3 Sales Numbers Your Creative Agency Should Track

3 Sales Numbers Your Creative Agency Should Track

In my last blog post, I reviewed important KPIs to track at your agency. However, there are many other crucial numbers that you, as an agency owner or account director, should track, so I’ve added a few more to the list!

I’d like to introduce a few more KPIs related to business development and the sales team. The list now includes: the number of sales leads by category, opportunities in the sales pipeline and conversion rates by account executive.

Number of Sales Leads By Category

First and foremost, it’s important to make sure you are tracking the number of new leads monthly and/or weekly. How does this month compare to last month? I like categorizing new sales lead by source. For instance, we track the number of leads that come from our website traffic and of course, I recommend breaking that down by direct traffic, organic search and social media (i.e. LinkedIn, Facebook, PPC).  At the end of the day, your agency needs to identify which activities are bringing more leads, and then, you should track this lead through the entire sales funnel to identify the correlation between conversation rate and number of sales.

You may also decide to sponsor an industry-related event or create a special offer for the sales team to use in the next quarter. All of these activities should be entered in your agency management software to help you create reports by lead category or lead source. Personally, I run sales lead reports on a weekly basis to identify which source is bringing more leads so I can work with our marketing team and ensure alignment with their efforts. “Smarketing,” as it’s called, describes the integration of your sales and marketing processes to increase efficiency and create more leads.

Opportunities in the Sales Pipeline

This KPI can be measured in a few different ways. You can pull the data by looking at all estimates/proposals you have submitted to your clients or prospects in a specific time period. You should make sure your sales team adds probability to close a potential deal so you can also track by the percentage probability. Let’s assume my sales team has submitted $450,000 worth of work in the last month and, as the sales director, I need to run a report to see what is the potential revenue is for our firm.

Besides probability to close deals, I also suggest tracking the monthly probability to close. You may have sent 25 proposals this month, but only five could potentially close next month. This is the main reason to make sure when creating estimates to not only enter the percentage probability to close but also the month to close. The rest of the proposals will only happen in two to three months down the road.

Conversion Rates By Account Executive

It is not so hard to identify top performers in your agency by looking at revenue brought by AE. However, what not many agencies do is to compare the number of leads passed to a specific AE and the conversion rate. For instance, you have a small sales team of four AEs. Last month your agency generated 80 leads in total and 30 leads were allocated to one AE. Down the road, this AE converted 40% of these opportunities, which represents 12 deals. At the same time, you allocated 20 leads to another AE who converted 18 deals with a conversion rate of 80%.  Make sure to always look at the conversion rates while evaluating your Account Executive’s performance.

As part of the conversion rate calculation, I also use the total revenue number by AE and compare to the number of leads passed to them and the percentage conversion rate. You could have an AE whose conversion rate is not very high, but he is dealing with larger deals and most often, longer sales cycles and lower conversion rates.

This article was written by former Function Point team member, Leonardo Maia.