All Atrium Metrics Catalog by Role, Goals, and Use Case
Atrium Card Link: Average Sales Cycle Card
- Overview
- Why It's Important
- How Do I Use it?
- Examples of how to use this in practice
- Advanced Details
- FAQ
Overview
The Average Sales Cycle card measures the average number of days from an opportunity's creation to Closed Won in order to measure how long it takes to close a deal.
This card will default to show you New Business opportunities to help teams focus on the sales cycle for new business acquisition.
(Learn more about how Atrium Actions & Objects work to calculate metrics.)
Metric Time Vector:The "Close Date" of the closed won opportunities used in the calculation.
Metric Value Vector:The number of days from each closed won opportunity's creation to its Close Date, divided by all closed won opportunities.
Why It's Important
Average Sales Cycle is a key input in the Revenue Formula, as it measures how long it takes a team or reps to win a deal. When assessing team and rep performance, average sales cycle is an important metric to investigate either sales velocity issues or outperformance.
How Do I Use It?
You should use this card in Dashboards & Alert Feeds you use to measure team and rep performance along with our other Revenue Formula Metrics (Bookings = Opps Owned * Win Rate * ASP / Sales Cycle) to understand performance issues or successes.
Average Sales Cycle should be tracked as it changes over time - especially as your sales process changes. For example, if you move into new verticals, change pricing, or move up market, its important to inspect how these changes affect how long it takes for deals to close.
Average Sales Cycle can also be used in your Forecasting and Planning Saved Views as historical deal cycles crossed with current open opps can help accurately plan potential future bookings.
Use Data Filters on the Average Sales Cycle card to inspect particular types of opps or accounts to better understand more specific cases like different Account Types, Opp Types, or Verticals.
Examples of how to use this in practice
Diagnose where individual reps have longer sales cycles for coaching:
Track changes in sales cycle for your team over time:
Advanced Details
$0 or Negative Value Opportunities: Occasionally organizations will Close / Win opportunities with $0 or negative values in order to true up bookings number or keep track of other information. Those $0 or negative value opps are not included in Average Sales Cycle.
FAQ: Why would an opp show a negative opp age?
On the average sales cycle card, it is possible for opps to have a negative opp age because of retroactive opp creation and closing.
If the close date of an opportunity in Salesforce is before the actual date of creation (i.e. hitting the new opp button in Salesforce), Atrium will show a negative opp age. Atrium measures opp age from when the opportunity was actually created in Salesforce; manually changing the create date in Salesforce will not change the opp age shown on the ASC card.
For example, assume a rep has some Salesforce hygiene issues and was to close a deal on December 2. The deal actually closed, but the rep later realized that an opp (or correct type of opp) was never created. The rep then created an opp on December 12 and changed the close date manually to December 2. Atrium looks at the actual create date for that opp (December 12) and the close date (December 2) to come up with an opp age of -10 days.