I want to continue my post from Tuesday about the importance and value of instrumentation. Today, I want to share SaaS metrics that can be answered with proper instrumentation (operational and business).
  1. Cost of acquisition. This is cost to capture an unaffiliated buyer. Need to know the costs associated with closing this opportunity including marketing costs, engineering support, etc. For this metric, it’s important to track the flow and behaviors of a customer through websites, sales touches, etc.
  2. D1, D7, D14, D30 retention metrics. Here, D stands for “day” and the number refers to the number of days since a user first enters the system. This metric tracks the percentage of returning users to the service in D days –gauge “stickiness”.
  3. Open and Click-Through Rates of Emails. Many products these days have email engagement and nurture campaigns. Here, companies measure if users are opening these emails and, if applicable, are they clicking into a destination the company is looking for.
  4. Drop-off During Sign-up Process. Many products have multi-stage sign-ups which can deter and annoy users from completing sign-up. By measuring here, the company can quickly ascertain if the sign-up process needs to be simplified or be very valuable to motivate complete sign-up. If they never enter, they’ll never see the great product! (This, by the way, is why so many apps use Facebook, Twitter, Google login… plus, companies get personal data shared from those platforms.)
  5. In-App Engagement.This is a big bucket including what pages, tabs, profiles, features are viewed and used. You want to understand how users interact with the product – are they finding pages useful? Are features cumbersome?
  6. Customer Lifetime Value. Same concept of the revenue of a customer (or net profit) but extrapolated against the number of times a customer buys (subscription, multiple products, etc.).
  7. Churn.That is, what percentage of customers stop buying annually? Good annual churn for SaaS businesses according to Sixteen Ventures is 5-7%. High churn may point to poor value, mismanaged expectations, or an inherent problem in the product.
  8. Average Revenue per Customer. To be explicit, it’s total revenue divided by customer. In this case, revenue would naturally be weighted by where most of revenue comes from.

I get excited when a company properly instruments their products and services. It demonstrates tremendous maturity and understanding to recognize engagement data will drive confirmation (or rejection) of hypotheses, and thus, enables smarter business decisions.

What are some other metrics you find useful? How would you measure success in your company?
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Bringing Intelligence to Fitness: How Body Boss helped increase my strength by 4.86% over two months

Okay, so I’m going to be one of the first to admit that I didn’t always believe in tracking workouts.  Thought it was just a pain in the rear, and a waste of time in the gym.  I tracked with a notebook back in the day in undergrad at GT, and found it not-so-useful.  I would also have to translate what I wrote in the notebook into Excel – big pain.  Too much work to track trends. 


After Tech, I was a management consultant specializing in supply chain management. I actually developed reports, dashboards, and metrics for several Fortune 500 companies, and it was then that I learned how successful companies always had their fingers on the pulse of the business.  They knew the state of the business from Execs on down to Analysts through structured, actionable reporting.  The companies that were less-than well-managed had poor reporting capabilities.  It dawned on me that with successful companies WHAT GETS MEASURED, GETS IMPROVED.  Enter a new world for myself and the Body Boss team… porting over intelligence though analytics to strength and conditioning.

In my earlier post about how we started, I mentioned how we built Body Boss with sleek and sexy design on top of statistics and regression modeling.  With the growth of technology especially in the mobile space, we could now remove the painful, time-consuming notebooks from the Stone Ages into the new digital era.  And the results are AMAZING. 

Where many coaches have created their own spreadsheets with percentage calculations, we’ve designed an application that does all the calculations for them. We’ve designed a tool that automatically takes what Coaches currently do, but makes everything that much simpler and that much easier to read while also engaging and MOTIVATING the Players.  Players have to execute afterall, right?

We’re updating our current Player Profiles soon with a new Stats page that is going to change the game – see the design below.  Now, we’re going to be able to provide Coaches and Players a quick and easy-to-read Stats page showing the progress of players.  No more messing around in spreadsheets.  To do this today for most coaches, this would take AT LEAST 2-5 minutes PER player.  To gather all the workout data, keystroke those numbers into Excel, and create charts to track trends?  If you’re a coach with 10, 20, 100 players… that’s a lot of time.  No longer is the game just working out harder, but working out SMARTER. 

We’re still implementing the new Stats page, but I built it roughly in Excel, and the below is what I saw.  So this tells me several things.  1) I’m a beast, and I’m getting stronger. I’m creeping up to 30 years old and still after some injuries, I can achieve greater. 2) Building this in Excel was a PAIN.  I can’t wait when this is automated with Body Boss. 3) As much as I love Excel from consulting days, it’s ugly. 4) Tracking workouts WORKS.  Intelligence is knowing where you are now, and challenging towards a goal.  That’s what Body Boss does.  It challenges you to NEVER settle… to always strive for greatness.

Testing and original layout of the proposed Stats page in Excel — a bit ugly, a whole lot of work

The new design of the Player Profile and new Stats page — much sleeker than Excel and much easier, automated



So for Coaches, Trainers, Players everywhere… we hear you, and we’re here for you.  We’re going to change the Strength and Conditioning game to help you focus on strategy and player development, not spreadsheets and number-crunching.  We’ll do that for you.  Customize your workouts how you want (percentages and all), and we’ll help you with the analytics.

– Daryl “D-Train” Lu

You can email me at daryl@bodybossfitness.com or message me on Twitter @TheDLu

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How’s the health of your company?

What is the state of your business?  If I were to ask you how are your operations faring, would you hesitate?  What about the trends?  Has operations been reducing no-trouble found/ cannot-duplicate rates?  Is your call center not asking the right questions when triaging customer complaints thereby letting through costly non-warrantable devices?  Has your days of stock inventory levels been trending positively or negatively?  Are you hitting your targets?

Successful companies know how operations are running daily.  Not just the leaders of the company but from the ground-level up.  Paramount to understanding the state of your business is relevant, actionable reporting.  Call them KPIs – that’s Key Performance Indicators for those of you who don’t know. 

In today’s business, analysts, managers, and executives alike are inundated with loads of data.  However, it’s not always a sure thing that stakeholders know not only what to look for but how.  I’ve been lucky enough to have consulted at several clients where reporting has been on all sides of the extremes, though no one having the ideal/ best practices.  Let me share a few thoughts…
  • Work smarter, not harder.  I’ve seen clients who had excellent cadences for metric reviews (simply put) but the way they created the reports was overly complex.  Analysts pulled reports together during the week and once the weekly report was completed, the analysts started working on the following week’s!
  • Rationalize your dashboards and metrics.  Too often leaders think they’re doing a good job because their managers and analysts are creating a plethora of reports.  They could show you reports for every piece of the business.  But as leaders, there are only a handful of metrics you really should be focused on.  Don’t waste your time and everyone else’s in your meeting sifting through which metrics are key to driving your business.
  • Reports should be easily digestible.  Okay, so maybe if you’re staring at a report showing your customer churn is skyrocketing and so you may be reluctant to swallow that bitter pill.  However, metrics should be easily recognizable/ read.  In reviews with other Leadership, who really has the time to stare at a data table to understand what’s happening?  Like back in elementary school, communicate through pictures (i.e. graphs) to tell stories of the trends, the current state, and the future.  Make reports easily understood and read.
  • Keep a cadence.  Reviews of metrics and dashboards should be done intermittently.  How often depends on your business.  Someone once told me you need to review everyday (in a short meeting) citing a day of not knowing is death.  I hardly think missing a day would mean death in most industries… perhaps in healthcare (company-wise and literally for patients) which is where he worked.  Reviews should be done on a regular basis so that metrics have a baseline for trends and are a part of company life.
  • Make your metrics actionable.  What is the purpose of creating metrics illustrating your business is not faring well if you’re not going to do anything about it?  Metrics, like x-rays at the doctor, tell you the situation and gives you clues as to how to repair or improve your business.  
  • Assign accountability and responsibility.  Hold your people accountable to address concerns.  To the point directly above, metrics should be actionable so that the state of the business lies with your people.  If no one takes accountability and responsibility, then how can change happen?

It’s easy to say, “oh yes, we have metrics.  They’re…” and then you rattle off a dozen, but are those metrics really important to you?  Or maybe you’re really creating metrics and dashboards just to have them.  Paramount to reporting and the whole purpose of reporting is not to have a status meeting daily, weekly, or whenever and leave the room feeling good but nothing was really accomplished.  Instead, reports should be ACTIONABLE and ACCOUNTABLE.  Metrics should be directed and focused on specific operations so that before the meeting adjourns, every stakeholder knows what’s spiraling out of control, what metrics are off target, what are the corrective actions, and of course, who has ownership.  It’s too commonplace to just create reports just for the sake of having them without the necessity to truly understand the business and act upon them.

Treat status reviews and meetings of reports as a tool to check the health of your company.  If you monitor with the right frequency, check key components to your company’s health, and address the bad habits (negative trends or otherwise) through accountability, it will be far easier to keep your company fit for the foreseeable future… and perhaps prevent a few heart attacks both for the company and you.
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