How to Use Sales Operations KPIs to Measure What Really Matters for Your Business
Team leaders in real estate have a problem:
Their customer relationship management (CRM) systems are overloaded with metrics and data. But, the most important question remains unanswered: is their sales operation creating opportunities and revenue for their business?
The difference between successful sales operations and failing sales operations lies in the ability to measure and use the right metrics for your sales operations. It's not about having more data—it's about having the right data, the kind that actually tells you something useful instead of just sitting there looking important.
Teams that scale successfully understand how to track and act upon key performance indicators (KPIs) for their sales operations.
What are sales operations KPIs?
Sales operations KPIs are metrics used to evaluate and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the sales process in your business. In the case of real estate team leaders, these sales operations KPIs serve as vital signs of whether their operation is functioning properly or if it has preventable gaps causing lost opportunities and revenue.
Think of them like warning lights on a dashboard—they're only useful if you know what they mean and actually do something when they light up.
Most team leaders and sales managers make a mistake: they track everything and understand nothing about what drives performance.
A CRM system may report that 1000 calls were made in the last month. However, the call activity metric provides no insight to your business—it's just a number floating in space, disconnected from what actually matters.
The questions that really matter are: were those calls converted to conversations with customers? Did the customer conversations convert to meetings with buyers? Were the buyer meetings converted to signed agreements and closed deals?
If a real estate team does not have the appropriate KPI tracking for sales operations, then their operation will operate on hope and instinct rather than data. What you get instead is a kind of operational blindness.
As a result, buyer leads remain untouched for weeks, appointments fall through without follow-up, and listing opportunities go to competing agents who simply have better systems for speed, tracking, and organization in their sales operations.
Critical sales operations KPIs that determine real estate sales success
Pipeline and forecast KPIs: the crystal ball to your future revenue
Pipeline and forecast KPIs for real estate teams are not just about tracking potential transactions.
Pipeline and forecast KPIs determine whether you will meet your revenue targets in the next 3-6-12 months.
These metrics are your early warning system—the canary in the coal mine for revenue problems you haven't encountered yet.
Pipeline created is the number of initial opportunities created—new buyer leads, FSBOs entering your database, expired listings becoming available in your market. The lack of consistent pipeline creation is a clear indication of an urgent need to refocus your lead generation efforts. Without continuous top-of-the-funnel activity and new opportunities, transaction volume will decline regardless of agent closing skills or conversion rate performance.
Pipeline developed is the number of opportunities that progress through your sales cycle and sales funnel—from initial contact to consultation, from presentation to signed agreement. The pipeline developed KPI determines whether your sales team can develop relationships with customers or whether leads become stagnant after initial contact, stuck in a kind of limbo where everyone forgets they exist.
Forecast accuracy measures how closely your predicted closings match your actual results and revenue outcomes. Continuously missing forecasts indicate system problems within your sales operations—pipeline management, deal tracking consistency, or unrealistic conversion assumptions.
What we found instead was that most teams were forecasting based on wishful thinking rather than what the data was actually showing them.
Performance and efficiency KPIs: measuring production and productivity power
These performance and efficiency metrics and KPIs provide insight into whether your sales operations produce consistent levels of revenue and production or appear to be producing sales activity. There's a difference between looking busy and actually generating revenue—and these metrics expose that gap pretty quickly.
Sales volume is total transaction value and revenue generated during a specified period—a primary sales operations metric. When paired with sales growth rate (the percent increase in your business performance), sales volume becomes a critical sales operations metric. A sales team achieving $10 million in annual volume, but with flat growth while the surrounding market expands 15%, illustrates why tracking market share and growth metrics are necessary sales operations KPIs.
Win rate is the percent of opportunities that result in signed agreements and closings. Win rate exposes the gap between sales activity and actual results that produce revenue. An agent with a 15% win rate indicates presentation issues, issues communicating value, or qualification issues that require training and process improvements within your sales operations.
Customer acquisition cost (CAC) represents the total cost of acquiring clients from lead to closing—marketing and lead generation expenditures, ISA salary, agent splits, and all other sales operations related expenditures. Many teams incur $5,000 in cumulative expenditures to generate $3,000 in net profit per transaction—untenable financial metrics that slowly bleed a business dry. Without tracking CAC by lead source, teams will continue to fund non-profitable sources while under funding profitable sources.
Sales velocity measures conversion speed and is one of the most important operational efficiency metrics calculated as (Opportunities x Average Deal Value x Win Rate) / Sales Cycle Length. Think of it as your revenue acceleration rate—how fast you can convert opportunity into actual money in the bank.
Productivity and activity KPIs: connecting work and production
Activity metrics and sales operations KPIs bridge the gap between the work done daily and the closings achieved monthly. These KPIs illustrate whether the effort expended by your team converts to production and revenue—or if it's just effort evaporating into thin air.
Number of touchpoints reveals the number of interactions between initial contact and signed agreement with customers. Real estate teams often find that they abandon prospects after 3-4 attempts when data indicates that an average successful transaction requires 8-12 meaningful touchpoints.
This gap explains why so many opportunities are lost in the pipeline—teams stop engaging the prospect before the relationship matures and the sales cycle is complete. What we discovered was a kind of premature abandonment problem—teams giving up right before the prospect was ready to commit.
Labor hours per ticket determines the productivity impacting both gross commission income and net profit in your business. If an agent expends 20 hours nurturing a buyer lead that generates $2,000 in team revenue, the economic viability of scaling your sales operations does not exist.
Sometimes you realize you're working harder, not smarter—and the numbers don't lie about that.
A team's market share is a strategic sales operations KPI
Market share is a percentage of a company's portion of total transaction volume within its market (or location) – an important strategic sales operations KPI for your organization to track. An example of this would be a sales team that experienced 20% year over year growth in sales; however, if competitors locally grew at a 35% rate and the overall market grew at a 40% rate, this "growth" in fact means they are losing ground.
It's the difference between being genuinely good and just being lucky enough to be in a rising market.
The inside sales agent model: an emerging business model fueled by role specialization
The commercial real estate brokerage industry has a flawed premise that an agent who is able to effectively present to in-person is likely going to be able to effectively dial through databases and generate appointments for the sales team.
However, these are two different skill sets and require different types of training and development.
What the industry was learning, slowly, was that expecting one person to excel at both was like expecting a marathon runner to also be a world-class sprinter.
Take the average producer in your sales operations group. At any given time, they are preparing for a listing presentation, need to review several homes prior to showing them to buyers, and have a contract crisis that requires their immediate attention.
And, in their CRM, there are 200 warm leads that require follow up, 50 new inquiries, and a database of past customers and clients that require regular updates. What does the producer focus on first?
The immediate fire. Unfortunately, the leads usually do not receive follow up - except in rare cases when "later" eventually arrives; however, the end result is that conversion rates suffer accordingly.
Enter the Inside Sales Agent model - a business model that involves a dedicated team member whose singular goal is to convert leads into appointments that the sales team can then close and turn into revenue. Their sole responsibility is to call, text, qualify prospects and schedule appointments for the sales team.
This type of role specialization has been proven to create significant and measurable results and performance improvements in sales operations.
Consistently, teams that use a dedicated ISA model report that their conversion rates double or triple, and that these increased conversion rates have a direct impact on revenue and business growth. What teams got instead of chaos was a predictable system that actually worked.
Creating your ISA scoreboard: the sales operations metrics that generate performance
Role specialization only succeeds when combined with defined sales operations metrics and performance metrics that provide insight into ISA productivity. Without visibility into ISA productivity, teams cannot differentiate between high performing ISAs and low performing ISAs, cannot define best practices and cannot hold anyone accountable to standards that are necessary to generate revenue.
A scoreboard is designed to serve two functions. First, it provides a competitive environment that drives performance among the ISA team.
Second, the scoreboard provides a level of granularity that allows for coaching and development of the ISA team.
The number of appointments set by an ISA should be the primary leading indicator of ISA success and should be the number one metric on the scoreboard.
All other metrics including calls made, texts sent, emails delivered, etc., represent activity. Only appointments represent actual movement towards closings and revenue.
One of the critical sales operations ratios is the calls per appointment set. For example, if one ISA generates an appointment after making 15 calls and another ISA consistently generates an appointment after only 8 calls, there is a difference in the ability of the ISA to handle objections, build urgency, communicate the value proposition and ask for appointments - sales operations metrics that can assist managers in developing the skills of the ISA team.
MaverickRE is a modern ISA management platform that automates the tracking of these ratios in real-time and provides visual leaderboards that display the calls to appointment ratios, conversation rates and performance rankings of the ISA team.
The appointment tracking problem: from set to held
Recognizing when an ISA has generated an appointment is an easy way to feel good about the ISA's productivity. However, the reality is that celebrating the ISA for generating an appointment often creates a false sense of accomplishment.
The ISA has scheduled the appointment and everyone involved in tracking activity metrics is happy - then nothing really happens. It's like throwing a party and nobody shows up, except you don't realize it until much later.
Unfortunately, in far too many sales operations groups, no one tracks the correct sales operations metrics.
This lack of tracking is where huge amounts of money and value are lost.
For example, a sales operation may celebrate the fact that they had 50 appointments in a particular month. However, if 30 of those appointments never turned into face-to-face meetings and no one is tracking this metric, the sales operation is operating based on theater rather than results.
Sophisticated sales operations groups track three distinct metrics related to appointments:
appointments set (the ISA has scheduled the appointment);
appointments scheduled (the appointment has been confirmed in a customer's calendar); and
appointments held (the customer showed up for the meeting). They track the held rate (what percent of the set appointments resulted in meetings).
When the held rate falls below 60%, the message is clear: either the ISA is not doing a sufficient job of qualifying prospects, the agents are not confirming appointments, or the follow up processes are not working.
High performing sales operations groups that have developed a sophisticated sales culture operate in a completely different way. When an appointment is scheduled, detailed calendar invites are distributed immediately to the parties involved in the meeting.
The ISA calls 24 hours prior to the meeting to confirm. If there is no answer to the ISA's call, a confirmation text is sent to the customer.
As a result, high performing sales operations groups consistently experience a held rate of 75% or better. What they discovered, through trial and error, was that confirmation wasn't optional—it was essential.
The rescheduled lead problem: your hidden gold mine
What happens to prospects when they reschedule or do not show up for a meeting? In almost every sales operation, the rescheduled lead drops off the radar screen.
The agents move on to the next available appointment. Meanwhile, that rescheduled lead - someone who indicated enough interest in the property to schedule a meeting - is ignored.
It's a strange kind of amnesia that affects the entire industry.
This represents operational incompetence.
Rescheduled leads have greater potential for future revenue and are farther along in the sales cycle and funnel than cold prospects.
Yet, they receive significantly less attention. High performing sales operations teams treat rescheduled appointments as high-priority opportunities.
They have implemented specific procedures to address rescheduled leads:
Immediate follow-up with the lead within 24 hours
Multiple attempts to contact the lead using multiple channels of communication
Continued nurturing efforts until the lead reschedules the appointment or indicates that they wish to opt-out of communications
Speed to lead vs. speed to everything else
Real estate teams obsess over speed to lead — calling new prospects within five minutes. While this metric is important for measuring sales operations performance, teams that focus solely on this metric and ignore other speed metrics will have an unbalanced view of performance.
The pattern we noticed was that teams measured the first touch obsessively while ignoring everything that came after.
High performing teams measure multiple speed metrics:
Time to first contact on new leads
Time to respond when leads initiate contact
Time to reschedule cancelled appointments
Time to update appointment outcomes
Time to follow up after showings or consultations
Each of these metrics represent a potential leak in the sales operations process. The new lead that waits six hours for a call back is no longer interested.
The cancelled showing that waits three days before receiving reschedule requests is another lost opportunity.
The lead distribution problem: sending the right leads to the right agents
Some real estate agents convert buyer leads at 15%, while some only achieve a 3% conversion rate — the difference in these conversion rates is a critical sales operations KPI. Some agents specialize in seller transactions, while others specialize in buyer consultations.
Some agents specialize in luxury properties while others consistently close their first-time homebuyers.
Most teams send leads to agents through a simple round robin method. This method of distributing leads wastes resources and de-motivates agents.
What you get instead is a system that frustrates everyone—the high performers feel punished, and the low performers feel overwhelmed.
Intelligent lead distribution takes into account several key variables including: past conversion rate, specialty match, geographic expertise, current availability and pipeline capacity. Advanced lead distribution systems automate this entire process.
When a new lead enters the system, the platform evaluates all eligible agents based on their 12-month conversion rates for that specific lead source, property type, and price range. The system then offers the lead first to the highest-converting available agent.
This algorithmic approach has helped teams increase conversion rates by 40-55% simply by ensuring leads reach agents most likely to close them.
The actual financial costs of not measuring sales operations KPIs
While manually tracking sales operations KPIs is technically possible, it is financially destructive and can severely limit a company's ability to grow. The losses are often invisible until the company begins to systematically measure its KPIs and understand the amount of revenue that is being "bled" through preventable gaps.
Companies lose money by purchasing leads that they never contact. Companies allow cancelled appointments to go un-rescheduled.
Companies assign opportunities to agents who will not successfully convert those opportunities. And companies make decisions based on intuition and guesswork, rather than the facts and data contained within the company's sales operations KPIs.
For every dollar earned by a typical real estate team, the company loses $0.40 to $0.60 per dollar due to these invisible leaks.
Therefore, if the company earns $100,000 per year, it loses approximately $40,000 to $60,000 per year.
This is not due to a lack of market opportunity, but rather due to a lack of visibility into the sales operations performance of the company.
Ask yourself these diagnostic questions to determine if your company is suffering from invisible leaks:
What percentage of leads received during the prior six months resulted in closings?
Which agent has the highest conversion rate for your company's most expensive lead source?
How long does it take to respond to a new lead once it has been received?
How many appointments were scheduled last month versus how many appointments were actually held — what is your held rate?
If your company cannot answer these questions regarding its sales operations, it is operating blind with respect to its sales operations metrics.
Once a company installs a systematic way of tracking its sales operations KPIs, the company will find that scaling is quite easy. Good performance is easily identified and quantified through the use of metrics.
Training deficiencies become apparent immediately. Resources can be allocated based upon performance data.
Hiring decisions can be made based upon benchmarks, rather than hope. What teams had to do was commit to measurement before they could commit to improvement.
Your company's future — the future of a highly successful and scalable operation that generates substantial profit, rather than merely generating activity — depends upon the decisions made today regarding the use of sales operations KPIs and installing better systems.
Are you ready to see where the hidden revenue opportunities are located?
Are you ready to see where the hidden revenue opportunities are located?
MaverickRE automates the entire process described above — providing real-time visibility into every single critical metric and KPI without the need for manual spreadsheet work.
Teams that achieve 2-3 times greater conversion rates than their competitors are not working harder; they are working smarter with systems that provide them with real-time visibility into exactly where to focus their coaching efforts, how to direct the flow of leads based upon performance data, and which processes are losing opportunities and resulting in lost revenue.
Identify the leaks. Fix the leaks. Increase the number of closings. Drive more revenue.
MaverickRE provides real-time visibility into held rates, calls-per-appointment ratios, win rates by source, speed-to-everything metrics and intelligent lead routing based upon sales operations KPIs — with no spreadsheets, no guessing and no waiting.
👉 MaverickRE provides you with real-time visibility into the data you need to improve your sales operations performance and grow your business.