How do you use RevOps reporting to promote transparency and accountability across the revenue engine?

I think there are three main areas - data hygiene, forecasting, and exec readouts - we focus on to create transparency and accountability with my Sales Ops team at Intercom.

1. Establish standards and enforce them for data hygiene - as I have described elsewhere in the AMA, we have expectations, a series of reports on hygiene compliance, and a weekly "cleanup" process that creates visibility into data quality and a means for sales teams to fix it.

2. Drive good process for forecasting - also described elsewhere in the AMA, we have a forecasting cadence that requires everyone on the team to know their business and provide a weekly forecast. We also look-back each quarter at the forecast accuracy to encourage improvement from the entire team.

3. Contribute to key executive readouts - my team is involved in four major recurring exec-focused reports that create transparency and accountability. First, we have a monthly Sales attainment and productivity report that shows how we are doing vs. quota and productivity targets. Second, we have a monthly Sales Analytics review that selects a few "hot topics" to deep-dive into with the Sales leadership team to highlight successes and work out fixes for underperforming areas. Third, we have a bi-weekly end-to-end funnel review with Marketing, Web, Sales Development, and Sales leaders to ensure we know how our new business funnel is performing. Finally, we have a monthly exec readout that covers critical business metrics and drives transparency for the entire leadership team.

At LinkedIn, for both target setting and execution purposes, within our SaaS businesses we break down the revenue funnel into discrete parts, each of them mapped to specific teams who are accountable for the results. At the highest level, the first break-down is between “New Business” and “Existing Customers”.

For example, within “New Business”, we have a further break-down by “Lead Generation” (owned by Marketing), “Opportunity Creation” (owned by Sales Development and Sales) and “Opportunities Won” (owned by Sales). For each of these parts of the funnel, there are a set of KPIs and targets associated with them. We have dashboards to track performance against each set of KPIs. For example, within “Opportunities Won”, the main KPIs are “Win Rate”, “ASP – Average Selling Price”, and “Average Deal Cycle”.

Structuring our reporting in such a way enables us to identify areas of strength and softness during our forecasting process, allowing us to understand the root cause, both in terms of the part the funnel it comes from but also the “cause-effect” relationship between input and output metrics. This structure not only leads to a more accurate forecast, but also allows us to quickly enact action plans with the accountable teams.