AMA: Bluevine Head of Sales, Lending & Credit, Scott Barton on Sales KPIs

I really like measuring how many net new companies and how many net new people your sales team is reaching out to each month. Some companies only measure one (or none). Both KPI's are easy to set up if you're using Outreach or Salesloft + Salesforce. Measuring these two KPIs will help you understand how wide (# of companies) and deep (# of people) that you need to go to get your desired results. Pro-tip: Find out what's been working for your top performers as a benchmark and then work with your ...Read More

Bottlenecks can typically be identified by your conversion rates within your pipeline. First, you should map our your buying stages. Typically this starts with Stage 0 (a meeting has been set) to maybe stage 7 or 8 (closed won). Most companies have the same stages across all customer segments. Once this is defined, you can start to measure how many leads are making it through. For example, most companies want at least 30% of their stage 0 opportunities to move to stage 1. If you're below this or ...Read More

I think the key here is set proper expectations. You can still get team members to buy in to some of these metrics that may be arbitrary if you let them know that you might have to pivot. More specifically, if you set goals based on your own personal experience, review them every quarter, and then are open to making changes when appropriate, most sales people will respond well. This really comes down to having senior sales and ops leaders that have industry experience. You don't have to perfectl ...Read More