Naturally, in most cases, sales teams are mainly measured against revenue. This could come in many forms such as potential revenue such as leads, MQLs, SQLs, etc., or actual revenue from active and existing clients. I think there is one main KPI that is commonly overlooked, and that is the quality of the relationship with the client. This is a critical aspect that more often than not, is not measured. And I completely understand as it is incredibly difficult to do so. While a great and trustful relationship with a client will not always correlate with revenue in the immediate term, this is the key metric that will ensure long-term partnership and mutual accountability going forward. A great sales representative will forgo short-term gains in order to build a long-term partnership.

Staying up to date on industry trends and sales enablement best practices is something that needs time to absorb the information to analyze if your organization needs to adjust any of the current or future programs. Below I have outlined a few ways to stay up to date on both industry trends and best practices. Industry Trends Sales Enablement is accountable for providing the GTM customer-facing teams with the current information and training to assist them in their customer engagements. Below are some of the Industry Trends to review based on your business needs. * Vertical Markets - Sign up to industry papers, forums and magazines to stay ahead * Personas - Sign up to any CSuite forums, magazines and blogs to stay informed of the thinking * Technology - Sign up to the technology forums that align with your solutions, preferably your own company's customer early adoption, or customer forums or developer communities * Purchase Industry Benchmarking Reports : Forrester or Gartner to assist in your efforts There are alot of vendors that offer enablement and insights for the enablement practioner. Below are the top three enablement professional networks that would help you. SalesEnablement Pro ATD (Association for Talent Development) Sales Enablement Society (Chapters are local in your area)

I stronly believe that sales people are one of the most likely people to get to the highest position in any business right upto the role of a CEO. In fact, many CEOs in global companies either come from either sales or product background. * A sales person would start their sales career somewhere as a SDR/BDR. * And then move into an account executive quota carrying role. * From there, they would either branch into management or continue to be a senior Individual Contributor (think about a Key Account Director) * I have seen successful sales people eventually getting into GM, CRO or even CEO roles

I always recommend that candidates study the job description carefully. Take a look at the qualifications and skills/experience that the hiring manager wants. Do your best to come up with examples/stories to showcase those desirable skills/experiences in the interview. If you have time, it never hurts to connect with someone who is doing the role today and pick their brain on what they like, don't like, and do to succeed in the role. You should be able to find them on LinkedIn. This type of insight is invaluable as you will be learning from someone who is doing the job you want. If you're talking to a cross-functional partner that you're not as familiar with, get curious. For example, I really appreciate it when candidates take the time to ask me, "how can I make your life easier in this role? how can this role help contribute to your team?" This type of question is a launchpad and invitation to discuss future collaboration opportunities. Remember it's just as important for you to evaluate if this role or company is a right fit for you as it is for the hiring manager and company to evaluate if you are a right fit for them. So be sure to throw in one or two questions to help you evaluate your decision as well. 

Be prepared: C-Suite folks are busy people- don't waste their time. Ensure you are prepared for every meeting you have with them. Anticipate the questions you would expect them to ask and have your answers ready to reply with in real time. Be clear and concise: It goes a long way in terms of how you show up to the C-Suite if you can articulate what you need to say in a clear and concise way. If you are taking the time to prepare, this should be easy enough to accomplish. Properly prepare them: If you are running a meeting or call together or simply need your C-Suite's involvement in a deal or project you're working on, it is critical to properly prep them for it. Take the extra time to build out a pre-read that outlines the background of the deal or project, who's involved, the goal of their involvement, what you actually need from them, and in some cases suggested ghost written content (i.e. ghost written email in a deal for exec to exec alignment). Simply put, if you are asking something of them, make it as easy as possible for them to get up to speed and execute on it. Be confident: The C-Suite are people too! Of course, have respect, but also have confidence in you and make sure that shines through. 

So much of the sales KPI tracking has been automated (# meetings, Pipeline generated, funnel progression) so I find the manual ones more difficult to track, but move the needle the most. ie: how many on-sites did a rep conduct this quarter? It's a manual process for reps to log into a CRM and update a meeting field as "in person" and often gets over looked in an organization. There is no substitute for in person meetings. Another example that's difficult to track things like how many new business units or contacts from other business units you broke into in a month, quarter, or year.

This is a great question, and how we have done this at Vanta has evolved over the years. Being thoughtful about how sales communicates updates to the rest of the company (and vice versa) is so critical. Today, we have a number of public slack channels where sales or GTM-related updates are regularly shared. We also host a public GTM All-Hands once a month that the entire company is (optionally) invited to attend. We also have monthly business reviews where GTM and EPD (engineering, product, design) representatives are asked to report on progress on key cross-functional company initiatives. All this to say, there are any number of ways that you can (and should) communicate sales updates to the rest of the company. Sometimes even a weekly email is enough to do the trick. H/t to my CRO for sharing that idea!

Great question & cross-functional support is paramount to success. My best recommendation: * Find common areas of overlap or shared interest * Align on the outcomes you both want to impact * Setup a 'stand-up' cadence (weekly/bi-weekly) On more extensive efforts, a project manager can be helpful. For smaller steps, stay aligned on an end goal, divide & conquer workstreams, and hold one another accountable.

By far the most over-hyped KPI is total pipeline created. This is certainly a key metric to track week over week as a health check, but it provides little insight into what's actually going on. The problem with total pipeline created, is at no point should the conversation end with that KPI. If it's low - why? If it's high - why? Was it one large opp? Was it a bunch of baby opps? Was it quality pipeline? Was it from one AE/Segment/Business Unit - or is everything firing on all cylinders? At best it provides directional guidance to tune into major variances and inspect. At worst it provides false confidence in a pipeline that won't get you to goal. Typically addressing total pipeline creation falls into one of two camps: 1. Mention & move on. These are meetings where the metric is called out, compared to last week and it's either * Good - "great job, let's see if we can stretch this 10% higher next week" * Bad - "we really need to prioritize pipe gen this week. Get on it." 2. Paralysis by analysis. These meetings show the metric, and then dive into 40 slides with individual permutations of how everything performed over the past week; leading to information overload and very little insight into what actually needs to change. This is why instead of just tracking total pipe creation - we want to take a three-pronged approach: 1. How are we tracking towards our pipeline generation goal (which is a leading metric against future bookings)? 2. Identify the factors that are contributing to the current results. 3. Define strategies to optimize the path to goal The standard discussion described above hits the first objective, skips number 2, and the only strategy is often "do more." We could write an entire post on steps 2 and 3, but here are a few variables that can take your basic "total pipeline creation" reporting to the next level * # of opportunities created & average opportunity value. This controls for the one big opp skewing results. You generally want more big deals, but don't want to have to rely on only one big deal to hit the goal. This helps monitor quality & quantity. * Split by region/segment/AE's - this allows you to identify people and parts of the business that are doing well and understand why (do more of it, share learnings, double down). It also ensures that those who aren't doing well don't hide behind overall success of the business and get neglected. We want to identify why they're struggling, and ideally get them unstuck to improve performance. * Pipeline by opportunity source - attribution can lead to some sticky conversations, but tracking where the pipeline is coming from is necessary to improve the overall output. This isn't meant to start a blame game, but you can't optimize something you don't measure. So if AE's, SDR's, Marketing, Partnerships, or PLG is slacking - what can we do about it? If something is working incredibly well - how can we do more? * Pipeline conversion metrics - how is the pipeline that's coming in converting through the funnel to closure? Are disco to demo conversion rates improving, declining or staying the same? What about win rate? Any new trends where we should ride the wave? Anything that's not working which we should stop doing? These metrics will give you a much deeper understanding of the factors that contribute to current results and lay a strong foundation so you can define strategies to help optimize results. With a strong team and partners in marketing, partnerships, SDR and RevOps leadership - you're a brainstorming session away from having your best pipeline generation quarter yet.

It's extremely important to build a network across the sales industry either by joining user groups or reaching out to your peers at other companies and asking for a " coffee chat " to understand how they are tackling the challenges and where they see opportunity. I also belief in asking new starters what they liked from there previous company in reference to sales development You could set up an RFI and have various companies come and present to you or commission a report via sales enablement agencies on best practices.