What KPIs should I own and not own being the first revenue operations hire at a start-up?

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

Here are some red flags for KPis that you are asked to own: There is not support for the KPI The KPI definition is not clear and well defined The levers for achieving the KPI are unclear Lack of Support - adoption of KPIs and achieving their targets is extremely difficult if you don't have buy-in from the parties responsible for doing the work required to meet the KPI. Say you're tasked with a KPI to drive AE adoption of a new account planning SaaS software, but the AEs weren't consulted on the ...Read More

I think there are two ways to think about "owning" a KPI when you're in RevOps. For many business performance metrics, you can "own" the KPIs in the sense of providing the data, reporting, and insights that enable other teams to be assessed against. These are things you are responsible for measuring but don't do directly in RevOps. There's a long list of these but the ones top of mind for me would be: New business pipeline metrics: things like marketing attribution, MQLs, qualified pipeline (vol ...Read More

As the first revenue operations hire at a start-up, you own all of the KPIs across the functions you support, but at the same time, you don't necessarily have direct influence over any of them. Similar to my answer for another question, you are the glue that holds these functions together and your responsibility is making sure there is strong collaboration and connection between the people working in those functions and the KPIs that they are all supporting. How do your sales and marketing team ...Read More