1. Human Resources: * The human resources team handles hiring, onboarding, training, and development of sales personnel. * Alignment with human resources ensures that the sales team is effectively recruited, onboarded, and supported in their roles. * Collaborating with human resources facilitates the development of training programs, career paths, and incentive structures that motivate and retain top sales talent. 2. Finance/Operations Team: * The finance/operations team manages financial planning, forecasting, and reporting. * Alignment with the finance/operations team ensures accurate tracking and reporting of sales metrics and performance. * Collaboration with finance/operations helps ensure that sales strategies are financially viable and aligned with budgetary constraints. 3. Marketing Team: * The marketing team generates leads, builds brand awareness, and supports sales efforts through content, campaigns, and messaging. * Alignment with the marketing team ensures consistency in messaging, positioning, and lead generation efforts. * Collaborating closely with marketing facilitates the development of targeted campaigns and initiatives that drive sales pipeline growth.

Love this question, too. It's true. There are a few reasons: 1. You will always have outliers in a sales org. Sometimes a rep has a windfall and reaches quota without hitting KPIs, I've seen it. But the point of KPIs is the make success repeatable. 2. It gives your managers a tool kit to help coach and manage performance. 3. How do you eat an entire elephant? One bite at a time. Each KPI is a "bite" and we do best when faced with a big task (annual quota) to break it down to as small of pieces as we can.

This is such a great question! Having been a sales professional since 2013, I completely understand how burnout can arise, especially with the constant "reset" every quarter. What’s helped me is creating clear personal boundaries with work and sticking to a structured, repeatable process. By focusing on the things I can control and holding myself accountable to weekly, monthly, and quarterly KPIs, I’ve built a more predictable and manageable workflow. I view sales as running my own business—it requires exceptional time management and operational efficiency.

Sales KPIs play a critical role in forecast accuracy, especially in unpredictable markets. Amidst the market turbulence, really the only thing you have are deal execution and forecast accuracy. The difference between having a math based forecast everyone is aligned around vs not is stark. There are so many ways to cut your forecast in an effort to determine where you'll land. The math itself is important but the most important is having a shared language and "walkup" in order to pinpoint the assumptions you're making - so you can have an in-depth discussion in a short amount of time.

Consistent benchmarking of reps against the top performers within a sales org. This could help assess coaching needs on a regular basis and also identify any talent gaps that need to be considered when recruiting new reps. The coaching needs maybe be around product based knowledge or fine tuning a reps management of a sales cycle.

To influence across functions and teams, you need to first understand their goals and align your objectives with theirs. It's much easier to ask for help from others if you're helping them reach their own goals. To be successful, you'll need to: 1. Understand Their Goals: Align your objectives with theirs. 2. Communicate Benefits: Highlight how your project benefits them. 3. Be Adaptable: Tailor your approach to different audiences.

Many businesses focus on the effectiveness of a seller, where most of the attention should be. However, it can be very important to look at the effectiveness of those supporting your sellers, by measuring AE ramp time. If you can turn a 6 months period into say 4 months, you not only improve your revenue, but you can also improve the AE experience, leading to better employee satisfaction, higher referral rates, and lower attrition.

KPIs can be over-hyped when they solely focus on action and lack direction. E.g. “make 100 dials” can result in sellers sacrificing quality for quantity, or in the case of a company I’ve spoken with — hundreds of AEs calling a now-defunct local pizza line to pad their stats. (True story!) More helpful is to direct the action towards an end that benefits the seller and the business — “make 100 dials or key personas in our database to accomplish this relevant CTA”.

When it comes to shared KPIs with demand generation, the approach can vary depending on the maturity of the company. Here’s how I think about it: Early-Stage Companies: Focus on Quality Over Quantity * Content Quality and Professional Outreach: In the early stages of a company, the key focus should be on the quality of content and outreach. The goal is to ensure that your SDRs (Sales Development Representatives) are delivering professional, world-class communications across all channels—whether it’s phone calls, LinkedIn inbox messages, or emails. * Engagement Metrics: While it’s tempting to track metrics like the number of emails sent or calls made, what really matters at this stage is engagement. Specifically, you should be measuring responses from high-level decision-makers (e.g., VP, SVP, C-suite titles). The more you can gauge how effective your communications are at generating responses from these senior roles, the better you can assess the quality of your demand generation efforts. * Incentivizing Engagement: To further drive this focus, consider incentivizing engagement KPIs. For instance, rewarding SDRs for securing replies or meetings with senior executives can reinforce the importance of quality interactions over sheer volume. Mid to Late-Stage Companies: Establishing Rigorous Front-of-Funnel Metrics * Activity Baseline: As the company grows, establishing a baseline of activity becomes more important. This includes tracking traditional KPIs such as the number of emails sent, phone calls made, and LinkedIn messages delivered. However, these activity metrics should be supported by a solid foundation of territory planning, account-based marketing (ABM) lists, and accurate contact information. * Lead Qualification and Account Targeting: The effectiveness of demand generation also hinges on how well the team qualifies leads and targets accounts. Ensuring that your team is focusing on the right accounts and has a strong lead qualification process in place is critical for driving meaningful pipeline growth. Key Metrics to Track: * Engagement Rate: Track the percentage of outreach that results in meaningful engagement (e.g., replies from target contacts, meetings booked). This is a strong indicator of the quality of your demand generation efforts. * Conversion Rates: Measure the conversion rate from leads to qualified opportunities. This helps you understand how well your demand generation efforts are translating into real sales opportunities. * Pipeline Contribution: Assess how much of the pipeline is being generated by demand generation efforts versus other sources. This helps in understanding the impact of your demand gen strategy on overall revenue goals. * Time to Engage: Measure the average time it takes to get a response from a key target after initial outreach. Shortening this time can indicate more effective messaging and targeting. Commonly Missed Metrics: * Engagement Quality: Many teams focus on activity volume but miss out on measuring the quality of engagements. For example, are your SDRs getting responses from the right decision-makers, or just anyone in the company? Focusing on high-value engagements is critical. * Follow-Up Consistency: Another commonly missed metric is the consistency and effectiveness of follow-up. It’s not just about the first outreach but also how well your team follows up and nurtures leads through the funnel. * ABM Effectiveness: Teams often overlook how effectively they are targeting accounts in their ABM strategy. It’s important to regularly review and adjust your target account list based on what’s working and what’s not.

To effectively define the metrics for which you should hold sales accountable, I look at a few things: 1. Understand the "Sales Math" of the business across some core universally applicable SaaS Sales metrics 2. Compare the performance of the top 1/3 AE's against the bottom 1/3 AE's and look for which metrics contribute the most to high performance. 3. Go deep in those categories and correlate the activities top performers do differently to achieve these results. Quantify these activities to define supporting metrics which will lead to success. To break this down, let's understand the foundational "Sales Math." This is the equation to hit quota. The equation is fairly simple, but everyone's vernacular is different. It is actually extremely important to have very well defined steps in the equation to get consistency across your entire team. For example, we use opportunity stages with clear exit criteria for the buyer & seller to provide consistent insight into our Sales Math. So I would actually use a Stage 1 Opp Created - instead of Discovery Call, and Stage 3 Opp instead of Demo. For the purposes of this article, I'll use general sales terms that each business should be able to use as a starting point and customize from there. Here are the metrics that go into the Sales Math equation: * Activities to create a Discovery Call * # Discovery Calls per quarter * # Demos per quarter * Discovery Call to Demo conversion ratio * # Closed Won Deals per quarter * Demo to Closed Won conversion ratio * Average Deal Size * Average Deal Cycle These metrics will allow you to create the math to hit quota. If the current team's metrics do not consistently lead to the results you're looking for, then the Sales Math may be aspirational. If your team is executing against plan, then this may be your actual current metrics. Regardless, this is what you should feel confident telling AE's is the realistic, attainable and surpassable way to hit quota. For example, it could look like: $250k Quarterly Quota Average Deal Size of $84k 3 Deals to hit quota Close ratio of 33% 9 Demos needed per quarter 60% conversion ratio of Disco to Demo 15 Discovery Calls needed per quarter 50 Activities to create a Disco 750 Activities needed per quarter* *one note on activity. It's a metric I'll always track to understand a baseline level of effort, but I will often leave this out of the Sales Math when dealing with higher complexity sales and more senior AE's. Up to you if this should be in your Sales Math equation. Now take your Sales Math, and map your high performers against your low performers to look for which metrics have a high correlation with success. This exercise can be extremely surprising, so be open to what the data shows you, and hold your strong opinions loosely. Let's extrapolate this exercise across two different scenarios: Scenario 1 - Enterprise Here's how the exercise played out when running it against a more enterprise business (numbers are directional): 1. Activity, Discovery Calls and Demos were almost identical across high & low performers. This told me that pushing "more activity" was only going to have so much impact on performance. 2. The Closed Won conversion of top performers was 46% vs. 25% for the low performers. This was a huge gap, and had major implications on the Sales Math. 3. The Average Deal Size of top performers was $160k vs. $70k for low performers. This is also a huge gap compounded the success or struggles of each group when combined with the stat above. So the key metrics to optimize were Average Deal Size and Demo to Close Ratio. We wanted to maintain our activity levels, but really lean into increasing ADS and strategies to help with Deal Execution. Based on this knowledge of what would have the biggest impact in high performance vs. low performance, we added in some metrics & activities that would contribute to these results: * Updated our account prioritization to ensure a focus on the top deals & tracked activity against Priority 1 accounts * We blocked off time each week to prospect into our top accounts & scheduled strategy sessions to help get more meetings with these accounts * We tracked # of Discos with P1 accounts * # of Demo's with $100k+ Opportunities For Deal Execution * We tracked multi-threading in each account * Have we made an executive connection? * We created a cross-functional meeting to lean into competitive differentiation strategy * We set a threshold for accounts that needed a key deal review & updated our process to improve efficiency and make room for more accounts reviewed each week. Scenario 2 - Transactional Here's how the exercise played out when running it against a more transactional business (numbers are directional): 1. There were two camps of high performers. Those with extremely high activity, and those with higher disco to demo efficiency. Our most consistent top performer was a combination of both. Low performers fell into a similar pattern of either low activity or low conversion of discos to demos. 2. Deal size and win rate didn't have dramatic differences outside of 1 AE who closed the largest deal in segment history. This wasn't repeatable so we eliminated that result instead of putting too much time in hunting whales. 3. Average Deal Cycle for top performers was 39 days vs. 52 days for lower performers. Top AE's were closing deals faster, which allowed for more time to close more deals. From this data we defined additional metrics and activities to drive better results: * Upped the baseline activity volume expectations - there is a diminishing point of returns, but higher volume was almost always a component of success. We raised the bar, but also coached our highest volume AE's to lean more into their efficiency metrics instead of pushing to just do more. * Managers went deep on quality of discovery calls coming into the funnel * Title & Seniority level of Prospects - lower conversion was correlated with lower titles. * Was the company in our Ideal Customer Profile? Quality of company greatly impacted conversion * Why now? Did we offer someone a gift card or just bug them until their defense was worn down? Or was this call predicated on funding, a new hire, an inflection point in the business, intent or some other business catalyst? * Managers inspected quality of prospecting messages * Managers inspected quality of discovery calls * We rallied around creative promos to help the team close deals faster * We replicated decks top AE's were using to build value and establish trust faster In both Scenario 1 and 2 - we started with the baseline Sales Math, and through comparison of top performers vs. low performers we were able to lean into the 2 key metrics that had an outsized impact on performance. We then defined key activities and additional metrics which we could hold the team accountable to, that we knew would correlate towards greater success across the team. How easy was that? :)