Business opportunity and other small franchise owners are always looking for new and enlightening information and advice when it comes to sales, and rightly so. One trend in particular they need to be aware of concerns the evolution of the data being used to manage the overall sales cycle and evaluate results more accurately than in the past.

Rick McCord is the Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Services for Domo, a new and yet already award-winning company that is changing the business intelligence industry for good, making it easier for managers and executives to readily access and harness the power of their companies’ data in groundbreaking ways. In recent blog posts for the company’s website, McCord highlights the cutting-edge key performance indicators (KPIs) that are being used by his company to more accurately predict sales success.

Although Domo’s products and services are aimed at larger enterprises as opposed to small businesses, for the time being anyway, McCord asserts that the insights he provides with regard to these “new” metrics can be helpful to virtually any organization that has something to sell. “For sales leaders, the metrics we choose to watch make all the difference,” he writes. Where the old way of doing things wasn’t necessarily wrong, it “didn’t give me (or anyone else) “the deeper insight…needed to accurately predict sales.”

Although quite expansive, today’s list of new KPIs contains five that McCord says can be particularly helpful to today’s sales leaders, enabling them to evaluate their processes, failures and accomplishments more effectively than ever before:

1. Pipeline Velocity—Knowing the total of what deals are in the pipeline is no longer enough because all of them are not guaranteed to close. This new metric asks how quickly things are moving through each stage of the sales process and then offers a more reliable predictor of future success.

2. Winning Percentage—The number of deals being worked on is important, but it’s not a good indicator of actual sales. This metric uses average close rates to more accurately predict conversions.

3. Closing Speed—Knowing how many deals closed in a given time period is good, but knowing how long it took to close each one is even better.

4. Acquisition Costs—A great deal is only great when it costs you less to close it than it’s worth. This new metric tracks the true profitability of any deal.

5. New Logos—Predicated on the fact that “all sales are not created equal,” this metric measures “real growth” in terms of net new customers as opposed to closed sales among existing customers.

To learn more about Domo and read McCord’s many blog entries as well as those of his colleagues, click here to access the company’s website now!