How do you measure sales success?

“All organizations need a discipline that makes them face up to reality.” — Peter Drucker

In my experience, companies attempt to correct sales problems by either adding more salespeople, training the sales staff or demanding better leads from marketing. While these solutions work at times, just as often they will not be successful because the problems may have different root causes.

A more effective strategy is to first, understand the company or team’s sales process and the activities that underlie it and second, view the situation quantitatively which involves having measurements. Herein lies the problem: Many sales organizations do not have any measurements except for the basics or more worrisome, they do not know the sales metrics that drive their sales results.

How do you measure your sales team’s progress? Do you have metrics in place to monitor important sales activities such as lead generation and prospecting?