Measuring Sales: 6 KPIs a Small Business Needs to Track Every Week

BOTrento Team3 October 2026 · Updated 12 October 202610 min read

Why six numbers, and why every week

Companies that write quotes by hand tend to have one of two problems. Either they measure nothing and decide on gut feeling, or they have so many indicators that nobody knows which ones matter. Six numbers cover the whole journey from a customer's first message to a signed order. When one of them gets worse, you know which step to investigate.

The weekly rhythm has a practical reason. An enquiry nobody answered cannot be rescued by a month-end review. After a week you still remember what happened, and you can act before the customer goes to a competitor.

One rule must hold before you start measuring: every enquiry has its own row in the record, an owner and a next step. If you don't have that yet, start with the routine in how to handle sales enquiries fast without losing any. Without it, the numbers won't add up.

6 sales KPIs: definitions that can't be read two ways

Most arguments about numbers arise because everyone imagines something different under the same word. That is why each KPI below has an exact definition. Write it into the header of your table and don't change it.

1. Number of new enquiries

Definition: the number of new sales cases created in the record during the week, whether they arrived by email, phone, web form or from an existing client. Do not count spam, supplier queries or complaints. If an existing client asks for a quote on a new job, that is a new enquiry.

2. Time to first response

Definition: the time from receiving the enquiry to the first substantive reply to the customer. An automatic acknowledgement such as "thanks, we'll be in touch" does not count. Track the median, not the average, because one enquiry forgotten over a weekend distorts the average. Also record separately how many enquiries waited longer than your internal limit.

3. Share of enquiries with a quote sent

Definition: how many enquiries from the given week received a price quote, divided by the number of new enquiries. When the share is low, the cause is either unsuitable enquiries or quotes nobody has time to write. You can tell them apart by the reason no quote was created, so keep a "reason for no quote" column with a few fixed values.

4. Quote-to-order conversion

Definition: the number of quotes that ended in a confirmed order during the week, divided by the number of quotes that ended in any way that week: accepted, declined or closed without a reply. Leave open quotes out of the denominator, otherwise the number will swing depending on how many quotes happen to be pending.

5. Follow-ups on time

Definition: the share of open quotes where the planned follow-up took place no later than the date stated in the record. Add a companion number: the count of open quotes with no next step scheduled. This is the group where half-won deals are most often lost.

6. Value of the open pipeline

Definition: the total value of all quotes sent and not yet closed as of the last day of the week. Also watch how the value moves: how many quotes were added, how many closed, and how many you manually closed as dead. Report quotes older than your usual decision time separately.

Routine: how to set up weekly measurement in one afternoon

1. Pick a single record. One CRM or one shared spreadsheet. If data lives in two places, the numbers will never reconcile.
2. Add the required columns: date and time received, date and time of first response, owner, status (new / answered / quote sent / won / lost / no quote), quote value, date quote sent, next-step date, reason for no quote and reason for loss.
3. Write the definitions into the header. Use the texts from the previous section. Everyone on the team must know what "answered" means.
4. Set a day and an owner. For example Monday morning, for the previous week. The same person calculates the numbers each time, using the same routine.
5. Just measure for the first few weeks. Set targets only once you know your baseline. A target guessed without data is usually worthless.
6. Attach one action to each number. If a number got worse, write down one concrete step, its owner and a deadline. Without an action, a report is just statistics.

If what holds you back is mainly the preparation of the quotes themselves, and that is why the share of enquiries with a quote is falling, read how to speed up sales proposals without losing control of your prices.

Weekly report template for your team

Send the report by email or in the team chat, always in the same format. That makes weeks easy to compare.

Subject: Sales – week [week number]

Hello,

overview for last week (previous week in brackets):
1. New enquiries: [count] ([count])
2. Median first response: [hours] ([hours]); over internal limit: [count]
3. Share of enquiries with a quote: [%] ([%]); most common reason for no quote: [reason]
4. Conversion of closed quotes: [%] ([%]); most common reason for loss: [reason]
5. Follow-ups on time: [%] ([%]); open quotes with no next step: [count]
6. Open pipeline: [value] ([value]); of which older than [number of days]: [value]

Actions for this week:
– [what] / [who] / [by when]
– [what] / [who] / [by when]

[Name]

Limit actions to two or three. If there are ten, none will get done.

Common mistakes that make the numbers meaningless

• Shifting definitions. One time "answered" counts from the phone call, another time only from the email. Change a definition only rarely, and note the change.
• Back-filling by hand. Response times added from memory a week later are unreliable. Record the date and time immediately, ideally automatically.
• Dead quotes in the pipeline. If you never close quotes that got no reaction, the pipeline grows but says nothing. Decide after how many unsuccessful follow-ups a quote gets closed.
• Judging people instead of the process. The numbers should show where the process gets stuck. If they are used to find someone to blame, the team starts working around the record.
• Too many KPIs. Every extra number has to be recorded, calculated and discussed. Start with these six and add more once you have reviewed them regularly for several weeks in a row.

How BOTrento approaches it

With manually handled enquiries, the biggest time sink is not calculating KPIs but discipline in the record. Someone has to log each enquiry, capture the response time and schedule the follow-up. BOTrento Chief of Staff is a managed process that takes this work over. It processes incoming enquiries from your mailbox, creates them in your record, prepares a draft reply or quote and watches the next steps. As a result, the data for all six numbers builds up continuously, without back-filling.

Principles of the process:

• Nothing is sent without human approval. Drafts of emails and quotes are always approved by someone on your team.
• A 14-day free trial. You can try BOTrento with no payment card and no API key of your own. The 14 days start with the first successful upload of your data (an import or a mailbox connection), and you have 7 days to prepare. Process KPIs can be agreed in advance, for example time to first response or the share of follow-ups done on time, and you can check the trial run against them. Profit or the number of orders cannot be guaranteed. We guarantee taking over the delivered process and fixing its defects.
• Your own API keys. The language model runs through the provider you choose with your own key. How it works is described in the help page on your own API keys. We store data on servers in Germany (EU). The text needed for the task is processed by the model provider you choose. A dedicated EU server that calls an external AI API is not a closed computation, though. For data protection details, see the practical GDPR and AI checklist.

In an internal pilot, the process handled 35 enquiries in 7 days and prepared 18 emails, 24 quotes and 15 actions. What such a flow looks like step by step is shown in the process demo on enquiries and quotes. You can find the scope of each plan, and start the free trial, in the overview of plans and the 14-day free trial.