Sales KPIs to track weekly — building a sales scorecard

Revenue is a lagging number. By the time it’s short, the cause happened six weeks ago: not enough calls, not enough new opportunities, deals stuck in one stage. A sales scorecard puts the leading numbers next to the lagging ones, so the team can see a shortfall coming while there’s still time to fix it.

This guide gives you a set of sales KPIs to start from, how to choose between them, and how to set them up so the team reviews them every week.

Balance activity, pipeline and results

A useful sales scorecard has three layers:

• Activity — what the team does. Calls, meetings, demos, proposals. Fully in the team’s control, and the earliest warning sign.
• Pipeline — what that activity produces. New opportunities, pipeline value, coverage. The bridge between effort and revenue.
• Results — what closes. Bookings, win rate, average deal size.

Scorecards with only results are anxious and reactive. Scorecards with only activity reward busy-work. You want a few of each.

Example sales KPIs, with cadence and direction

“Inverted” means lower is better — the metric turns red when it goes above target.

Notes on using them:

• Pipeline coverage is one of the most useful single numbers in sales. Below about 3× remaining quota, the quarter is at risk regardless of how confident anyone feels. Use whatever multiple your historical win rate supports.
• “Deals with no next step” is an inverted hygiene metric. It catches the stalled deals that inflate the pipeline.
• Win rate and cycle length are monthly. They’re too noisy weekly with a small number of closes.
• Per-rep numbers are best kept in your CRM. On the team scorecard, track team totals; if you want individual visibility, create metrics per rep and make each rep the owner.

Setting it up in Clarion

Open Metrics for your sales team and use Add Metric for each one:

• Name and Definition — be exact. “New opportunities: opportunities created in the CRM this week with an amount and close date set.”
• Target and Unit — $, %, count, or a custom unit like “calls” or ”×”.
• Frequency — Weekly for activity and pipeline, Monthly for win rate, cycle length and discount.
• Owner — the sales leader for team totals; reps for their own activity numbers.
• Inverted metric — tick for deals without next steps, cycle length and discount.

The clicks are in create a metric and set targets and inverted metrics. Mark bookings and pipeline coverage as key metrics so they show on the leadership dashboard.

If sales sits under a revenue or commercial team with sub-teams — new business and account management, say — give each its own metrics. The parent team’s metrics page shows a Team Roll-Up of metrics health from each sub-team. See teams and companies.

Getting numbers out of the CRM

Your CRM is where these numbers live, and Clarion has no native CRM integration. Two generic routes bridge the gap:

• Push URLs. Each metric gets a private URL. A scheduled Zapier, Make or n8n workflow — or a Google Sheets script fed by a CRM export — posts the week’s total to it. Each push replaces the current period’s value, so push the running total, not one per deal. See metric push URLs.
• Pull from a URL. If your CRM or reporting layer exposes a number at a JSON API endpoint, an admin can have Clarion fetch it hourly, every six hours or daily. It reads JSON only. See pull from a JSON API.

Or keep it manual: reps record their own numbers before the meeting, or during the sync’s Scorecard step. See record metric values.

Using it in the weekly meeting

Review the scorecard at the start of your weekly pipeline review. Read each number as on or off target, then move on. Anything off target becomes a challenge: expand the metric and click Flag as challenge, which creates a challenge with the actual and target values filled in, owned by the metric’s owner. See challenges.

Read the layers together. Low bookings with healthy coverage suggests a closing problem. Low bookings with low coverage is a pipeline problem that started weeks ago — and the activity numbers will tell you whether it’s still happening.

Common mistakes

• Only tracking revenue. You’ll learn about problems a quarter too late.
• Fuzzy definitions. If “opportunity” means something different to each rep, the pipeline number is fiction.
• Activity targets with no link to the result. Work backwards: bookings target ÷ average deal size ÷ win rate = opportunities needed; opportunities ÷ meeting-to-opportunity rate = meetings needed.
• Setting targets to what you hit last month. Targets should come from the plan, not from history.
• Using the scorecard to blame. Red numbers are for solving. If reps fear the scorecard, the numbers stop being honest.

For turning the annual number into quarterly projects, see turn sales targets into milestones.