One of the first metrics I pull in any Salesforce I start in, and a metric I regularly revisit in orgs I’ve been working in for some time, is Sales Velocity.

Sales Velocity = Number of Opportunities × Average Deal Size × Win Rate × Sales Cycle Length

• Number of Opportunities: Easy to get – just the number of Opportunities in the org. Sometimes we’ll overlay an Account Segment on the Opportunity (i.e. SMB, Mid-Market, Enterprise) and most times we’ll exclude Renewal Opportunities. Whether tracking Sales Velocity or not you’ll want to know the rate at which Opportunities are added to Salesforce so you know your pipeline coverage.
• Average Deal Size: Also easy to get in Salesforce – just pull All Closed/Won Deals and average their Amount. Their may be nuances for multi-year deals.
• Win Rate: To calculate win rate, I go back to this blog post. You’re just looking for the number of Closed/Won Deals divided by the total number of Closed Deals. Easy to pull using Summary Level Formulas in Salesforce
• Sales Cycle Length: This one is a little more fun – could be as simple as a row-level formula that calculates from Created Date to Closed/Won Date. You can also start calculating time in stage reports – which provide indications when the Opportunity has been languishing in certain stages for too long and about how long an deal that’s likely to close stays in any one stage.

Typically, in any newish company’s Salesforce org these numbers are all over the board – the company may know that they can move some smaller deals through the pipeline quickly or that larger deals are being created with larger companies but not moving through the pipeline. Pretty obvious stuff. There’s still two reasons why I like this analysis:

• Win Rate over time should improve and if it’s not improving then we can look at what’s leading to the creation of Opportunities, the quality of Leads coming to sales and the reasons for closed/lost. Some of these things can be adjusted by sales.
• Inverse metrics to the above. Deals that are Closed/Won always move faster through the pipeline than Deals that are Closed/Lost. So looking at Closed/Lost Deals gives you data on indicators that a Deal that’s been sitting in Stage 2 well beyond the average amount of days of a Closed/Won Deal in Stage 2 is unlikely to close. This forces reps to move on from Deals to focus on those with a higher likelihood to close.

Sales velocity is not the be-all-and-end-all metric in a Salesforce org. It does, though, pull out key metrics that help to focus the sales organization on the deals that matter.