OpenView Issues Sales Benchmarks Report
OpenView Venture Partners, an expansion-stage venture capital firm focused on providing technology companies with deep operational support, announced today the release of a new report entitled, “Measuring Up: 9 Sales Benchmarks that Can Help Expansion-Stage Companies Build a Scalable Sales Machine.”
Targeted at the CEOs and heads of sales at expansion-stage technology companies, the report provides guideposts for establishing initial sales performance expectations and measuring your performance against them.
“By allowing companies to better evaluate and understand their own metrics, sales benchmarks can give executives and managers a much better sense of what to expect when launching a customer acquisition initiative into a new market or when building out a sales team,” explained Devon McDonald, Director of Sales and Marketing Support at OpenView. “Ultimately, those insights can help companies manage a variety of challenges, such as analyzing sales funnel activity, developing a scalable customer acquisition model, and addressing impediments in new markets.”
The sales benchmarks covered in the OpenView report span two categories:
1) Lead generation team performance sales benchmarks, which are critical to analyzing an existing lead generation team’s performance and to efficiently building new teams. They include the following conversion rates:
- Call to conversation
- Conversation to appointment
- Appointment to opportunity
- Lead to opportunity
2) Sales team capacity and productivity sales benchmarks, which can be used as a frame of reference to ensure that you are hiring the right number of lead generation reps, are leveraging those reps effectively, and that you are encouraging sales activities that ultimately fuel optimal financial performance. They include:
- Number of open opportunities per sales rep
- Pipeline coverage
- Opportunity win rate on new customer deals
- Pipeline slippage
- Number of new customer deals won per rep
“After reading this report, you will have a better understanding of the metrics your company needs to track in order to hire, manage, and scale its sales organization effectively, and whether or not you are on pace with industry averages,” said McDonald. “Ultimately, the most important take away is that it’s essential for your sales organization to track these benchmarks. The calculations for them are universal and measuring them is absolutely critical to successfully scaling an expansion-stage sales organization. Over time, the data that doing so yields will allow you to create your own sales benchmarks, which will provide the best context for your business going forward.”
About OpenView Venture Partners
OpenView Venture Partners is an expansion-stage venture capital fund based in Boston that is focused on high-growth software, Internet, and technology-enabled companies. Through its staff of seasoned operating executives, who collectively bring several decades of technology and management experience to the firm, OpenView is able to help portfolio companies quickly optimize their product, go-to-market, and organizational and operational functions. Founded in 2006, the firm invests globally and has approximately $440 million in total capital under management.
About OpenView Labs
OpenView Labs is the strategic and operational consulting arm of OpenView Venture Partners, a global venture capital fund that invests in expansion-stage technology companies. The Labs team consults to the management of OpenView’s portfolio companies across an array of functional areas, including recruiting, go-to-market support, and research and analytics. Together with its network of senior advisors, the team supports OpenView’s portfolio companies on a range of initiatives ranging from methodology incubation and market research, to providing strategic coaching.