Want to increase the effectiveness of your sales team and the profitability of your company? Here’s a detailed guide on how to leverage sales analytics (with examples, templates, tools, and KPIs) for achieving the same.

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%!”

You don’t need more sales metrics and data to wad through. You need the right ones. Understand which sales KPIs and metrics to track, why they matter to your company, and how you’re going to use them.

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: