How do you set revenue targets for your industry that you're focused on when the sales team's quota isn't tied to your industry?

There is an in-depth science to this that many sales or product strategy teams leverage, so with that caveat, I'm sharing a high-level approach. My recommendation is to break down the problem piece by piece and find each variable needed to set a revenue target (and a sales pipeline target and coverage ratio based on close rates to support attainment of that revenue target).   First get a sense of the addressable market. Talk with your sales leaders (or strategy team) to determine if you have a w ...Read More

Not sure I understand the question. If this is to set revenue targets for a new industry expansion where GTM resources have not yet been assigned, I'd do a top-down and bottom-up analysis of the total addressable market (TAM), then take a percentage of that TAM to set the revenue target. You'll need to have marketing-only activities ready to back up your assumptions if no other resources are available. Top-down: Research the overall industry, audience size, propensity to spend, competitive prici ...Read More

This is a tough one because it’s difficult to set any sort of revenue targets for your industry if sales is not fully aligned and compensated to sell to that industry. You could be setting yourself up for failure. Not sure who’s requiring you to set a target in this way, but I would first ensure that you have strong buy-in from your leadership / your executive team on what the expectations will be around accountability. Having said that, you could approach it in two ways: Set target based on int ...Read More

When I read the first part of your question, my first thought was to tie it to sales team quotas ;) In more mature industry GTM motions, having sales teams segmented by industry is best practice. For example, we had sales teams at SurveyMonkey fully dedicated to B2C, B2B, Financial Services and the public sector - they have different lingo, regulatory/compliance needs, use cases, product needs, etc. Ok, but what if you can't tie it to sales quotas? In my opinion, revenue may not be the right goa ...Read More

This is really tricky to do well, and requires strong executive leadership and business operations support to pull off. Right now, at Procore, I work in an environment where our sales teams -- and thus revenue targets -- are set by our three primary segments, so I don't have this issue, but our Product teams do -- and I've talked to them a lot about it, and I have also had this experience back when I was at Salesforce.  A few recommendations: Use modeling based on prior year attainment by indust ...Read More

Industry KPIs should encompass sales and marketing performance. Sales and marketing teams need alignment on pipeline, revenue goals, and rep productivity.   In many instances, when a proper solution marketing team is created, KPIs should encompass market penetration and sales performance. Even if quota isn't tied to the industry, benchmark figures must be baselined to grow off of: New Logo ARR Cross Sell ARR Rep Productivity  Upsell ARR Close Rates  Cycle Times Pipeline All of this then translat ...Read More

The strategic marketing team could provide direction on where the business has the greatest growth potential: where there is a strong product-market fit and room to capture a greater share of demand. They may already have target growth numbers in place. Next, you’ll need to determine whether you can identify the industry for each customer segment in the customer relationship management (CRM) system (e.g. Salesforce) and track their progress through the pipeline. With this information, your marke ...Read More

Formally, sales and sales ops should be setting revenue targets and the associated pipeline coverage targets needed to drive marketing strategy. At least for enterprise software companies with direct, quota-carrying sales organizations, compensation structure drives the ship so you wouldn't want to construct revenue targets apart from the sales team - that's bound to cause all sorts of alignment issues. If, in a marketing role, you decide that an industry focus is the right driver for messaging ...Read More

As a PMM, revenue is a trailing metric and the one you have the least control over. If there aren't existing quotas set by industry (and this is rare), this is likely to be unsuccessful. Instead, go back to the core KPIs for PMM: Opportunity creation (count), Qualified pipeline ($), and win rate (or pipe coverage). These are more direct to measure, and if you create opportunity for sales, they'll follow those dollars.  Establishing these can flow directly from past results and the next few quart ...Read More