AMA: Tealium SVP, Revenue Operations, Michael Hargis on Revenue Operations KPIs

I love this question. The one tool that I can't live without right now is Clari. We run our entire business out of it at the executive level. Q4 is a critical one for any SaaS company at our scale and we rely on Clari to power our weekly forecast cadence, evaluate trends in the pipeline and click into the details of deal health for all of our opportunities, both new and expansion. I first got introduced to Clari in 2016 while at the TOPO conference in San Francisco and immediately saw the value. ...Read More

My first piece of advice would be to learn. Learn as much as you can about the total addressable market, the product market fit and the buyer's journey for the product or service that your new company is selling. Spend time in the field with sales and SDRs. Read online reviews about your company. Take a sales leader out for dinner/drinks and ask them how they get deals done at your company. Take the AE onboarding courses for new sellers joining your company. Read old board decks and study the me ...Read More

I like to think about KPIs for any revenue organization in a 3 P's framework : 1. Performance 2. Predictability 3. Productivity Performance: It's important to understand the performance trends of the company and the most common KPS in this category include:   - ARR - Retention - Number of Customers (Existing + New Logos - Churned Logos) - Gross Margin.   For each of these KPIs, I like to look at the numbers vs. goal, vs. last year (YoY) and vs last quarter (QoQ). These are the basic health marke ...Read More

You should own all of the KPIs/metrics if you are the first revenue operations hire. Initially, you'll need to validate the data sources and availability, put a system (and potentially tools) in place to capture them and do the calculations and visulization yourselIf the first few times. I once worked at a company that did not look at any metrics in their weekly executive staff meeting. I made it my mission to develop a simple executive dashboard with operational metrics that was reviewed by lea ...Read More

This is a great question.   A big one for me is Total Pipeline, or Rolling 12 pipeline. I don't think that metric tells you much without additional context. Sometimes a team can more easily hit their goals with a smaller pipeline and better conversion rates. It's easy to assume your GTM strategy is working when overall pipeline continues to grow but it could also mean you have a pipeine quality issue and we've acquired a lot of low propbability opportunities in companies outside of ICP. Also cus ...Read More

I think it's good to try and tell stories with data. What is the KPI actually telling us about our business? Develop a recurring insights cadence within your company. Think of it like a quarterly newsetter from Revenue Ops describing how the teams just performed. Spend some time to make it look good with the data visualzed in charts and the details provided in the appendix. After you produce it a few times, you'll start to get traction and the KPIs will become a part of your leadership team's vo ...Read More