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Which accounts in the territory nobody has touched this quarter. Which rep carries ninety accounts and works twenty. Which region is growing on three customers and losing the rest. From the CRM and the revenue source you already have, account IDs only.
What a newly hired rep should be given on day one from the book they inherit: the accounts ranked by revenue with days since last touch, the returning lines that were bought and dropped, the dormant accounts with their cadence and run rate, the open deals with slip counts, and the tier cadence that says who to call first. A ninety-day plan in three lists, the measures that say whether the ramp is on track, and why it beats a week of shadowing.
16 Sept 20263 min readWhy pipeline, forecast and win rate all rest on whether anyone contacted the account, and how any B2B sales team measures coverage from CRM activity: untouched accounts, rep load, territory trend against plan, and the reconciliation to invoiced revenue.
16 Sept 20263 min readHow a sales leader measures the share of first meetings that become a qualified opportunity within a stated window, per rep and per source, from the activity log and the pipeline: the conversion rate, the meetings with no opportunity and no follow-up, the reps with many meetings and little pipeline, the sources whose meetings convert, and why the measure sits between activity and pipeline where most teams measure neither.
16 Sept 20262 min readHow a sales leader measures the load on each rep from the CRM export, accounts and open opportunities weighted by expected effort, sets the norm from the team's own best-performing reps, and finds the two failure modes the headcount plan hides: reps with too many accounts to touch and reps with too few to hit number.
16 Sept 20262 min readHow a sales leader measures the days between an account being assigned to a rep and the first logged touch, from the assignment history and the activity log: the median per rep, the accounts past a stated number of days with no touch, the effect on first-year revenue from the team's own history, and why the number is the earliest coverage signal a team has on new business.
16 Sept 20262 min readHow sales teams should choose analytics software: start from the questions, check the data you hold, ask vendors ten questions, avoid the traps.
24 Sept 20264 min readWhen a sales rep or account manager leaves, the accounts they owned are at their most exposed and receive the least attention. This page gives a handover checklist for the first thirty days: reassigning every account the same week, ranking the book by value and by risk so the new owner knows where to start, the first-contact deadline per tier, what to capture from the leaver before they go, the contracts and renewals due in the next six months, and the two measures, time to first touch and ninety-day retention of the inherited book, that show whether the handover worked.
17 Sept 20265 min readLagging indicators in sales report results after they have happened: revenue, churn, win rate. Leading indicators move earlier and can still be acted on: coverage at cadence, dormancy, pipeline created, utilisation before renewal. This page sets out the difference, lists common pairs, and gives the test most teams skip: checking on the business's own history that the supposed leading indicator actually moved before the lagging one, by how long, and how reliably.
17 Sept 20264 min readThe complete meeting-to-opportunity conversion calculation on ten first meetings from two reps, small enough to check by hand: the first-meeting rule, the source per account, the pipeline's opportunity created dates, the thirty-day window, converted or not per meeting, the follow-up check, conversion per rep and per source, the no-follow-up list, the meeting whose opportunity came outside the window, and the assertion that first meetings equal converted plus followed-up plus no-follow-up, so a reader can reproduce every figure and then run it on their own activity log and pipeline.
17 Sept 20263 min readA template for a one-to-one pipeline review between a sales manager and a rep: the pre-read table that flags which deals need discussing, the six questions to ask about each flagged deal, how to handle stalled deals and slipped close dates, how the review feeds the forecast, and what to record. This page gives the flags, the questions, a thirty-minute structure, and a copyable template, so the review is about the ten deals that need a decision and not a recital of all forty.
17 Sept 20265 min readThe ten sales KPIs a B2B sales team should run on, whatever it sells, each with its formula, the export it comes from and what it tells you: value coverage at cadence, dormant accounts by prior value, share of wallet against similar customers, win rate from a stated stage, pipeline coverage against required, forecast bias per rep, time to first touch on new accounts, rep load against capacity, meeting to opportunity conversion, and customer concentration. Also the three measures most teams miss, the figures to drop, the identities, and who owns what.
17 Sept 20264 min readA hub for the templates on this site: the weekly sales meeting agenda, the pipeline review, the forecast sheet with tested categories, the monthly sales report, the quarterly business review, the one-page account plan, the territory plan, the account handover checklist, the win-loss form and the lost customer review, plus dashboard examples for five readers. Each template is copyable, says which export each figure comes from, and is designed so that the document is mostly filled in before anyone sits down to write it.
17 Sept 20263 min readA weekly sales meeting agenda built on computed lists rather than verbal updates: five minutes on the numbers that moved, ten on the accounts that need a call this week, ten on the deals that changed or stalled, and five on commitments made and kept. This page gives the agenda minute by minute, the four lists that feed it and where each comes from, what to cut from the usual meeting, the rules that keep it to thirty minutes, and a copyable template.
17 Sept 20265 min readThe honest answer to what share of a sales book should be covered: it depends on what counts as a touch on the desk, on the cadence each account is owed, and on whether coverage is measured by account count or by the value in the accounts. This page gives the ranges by desk, the three measurable things that set the right figure for one team, and the table to compute before anyone quotes a percentage.
17 Sept 20263 min readThe honest answer to what B2B sales win rate a team should have: the 20 to 30 percent figures usually quoted depend entirely on the stage the rate is measured from, whether it is counted by deals or by value, and what happens to deals that never close. This page gives the ranges by stage and desk, the three measurable things that set the right figure for one team, and the table to compute before anyone quotes a percentage.
17 Sept 20263 min readWin rate, close rate and conversion rate are used interchangeably in sales reporting and have different denominators. Win rate is won over decided. Close rate is usually won over all opportunities created, decided or not. Conversion rate is the share moving from any one stage to the next. This page sets out the three definitions, computes all three on the same hundred opportunities, shows when each is the right one, and lists the questions to ask before comparing a figure to anyone else's.
17 Sept 20263 min readA template for win-loss analysis that runs on every closed deal instead of an occasional interview programme: the seven fields to record at close, a short controlled list of loss reasons, how to stop price becoming the answer to everything, and the four tables the data produces: win rate by segment and size, by competitor, by source and by stage lost. This page gives the fields, the reason list, the tables, the interview questions for the few deals worth a conversation, and a copyable form.
17 Sept 20265 min readCoverage analytics for B2B sales teams. Who is covering what, and what is left.
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