AMA: Salesforce Senior Director, Sales Strategy & Operations, Katie Cook on Revenue Ops KPIs

GREAT question. The biggest gap I often see when it comes to KPIs is not including personnel characteristics. Things like tenure, time in role, geographic distance to customer, etc. can have a HUGE impact on an AEs ability to sell. While it is often up to the sales leaders to identify these types of issues in their teams, strategy/revenue ops can help identify trends in organizations at large. For example, if 65% of your sales team was hired in the last 12 months and you have seen a marked decre ...Read More

So I may get drummed out of the Sales Strategy business for this answer, but I would have to say "raw" Pipe Generation. Yes Yes I know thats crazy! I very specifically included the word raw because I am referring to pipe generation numbers that have not been scrutinized by strategy/sales leadership. I say this because sales people are SMART. They know all the tricks of the trade. If they know they need to have $750k of pipegen each quarter as an example, I have seen time and time again sales peo ...Read More

I love this question because it gets beyond the nerdy numbers part of our job and gets to arguably the more difficult part--LEADERSHIP! Sales Strategist are trusted business partners to our sales leaders. We have a duty to advise them on their business, even if that means telling them they are missing the mark. But how do you tell them they are "missing the mark" if you have no idea what the mark even is! Depending on the size of your company, many of the KPIs will likely come from your higher e ...Read More

OOF! Asking the hard questions today! I love it! Yes you are 100% correct. I don't know how many times I felt like I should just get a dart board out or ask a magic 8 ball about our next FY targets because there are so many things that could effect our performance that we have no control over (pandemic, election results, weather, etc). That being said, I do the best I can to root myself in data (like any good strategist!). Find as many historical comparisons as you can whether in a similar verti ...Read More

The KPI that I tend to disagree with the most is hiring targets (I am using the term KPI very loosely here as some revenue ops are not involved with headcount planning). It is, of course, important to push businesses to grow, particularly when sales territories are too enriched and one salesperson cannot handled all the business themselves (undermanning = loss of revenue simply due to workload!). HOWEVER, this is a dangerous, double edge sword. When we set hiring targets without thorough capacit ...Read More