AMA: Intercom VP, Sales Operations, Tyler Will on Revenue Ops KPIs

I don't think RevOps teams are completely missing anything, though that has to be a company-by-company assessment. In my experience, there are two places RevOps could place more emphasis than seems typical to provide better visibility into the performance of the business. 1) Provide more insight into rep-customer relationship "quality." With tools like Gong, activity tracking, and applications of GenAI to summarize customer interactions at scale, there is an opportunity to get deep into the qual ...Read More

The must-have KPIs will depend on your business but I think they should cover the customer journey from awareness of your product (think brand marketing) through the renewal and upsell/cross-sell process. One great way to go about this is to draw out your entire customer journey, overlay which teams touch the various parts of that, and then define the KPIs along the entire journey they each care about. You can then add other metrics that aggregate performance (e.g., quota attainment, revenue) ac ...Read More

There are lots of good guides available that explain the OKR process and how to set them. I think your preferred ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini/Perplexity answer to this question is probably quite useful and you could even feed in some specific context to your business that would help do this better than I can without any more context. The one maybe valuable thing I can add to this is a suggestion that everyone coordinate their OKRs in your reporting chain. If your company runs a good OKR process, your b ...Read More

I think there are two ways to think about "owning" a KPI when you're in RevOps. For many business performance metrics, you can "own" the KPIs in the sense of providing the data, reporting, and insights that enable other teams to be assessed against. These are things you are responsible for measuring but don't do directly in RevOps. There's a long list of these but the ones top of mind for me would be: New business pipeline metrics: things like marketing attribution, MQLs, qualified pipeline (vol ...Read More

I don't think there are many RevOps-related KPIs that are over-hyped or completely unimportant (we're not dealing with Community-Adjusted EBITDA here). The important thing is that you understand your business, the drivers of it, and the activities you want the people in various GTM roles to do for your business goals and needs. KPIs ultimately have to provide insights and value to the business so as long as you're doing that, and there aren't so many metrics everyone's eyes glaze over, you're pr ...Read More

Great question! This is important to get right so you are aligned with your boss, key stakeholders, and Analytics and Finance partners. Setting KPIs as part of strategy setting / project planning is beneficial and too often overlooked. Assuming you identified the KPIs needed to assess the work, there are a few ways I see this done well. The approach depends on the scope and extent of cross-functional collaboration on the project. Smaller RevOps-centric change (i.e., something that just impacts M ...Read More

In situations like entering new markets (I'm think new geo, segment, or product intro), ideally the company has a business case justifying the investment that can be the starting point for your KPIs. Anchoring to these "early days" KPIs in the business case is probably your best bet to making things as minimally arbitrary as possible. If that sizing/business case creation is not happening, there is a bigger issue to address than RevOps KPI setting! Assuming you have some idea of the reasons behi ...Read More

There are two ways I think about RevOps accountability when it comes to KPIs. First, for business outcome-type metrics, the accountability for RevOps comes from providing accurate and timely reporting and insights on that KPI to other teams. Maybe most simply, RevOps isn't compensated on quota attainment but is absolutely accountable for setting quotas, measuring attainment, and ensuring reps are paid accurately. There is a large group of KPIs (I have shared a list in a few other answers in the ...Read More

The exact OKRs for RevOps will depend on the circumstances of your business but I believe teams need to have a mix of run-the-business deliverables, process/operational improvements, and larger strategic initiatives. With all the pressure on day-to-day work and fire fighting in RevOps, I think the latter two are important to set and align with your stakeholders (e.g., CRO, VP Demand Gen, FP&A) in order to have the air-cover needed to say no to other things and make real change in your busine ...Read More

Any KPI where you either do not understand the mechanisms to drive that KPI or cannot influence the outcome is a bad choice. Not understanding what would be necessary to hit a KPI is a recipe for failure because you can't give direction to the people who have to take that action. Let's say there was a KPI to reach some higher level of CSAT but no one knew what the underlying causes of low CSAT are because of a lack of data and feedback from customers. It would be unwise to commit to achieving a ...Read More

Attribution is challenging but ideally your martech system and scoring models can provide you with coverage in most cases. I am certainly not an expert on marketing attribution, but I think the team launching a campaign or building an asset should have an idea what benefit it will drive and where that might show up in the metrics. If you're only changing that one thing (i.e., a controlled experiment), it may be best to show an uplift in a few metrics vs. a baseline and attribute the change to th ...Read More