What is an important KPI that you see revenue operations teams completely missing?

Most of the time, you can find rev ops teams being the busiest teams. There is usually no downtime as in sales; there is a quarterly cycle, and planning happens every six months (or a year). As leading a rev ops team, I value the two metrics below that some teams tend to deprioritize.

• % of time spent firefighting (or responding to ad-hoc tasks) vs. working on big rocks that help move the business forward. In many cases, I see teams at 80/20. Ideally, it should be the other way around, but if you can get this to 50/50, you are running a healthy team. You'll need to constantly look at this and align with your stakeholders and get their buy-in, but also be able to push back and say "no." And I see this as a leader's job to do.
• The health of the team in terms of job satisfaction: Many companies run engagement surveys to measure, but the leaders often only sometimes get to focus and improve the gaps from these surveys. Rev Ops professionals generally have a high tolerance and have "helper" personalities, so it should be taken seriously if these scores are low. It will lead to burnout and high attrition. Make sure to take action and help team members feel they are learning, growing, balancing their work life, setting boundaries, and getting clear communication.

A few KPIs that make a lot of sense to me in this economic environment:

1. Push Counter - take a look at how many times opportunities are slippling.

2. Time Since Discovery Meeting - how long has it been since you've had engagement with your prospetive buyer?

3. % of Accounts in Territory that are Touched - are your AEs and SDRs diligently outreaching all the accounts in their territory?

Identifying preventable churn from the non-preventable churn and focusing on second-order revenue. 

Everyone is going to see churn trend up this year while things normalize, which is going to make a lot of Rev Ops teams panic and try to solve everyone’s concerns with the same level of urgency.

Rev Ops teams and specifically Customer success teams need to go into triage mode and determine which customers are really worth trying to save. Not every customer is worth saving and that will be a hard pill for many customer success professionals to swallow.

Customer success teams can gracefully let customers churn and keep good relationships. While companies will lose their ARR and potential expansion ARR, they will hopefully keep more future second-order revenue intact. Second-order revenue potential can be massive, so making sure not to screw that up is critical.

An often-overlooked but crucial KPI for Revenue Operations teams is Customer Success and Engagement Metrics, particularly post-sale. While many RevOps teams are adept at tracking pre-sales metrics like pipeline velocity, lead conversion rates, and sales cycle length, there's a tendency to overlook metrics that gauge customer health and engagement post-purchase.

The health of your customer base directly impacts recurring revenue, upsells, and cross-sells. In businesses, especially those with a subscription model, customer lifetime value (CLV) can be more significant than initial sales. Furthermore, metrics like product usage frequency, customer satisfaction scores (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS), and customer support interaction rates can be the best churn predictors, so proactively addressing issues in these areas can significantly reduce revenue leakage.

I believe that these are often missed because many RevOps teams are heavily focused on acquisition metrics, under the assumption that customer retention and engagement are primarily the concerns of customer success or account management teams. Sometimes, the data relevant to customer engagement is also siloed within different tools or departments, making it challenging for RevOps to track and analyse, and there’s often a gap in collaboration between sales, marketing, and customer success teams, leading to missed opportunities in leveraging post-sale customer insights for revenue growth.

In my opinion, Rev Ops teams and their leaders should treat customer success as a critical component of the revenue operations strategy. This can be initially achieved by establishing KPIs collaboratively across sales, marketing, and customer success to ensure a holistic approach to revenue growth and also retention. But at the same time, and to ensure long term success, let's not forget the crucial role that technology plays in this alignment, I think that it is absolutely fundamental that we aim to use CRM and customer success platforms that offer integrated analytics and insights across the entire customer lifecycle, so not only for the acquisition phase.

The ultimate goal here is to ensure that RevOps teams can gain a more holistic view of the revenue lifecycle, not just from initial sale to renewal but also in terms of expansion and advocacy, thereby driving sustainable growth and long-term success for the organisation they support.

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.

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.

● Missed: Lead velocity rate (LVR), which tracks how fast leads are progressing through the funnel and full funnel conversion which is hard to capture effectively at most companies