Most founder-led companies track something before they hire a sales director, usually revenue against target, and maybe a rough sense of how many leads came in that month. That's not enough to evaluate whether a new hire is actually improving things, or to write a job description specific enough to attract the right person.
The metrics that actually predict revenue
- Pipeline coverage: the ratio of open pipeline value to your target for the period. A healthy business typically needs three to four times its target in pipeline to reliably hit it. We go into this in more detail in our breakdown of what pipeline coverage actually means.
- Win rate: the percentage of qualified opportunities that close. A dropping win rate with a growing pipeline usually points to a qualification problem, not a closing problem.
- Average deal size: tracked over time, this tells you whether you're moving upmarket, downmarket, or just staying flat.
- Sales cycle length: how long it takes a deal to move from first contact to closed won. A lengthening cycle with no change in deal size is an early warning sign worth investigating before it shows up in a missed quarter.
- Forecast accuracy: how close last quarter's forecast was to what actually closed. This is the metric that tells you whether your pipeline data can actually be trusted.
Why founders tend to track the wrong things
Without a sales leader in place, it's natural to fall back on activity metrics: calls made, emails sent, leads generated. These are easy to measure but don't reliably predict revenue, because they say nothing about the quality of what's in the pipeline or how likely it is to close. A team can be extremely active and still be having the wrong conversations with the wrong accounts.
Why this matters before you hire, not just after
Having a real baseline on these five metrics before a new sales director starts does two things. First, it gives you an honest way to evaluate whether the hire is actually improving performance, rather than relying on gut feel or how confident they sound in meetings. Second, it makes the job description and the first 90 day plan far more specific, because you can point to exactly which number needs to move rather than a vague mandate to "grow revenue."
If you don't currently have visibility into these numbers, that's usually the first thing a proper sales audit uncovers, and it's worth having before you write the job spec for whoever is going to be accountable for moving them.