Top 5 Most Important Sales Productivity Metrics in 2024

In today’s highly competitive sales landscape, sales teams face a number of profound challenges. Not only is it difficult to meet targets, reps often struggle to manage their time effectively and smoothly navigate complex sales cycles.

By measuring sales productivity metrics, sales leaders can identify and work through  any issues, allowing their teams to focus on high-impact activities and improve their overall performance.

Why does measuring sales productivity matter?

Sales productivity measures how efficiently a sales team converts its efforts into revenue. At a high level, it evaluates the effectiveness of sales activities, helping to identify the strategies and actions that lead to successful outcomes.

By measuring sales rep productivity metrics, teams can:

• Discover the most profitable sales plays by revealing which tactics consistently lead to the highest revenue and conversion rates.
• Find more profitable customer niches by analyzing which customer segments contribute the most to revenue and have the highest engagement rates.
• Create better compensation plans for sales team members by aligning incentives with the activities and outcomes that drive the most revenue, ensuring that top-performing behaviors and reps are rewarded.
• Identify what’s working and what isn’t by highlighting which strategies, activities, and processes lead to successful outcomes and which ones fall short.

Every sales team, regardless of size or stage of company growth, can benefit from starting to track and measure sales productivity metrics. 

Top sales productivity metrics that matter in 2024

In the past, sales team productivity was often gauged by the sheer number of cold calls or cold emails a sales rep sent. However, in modern B2B sales, we all know that quantity alone doesn’t drive success. 

Today’s sales landscape demands a focus on metrics that measure meaningful engagement, the effectiveness of communication, and the ability to build strong customer relationships. As we look to 2024 and beyond, sales leaders should prioritize updated sales metrics that capture the quality of interactions to truly gauge and improve productivity.

Sales productivity metric #1: Quota attainment

Quota attainment is the percentage of a sales rep’s target that they achieve within a given time period — typically measured monthly, quarterly, or annually. To calculate quota attainment, divide the total number of sales made by the rep by their assigned quota and multiply by 100.

If reps are consistently hitting their quotas, it may indicate that the quotas are too low, leading to missed revenue opportunities and underutilized potential. On the flipside, if they’re consistently missing their quotas, it could suggest that the targets are unrealistic or that there are challenges in the sales process, requiring adjustments in strategy, training, or support to help reps achieve their goals. 

Sales productivity metric #2: Deal slippage

Deal slippage refers to the delay or failure to close deals by the anticipated date or within the expected timeframe. While every organization experiences deal slippage, teams that consistently face this problem often fail to ask the right questions during the sales process or are incentivized to push a lead down deal stages without proper qualification. If certain reps are having deal slippage issues, it could indicate that they need more training or are trying to hide problems and obfuscate reality.

By keeping track of deal slippage, sales leaders can identify issues within the sales process — like unrealistic timelines or obstacles faced by the sales team. Monitoring slippage allows for timely adjustments to improve forecasting accuracy, address pipeline bottlenecks, and enhance overall sales performance.

Sales productivity metric #3: Lead response time

Lead response time measures how long it takes sales teams to follow up with a new lead after initial contact is made. This metric is important because faster response times are associated with higher conversion rates and increased chances of closing deals, since timely engagement demonstrates responsiveness and care. By tracking lead response time, sales leaders can ensure that leads are nurtured promptly, optimizing sales opportunities and improving overall sales effectiveness.

Depending on the size and structure of your sales team, you might be using a round-robin style of sharing inbound deals with your reps. If you’re more sophisticated, you might send specific leads based on set parameters to specific reps. Either way, the most important thing is ensuring that whoever gets a lead follows up quickly.

Keep in mind that this doesn’t just refer to the initial sales contact. Leaders should track lead response time throughout the entire sales process. If a sales rep is taking 24 or 48 hours to follow-up with someone in the final stages of a deal, they could blow the sale by making the prospect feel like they aren’t a priority.

Sales productivity metric #4: Average deal size

Average deal size is the average revenue generated from each closed deal within a specific period of time. It’s calculated by dividing the total revenue from closed deals by the number of deals.

This sales rep productivity metric matters because you know the annual contract value (ACV) of your product. If a rep is consistently offering discounts to close deals, this could alter the ACV average and incentivize your team to offer bad deals to close customers faster. Ideally, you want to balance winning deals fast with setting expectations with your team and prospects around your ability to discount your product.

When average deal size is trending up, it usually indicates that the sales team is closing larger deals or upselling more effectively, which can suggest improved sales strategies and stronger market positioning. Conversely, when average deal size is trending down, it may signal challenges like reduced pricing power, declining customer budgets, or a shift toward smaller deals, which may require a review of pricing strategies and sales tactics.   

Sales productivity metric #5: Selling time

Selling time refers to how much time your team actually spends selling your products compared to other activities like notetaking, prospecting, and updating the CRM. 

Ideally, your team should be spending the majority of their time on actual selling. If they’re an SDR, this means prospecting, cold calling, and cold emailing. If they’re an AE, this means following up with prospects, giving demos, and social selling.

To decrease selling time, teams can implement tools like LeadIQ, which accelerates prospecting workflows with the ability to capture and sync contact data to CRMs in one click, write personalized emails rapidly using AI, and automatically track job changes of champions, buyers, and power users, among other capabilities. Additional tools that can help increase selling time include Gong, Salesloft, and Groove.

On top of this, leaders can increase selling time by ensuring their teams know best practices and are trained to use the tools they’re given to their full potential.

3 ways to increase every sales productivity metric

What good are metrics if you don’t know the best ways to help your team improve them?

Selling in 2024 is a much different ballgame than ever before. Whether it’s due to the arrival of AI or budget cuts across the board, every sales team is looking to get more juice from the squeeze. With that in mind, let’s examine three ways to increase any sales productivity metric.

1. Utilize AI tools

Using AI tools can enhance all areas of sales by rapidly surfacing data-driven insights and automating repetitive tasks, such as lead scoring and email outreach. Additionally, AI-powered tools can offer predictive analytics and personalized recommendations, helping sales teams better understand customer needs and adjust their strategies accordingly.

To speed up prospecting, reps can use LeadIQ Scribe’s generative AI capabilities to easily craft personalized emails in seconds. For more AI-powered tools that can help reps cover more ground faster, check this post out.

2. Double down on what’s working

While the number of cold calls and cold email reps send still matters, it’s important to know whether the tactics and sales plays you’re using are actually working. While quantitative data may be able to provide some insights, qualitative data collected by talking with reps and bringing your team together so that they can learn from each other is most important.

In 2024, you may also want to experiment with newer cold outreach tactics like social selling and video outreach. You never know when a new approach could make a world of difference.

3. Ensure sales team compensation is aligned to goals

In general, sales teams are compensated through a combination of a salary and commissions or bonuses. If your sales team isn’t motivated to close deals or feels as though it doesn’t matter if they work hard to get signed contracts because it doesn’t impact their financial well-being, this could be hurting sales velocity and overall quota attainment rates.

For the best results, speak with team members and ensure they’re part of the sales compensation conversation. While sales leaders have to ensure that they’re putting the company first, you don’t want to demotivate your team by rolling out a new compensation plan that upsets everyone.

How LeadIQ can help increase sales productivity

In today’s accelerating B2B sales landscape, reps are pulled in a million different directions. To hit their numbers, they need to work as productively as possible — day in and day out.

As a prospecting hub that connects with the tools reps use every day, LeadIQ is built to help sales teams accomplish more. To learn more about how LeadIQ can help your sales team soar to new heights, request a demo today.