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 decrease in activities being logged, is this due to the activities not occurring or is this due to a lack of training on how to log activities? The role of the sales strategist goes BEYOND revenue attainment. We must often look deeper than surface level KPIs and work with our the greater sales support network (Sales Programs, Sales Enablement, etc) to help solve complicated problems that go beyond pipe generation and quota attainment.

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 capacity analysis, it can lead to some pretty serious, compounding problems. Most obviously would be the tendency to hire ANY one vice THE one. Substandard hiring leads to salesperson underperformance, which leads to higher cost book, lower margins, overtasked first line leaders, etc. Ultimately, if you end up over saturating your sales force (i.e. carrying a group of unproductive sales people), it could lead to layoffs. Throwing more people at a problem, especially in mature businesses, is rarely the right answer.

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 people submit opportunities (cough) often for next FY or several quarters away that are, frankly, not real. They will game the game to check the pipe gen box, and the pipe is full of garbage. This can throw off your coverage calculations and paint a rosy picture where there is not one. As a result, it is a MUST to regularly inspect your business' pipeline in order to maintain an accurate pulse of your business.

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 echelon, while smaller companies are more likely to have autonomy over their targets. No matter who is setting the targets, you AND your sales leader need to be on the same page BEFORE you hold anyone accountable, otherwise you are moving the goal post on them and that can be frustrating for the sales leaders and breakdown trust. I believe in open and honest communication. If I am holding a salesperson to a standard, that standard will be openly advertised on multiple platforms (i.e. in person meetings, slack, email) and the source of our tracking (dashboard, report, google sheet) will also be shared so how they are tracking against the KPI is never a surprise.

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 vertical, a competitor, or perhaps a large company 10 years prior. That data then gives you a general idea of how others have performed in a comparable market. You can then use that starting point to deviate from based on feedback from your sales leaders and industry advisors. I have found that sales leaders tend to be a little on the conservative side (they don't want to make promises they might not be able to deliver on) and industry advisors tend to be a bit overly optimistic. I try to strike a balance between the two.