Which sales numbers should you check every week?

Pick numbers that move when the team does something this week. Revenue arrives at the end of the month, and by then the week that caused it is gone. The set for a team of one to ten sellers:

• New inquiries: new requests and messages, each inquiry counted once.
• Reply on time: inquiries answered within your standard, divided by all inquiries.
• Conversations and meetings: held, not just scheduled.
• Proposals: sent in writing, with a price and terms.
• Deals with a step and a date: open deals with a next step and a due date recorded, divided by all open deals.
• Sales: count and amount, by the rule you agreed, by payment or by signed contract. Do not mix them.
• Overdue: actions whose due date has passed.

Numbers do not argue; definitions do. One seller counts every message as an inquiry, another counts only website requests, and the same customers give two different numbers. Write one sentence per number: what it counts, from which CRM field, by which date. Keep that page where the team can see it.

Use one date rule everywhere. Count a sale by the rule you agreed, payment or signed contract, and never switch between them. Count by creation date, and a slow month borrows results from a fast one.

Revenue still matters: it goes in the monthly report to the owner, with three numbers that need more than a week of deals: win rate, pipeline coverage and the median sales cycle. If a number on the weekly page moves when nobody does anything, it belongs in that report too.

Read the numbers in the first five minutes of the weekly meeting, for the team and for each seller. Compare them with your own last four weeks; a norm from another company knows nothing about your team. One bad week is often noise. As a starting rule, act on three weeks in the same direction.

Read them in pairs, through four numbers you calculate from the seven: average deal size, and the conversion from inquiry to conversation, from conversation to proposal and from proposal to sale. Many inquiries with few conversations point to the first reply. Many proposals with few sales point to the proposal itself, and more inquiries will not help.

A number that has moved the wrong way for three weeks becomes one decision with an owner and a date. It goes on the same list as the meeting's other decisions.

Seven numbers fit on one screen and take five minutes to read. Each extra one takes time from the deals. Add a number only when a question keeps coming back that none of the seven answers, and drop one when you do.

The Seven weekly numbers kit has a spreadsheet to track them, a guide to reading them and a numbers agreement where the team writes down the definitions. To start, a shared spreadsheet with one row per week is enough.

Example (invented numbers): a team of three logs 41 new inquiries in a week, and 33 of them, 80%, got a reply on time. There were 18 conversations and meetings and 9 proposals. Of 20 open deals, 14 have a step and a date, which is 70%. The week brought 2 sales for $9,000, and 11 actions are overdue. Calculated from these: an average deal size of $4,500, 44% from inquiry to conversation, 50% from conversation to proposal and 22% from proposal to sale. Against the last four weeks, overdue has doubled while the rest held, so the decision for the next two weeks is about overdue steps.

By Friday, write a one-sentence definition for each of the seven numbers, agree how a sale counts and fill in the last four weeks from the CRM.

Which numbers to check every week, with one definition for the whole team.