Data is the key to accountability in SaaS sales. If you’re still living in the 1960s, when the only metrics you measured were deals closed, revenue earned and bottles of brandy polished off, it’s time to get with the times.

If you want to achieve your sales goals month after month, then guesswork and intuition aren’t your best friends. You need cold hard data, and your sales CRM must capture all necessary information on the deals closed by your reps.

When you’re working in sales, you typically have specific goals to meet and targets to hit. Whether your goals are large or small, and whether you have 2 months left or an entire year to meet them, you know what those end numbers are - and they don’t fluctuate.

“We increased year-over-year sales by 150%!”

If you want to scale your sales team, grow your revenue, and beat out the competition, there’s no question you need to understand data. All the best sales teams in the world run on data. Unfortunately, almost all of them make the same critical mistake.

What’s makes a great salesperson? Consistency. And this just gets more important when you’re dealing with a sales team.

Work for a startup? Guess what: You’re in sales. As Y Combinator founder Paul Graham famously wrote:

If you’re just getting started with your sales process, what metrics should you track? There’s a ton of technology that enables you to measure and analyze everything from minutes talked to number of words per average email and length of email subject lines.