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

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 business. 1) Run-the-business OKRs should not just be day-to-day things (e.g., attend forecast meetings) as that doesn't really qualify as an OKR in my view. However, major work such as territory planning or quota setting might qualify as an OKR given the complexity and impact on the business. 2) Process/operational improvement OKRs are an important "intermediate" group that focus the team's attention on ways to make things work better. The range of possibilities here is enormous: introduce a new tool for sales teams, revamp a critical report (e.g., pipeline reporting, QBRs), improve the pricing approval process, change the campaign attribution model, and on and on. How many of these you can do in any period will depending on the size of the RevOps team and what other priorities you have. 3) Strategic initiative OKRs are the ones that often get pushed aside for the daily work but are essential to truly transforming a business and being viewed as a strategic advisor to the C-suite. While not everyone on the RevOps team might touch one of these each quarter, I do believe it's ideal if you can have enough so everyone is involved in some significant way. Examples of these might be org transformations (e.g., introducing a new role to support renewals), compensation redesigns (usage-based compensation is a hot topic right now for many companies), or even an overhaul of the RevOps team itself.

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 quality of conversations, the frequency of certain interactions like QBRs, and adherence to sales narratives. Doing this, and working closely with Sales Enablement and Sales Leadership, there's a chance to drive big improvements in overall performance and productivity. 2) Provide more insights into customer health and product usage. In today's environment, especially for SaaS companies, there's a lot more emphasis on churn prevention and growing the existing customer base rather than finding new customers (you still need to do that, but the balance has shifted as far as I can tell). I believe that to do this well, you need to dig into customers' usage of the product (for example, we measure a series of steps and actions taken by customers as part of our "customer milestones" measurement). This can help uncover opportunities for growth and proactive intervention where a customer is not being successful with your product. That needs to happen much earlier to take mitigation actions and avoid churn now that software and services spend are being carefully scrutinized to eliminate unused things.

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 AMA) you are responsible for measuring but don't the actual underlying work in RevOps. Second, there are KPIs that RevOps has accountability for in the sense that we directly or at least strongly influence performance and have control over the actions that lead to the measured outcome. I personally don't want to sign up for accountability if I cannot influence or do it myself. This is probably a narrower group of KPIs than above but you should look for ways to measure the quality of your work or processes you run, how responsive you are to needs of the business, and are you delivering on OKRs or other big projects.

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 (volume and value), conversion rates between stages, deal cycle times, ACVs, ARR, self-serve account volumes and revenue, etc. * Existing business performance: churn and contraction amounts and rates, expansion pipeline and rates, NRR, GRR, etc. * Profitability metrics (probably with Finance help) like LTV:CAC, SaaS Magic Number, payback periods, etc. * Productivity and rep performance metrics like attainment distributions, revenue and pipeline per rep, etc. Then there are KPIs that RevOps can "own" in the sense of having direct or at least strong influence over the performance. The right set for your company will depend on a lot of factors (and if you're the first hire you may have limited time on these). Here are a few ideas: * Quality outcomes such as forecast accuracy, quota setting accuracy (e.g., if you have a target of getting 80% of reps to 80%+ attainment, did you do it?), lead and account routing accuracy, and others that assess if you are running a clean process around these things * Responsiveness outcomes around SLA attainment on deal approvals if you run deal desk, ticket resolution rates and times for other issues from sales people * Maybe more OKRs than KPIs, but project completion outcomes can also be useful. For example, did we get quotas delivered on time, were new territories assigned within the targeted week at the start of the fiscal year, did we launch a new sales tool on time, etc.?

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 CSAT improvement since you're flying blind as to what to change and what to have various teams work on. Likewise committing to a KPI you can't influence is unwise. I think this might happen to a lot of RevOps teams where they feel obligated to sign up for a business outcome like number of new logos or a revenue growth rate. At the end of the day, RevOps can set incentives and strategies and allocate resources to achieving an outcome but we don't create demand in the market or sell anything to customers so it's really hard to commit to this since your fate is largely in other team's hands.

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 probably on the right track. There are a few other answers to this question on Sharebird (I wasn't sure that "hype" and "KPIs" was really a thing so I did some research...) and I agree with those assessments. But note that the authors point out not a problem with the metric itself, but the risk of it being misused or not connected to the broader business objective and outcome. In other words, context and implications matter with metrics.

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 boss should have a set of OKRs that you can use to guide yours. Most things will ladder up nicely to hers and a few might be less direct (in which case you should have a lot of conviction that it merits being an OKR for you). Then if you're a people manager, your team can set individual OKRs that ladder up to yours. This creates nice alignment and commitment to getting a few things done really well (vs. having everyone doing whatever without having thought about dependencies on other people or projects). Then naturally the individual level OKRs are the individual projects that tie this together.

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 Marketing, Sales, Success, or Support) * KPIs can often be socialized with just a few key partners in standing meetings. * I often use a 1:1 with my boss or other leaders to talk through an idea and what we will measure. That's often enough to proceed but it forces you to sharpen your thinking and commit to something. * Medium size investments or programs that affect multiple teams * This can often be done with a good "roadshow" type document that includes the broader project plan and goals. * You might end up presenting this more formally to an exec team meeting or some other leadership group to socialize the KPIs and get buy-in. The KPIs are probably secondary to other parts of that roadshow but again show what you expect to drive through the work. * Major strategic programs * This likely needs a dedicated effort on setting KPIs. This may go as far as having a working group define them, gather data to set a baseline, and extensively document and socialize these. * In some recent work I have been involved in at Intercom, we put a pretty large effort into setting initiative KPIs (both primary and secondary) and then reviewing those to make sure they tie into company-level goals. This was a very collaborative effort of Finance, Business Operations, data science teams, initiative leads, and others and then taken to formal steerco and exec meetings to review and approve. After the work is done, sharing a scorecard or similar KPI readout of the KPIs is a great way to show success (or failure) of the initiative. Ideally this should be designed in the pre-work so everyone knows what they're going to get on a pre-set schedule (this helps avoid getting asked for ad hoc reviews too!). How that gets distributed is up to you and depends on the same factors as above -- a 1:1 might be enough, or you may need a meeting with a steerco or exec team for a major program. My team and I are in the midst of this now. We defined four primary KPIs and ~20 secondary metrics we wanted to track for a major GTM model change. Those were turned into a nicely organized document, we build the dashboards and reports needed, and now assemble that monthly and share with the leaders involved in the program. It's a bigger lift for a large program but has been hugely helpful setting expectations and conveying performance data in an organized way.

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 that campaign or asset. Then even without direct attribution, can you see movement in the metrics the marketing team expected? Maybe that's an uplift in brand recognition vs. the pre-campaign baseline. Maybe that's an increase in visits to your website or increased time spent on the website / viewing videos. Perhaps it's an increase in pipeline generated for sales or more self-serve trials starting. If you can think through what you expect will happen after launch, then you can at least see if that metric moves vs. the prior level and point to success or failure. Even if imperfect, it's better than not measuring at all.

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) across this journey if they aren't already captured. Here's a list I provided elsewhere in the AMA with some additions. It is by no means comprehensive or right for every company to use. * New business pipeline metrics: web visits, marketing attribution, MQLs, qualified pipeline (volume and value), conversion rates between stages, deal cycle times, ACVs, ARR, self-serve account volumes and revenue, etc. * Existing business performance: churn and contraction amounts and rates, expansion pipeline and rates, NRR, GRR, etc. * Customer success performance: product usage, customer health, etc. * Profitability metrics (probably with Finance help) like LTV:CAC, SaaS Magic Number, payback periods, etc. * Productivity and rep performance metrics like attainment distributions, revenue and pipeline per rep, win rates, etc. I find it much harder to measure RevOps performance with metrics than I do the business we support (demand gen marketing and quota carrying sales are probably the two most quantifiable roles for performance assessment in a company). That said, there are KPIs that RevOps can usefully be evaluated against because we have direct or at least strong influence over the performance. Here are a few ideas: * Quality outcomes such as forecast accuracy, quota setting accuracy (e.g., if you have a target of getting 80% of reps to 80%+ attainment, did you do it?), lead and account routing accuracy, and others that assess if you are running a clean process around these things * Responsiveness outcomes around SLA attainment on deal approvals if you run deal desk, ticket resolution rates and times for other issues from sales people * Maybe more OKRs than KPIs, but project completion outcomes can also be useful. For example, did we get quotas delivered on time, were new territories assigned within the targeted week at the start of the fiscal year, did we launch a new sales tool on time, etc.?

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 behind the new market entry and the business case that supported it, you should be able to create at least a few KPIs that tie to those goals based on assumptions from the company's past experience. For sake of example, let's say you have decided to launch a new product. The business case says it's a $100M opportunity for the company, half from new customers and half from cross-selling to existing customers. You could then estimate some pipeline, logo or attach rate, and revenue KPIs based on estimated adoption of the product by new customers and existing (ideally based on historical data on similar product launches such as 5% first quarter, 15% second quarter, 25% by year 1, etc.). From there, you could reverse-engineer further KPIs that would support that outcome such as the dollar amount of qualified pipeline needed, number of opportunities to be created, number of MQLs from a launch campaign, number of outbound activities or demos required, and so on. This will really depend on how your GTM motions work as to what is most important to the launch. Regardless of the quality of the inputs you have and the degree to which you have to make guesses with or without any data, I think it's really important to have something to measure against even if it feels arbitrary. That gives you a framework to discuss performance even if it needs to be revised as you learn more. That's a far better outcome than having no KPIs at all and not being able to assess the success or otherwise of the program.