What sales-per-hour means and how VICIdial computes it

Sales-per-hour is the headline productivity number on most outbound floors: how many sales an agent books for every hour of effort. It sounds simple, but VICIdial surfaces it two different ways depending on which report you open, and the two answers will not match. This post explains both formulas, where each lives, and which one to trust for what.

The primary definition

In the Team Performance Detail report, sales-per-hour is the total number of sales divided by talk time. A "sale" is any call the agent ended in a Sales-category Status (lead status), so the count tracks dispositions, not raw connects. Talk time is the time the agent actually spent talking to customers. Dividing sales by talk time tells you how productive the conversations themselves were, ignoring how long the agent sat waiting for the dialer to feed them.

That choice is deliberate. By using talk time rather than total logged-in time, this version isolates conversation efficiency. An agent who closes fast inside each call scores well here even if the dialer kept them waiting between calls.

The formula, drawn out

flowchart TD
  A[Sales-status dispositions] --> C{Divide}
  B[Talk time] --> C
  C --> D[Sales-per-hour: Team Performance Detail]
  E[Sales-status dispositions] --> G{Divide}
  F[System time] --> G
  G --> H[Sales-per-hour: Performance Comparison]

The second definition, and why it differs

Open the Performance Comparison report instead and the column with the same name, SALES PER HOUR, is computed differently: total sales divided by system time. System time is the agent's whole logged-in window, including wait and disposition time, not just talk. Because system time is always larger than talk time, this version produces a smaller, more conservative number for the same agent on the same day.

There is a third, closely related field worth knowing. The Team Performance Detail report also carries SALES PER WORKING HOUR, which is sales divided by system time, the same math the Performance Comparison report calls sales-per-hour. So if you want the two reports to agree, line up SALES PER WORKING HOUR against the Performance Comparison figure, not against the plain sales-per-hour column.

Where each column lives

• Team Performance Detail: SALES PER HOUR = sales / talk time. Also has SALES PER WORKING HOUR = sales / system time.
• Performance Comparison: SALES PER HOUR = sales / system time, shown across today, yesterday, and 2, 3, 5, 10, and 30 days back.

For a column-by-column walkthrough of where these sit, read how to read the Team Performance Detail report and how to read the Performance Comparison report.

Which one should you watch

Use the talk-time version when you are coaching conversation skill, because it strips out idle time the agent does not control. Use the system-time version when you are measuring whole-shift output, because it counts the cost of pauses and slow dialer pacing. Neither is wrong; they answer different questions. Read sales-per-hour next to a Conversion rate and the rest of your Agent performance columns so you can tell whether the agent is booking sales quickly or just talking to a lot of people.

A useful sibling metric is first-call resolution, which shows how many touches each person took. Read what first-call resolution is to pair efficiency with effort. Both belong in the same coaching conversation.

For the full map of which report answers which question, start at our guide to VICIdial reports. And if you do not have a dialer producing these numbers yet, our managed VICIdial plans provision a fully reporting box in under 40 seconds.