AMA: MURAL AVP, Enterprise & Strategic Sales, Nick Feeney on Sales KPIs

OKRs can vary depending on how your specific business and team are measured. It is crucial to first understand what the business OKRs are before you can be prescriptive in delineating key objectives to your respective team. Team metrics: * Data trends - SCL, ACV, WR + pipeline (3x) * Days within stage * ACV (average contract value) * ASC (average sales cycle) * Delineated by stage * WR (win rate) * Delineated by stage * New logos * New logo vs. expansion revenue * SQO to SAO production (sales qualified to sales accepted opportunity) * Your team should have ~3-4x pipeline coverage in order to feel confident in attaining the number * Activity to SQO production (how many activities until a meeting is booked) * % to quota attainment * There is a fine balance. ~125%+ attainment across the team to me means the number is too attainable. I like to see performance average ~90-95% attainment across a team by region. Business Metrics Great metrics to ask in an interview * Run rate vs. growth rate * Path to profitability * At scale, do these unit economics work? * Revenue now vs. targets for the year vs. projections * Revenue streams * Market share * CAC (Customer acquisition costs) * NDR (Net dollar retention) * What is the current valuation vs. projection for next year

Compared to a sales-assisted org, your KPIs change with a self-serve product. You want product led growth that funnels your NRR (Net Revenue Retention) to feed your MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue) that feeds your ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue). Some of my go-to self-serve product metrics are the following: * NPS (net promoter score) * CAC (customer acquisition costs) * Customer retention * Customer churn * Unique traffic visits * Conversion ratio broken down by marketing event/engagement * Content vitality * % of self serve upgrade to sales assisted ARR * How can Marketing increase this %? * What are the trends for those upgrades? Can we adjust our Marketing efforts based on this? * Abandon rate (visit and never return) * Recontact % * Escalation to sales assisted communication

Your process should be dependent on your targets: * Are you focused on new logo acquisition vs. expansion? * Is your goal to drive more revenue through self-serve as you go up market? * How are you holding the team accountable? What metrics is most important to them (how they get paid)? * Are you based on monthly, quarterly, semi-annual or annual quotas? * What are the key KPIs that your business is struggling with? How can we incentivize (spiffs) the team to focus their efforts here? If there is a metric that you need to focus on (i.e. generating new pipeline this quarter), I recommend putting a spiff in place for the team to overachieve that target. Sellers are incentivized by money. Make it fun and competitive. These are just a few things to consider as you look to build your process around your key sales metrics.

“SMART” goals; they’re simple and effective: * Specific * Measurable * Achievable * Relevant * Time-Bound This is a classic way to hold yourself accountable with realistic outcomes. When I think about revenue, I challenge sellers and leaders to lead with data. Based on historical revenue, are you able to create a predictable model? Meaning, based on ACV, WR, sales cycle length, SQO/SAO production, are you able to determine how many opportunities you need at the start of each quarter/year in order to work backward on exceeding your quota? At what stage does your team struggle the most? Meaning, if your longest stage duration is Proposal stage, why is that? Are there poor behavior trends you can get ahead of going forward to reduce the time it takes to get to Legal Review? The more comfortable you are with data, the easier it will be for you to create goals that reflect historical success.

You should own every single KPI that impacts revenue. As a seller or leader, you need to ask yourself which KPIs influence your ability to overattain. For example, do you know the top 5 reasons why you lose deals? Are you able to work with enablement to create collateral on how to get ahead of those top loss reasons at Discovery stage moving forward? Do you know which AE moves deals through the pipeline the fastest? What are the top 2-3 reasons why that is happening? How can you build a process around this for the rest of the team? I encourage all sellers and leaders to do some introspection and dig deep into common roadblocks to iterate and also pinpoint key successes in your sales motion to scale. Ask yourself how you can partner with your revenue partners (solutions consultants, solutions engineers, marketing, enablement, etc.) to get ahead of key objections that you commonly face and start to adjust your playbook based on this.

I think about this in two ways: 1. Vanity metrics 2. Key business metrics * Activity: Leaders should care less about the mass quantity of emails and calls and focus more on quality and conversion rates. How and why did someone respond should take priority vs. how many voicemails did you leave today. * Revenue: Rather than looking at how many MQLs we’ve generated, let’s determine how many MQLs converted to SQOs, which converted to SAOs, which converted to annualized revenue. * Why did a meeting not convert? Title? Need? Poor AE discovery? * What patterns can we surface in deals we won? Multi-threading? Key persona/industry? I encourage leaders to focus less on vanity and myopic metrics. Your attention should be geared towards metrics that help inform future strategies on how to improve business outcomes.

Moving up-market is no easy task. It adds a great deal of complexity, precision, and requires more people, processes, workflows, and technologies to do it effectively. This initiative must be done company wide and has to address the ongoing challenges that your target (or evolving/new target) audience must solve at a global scale. Here are a few things you’ll need to think about as you shift from a velocity to a transformation motion: 1. Historical success 1. Have you closed up market in the past? 1. Can you create a playbook around these successes? 2. What deals have we lost up market? Can we take learnings from these losses in order to adjust our sales motion, product, security, legal, etc. in order to win? 2. Product 1. Are you solving an enterprise need? 2. Are you sustainable for an enterprise wide deployment? Have you done this in the past? 3. Integrations and workflows 4. How do you differentiate in the competitive market? 3. Security 1. Configuration and posture management 2. Architecture 3. Monitoring and threat protection 4. Automated workflows 5. DevSecOps 1. SSO, SAML, authentication flows 6. Governance and risk compliance 7. System functionality and APIs 4. Marketing and Sales alignment 1. Target audience 1. Does this change as you go up market? 2. Target account list 1. Firmographic + technographic data 3. Segmentation 2. ABM (account based marketing) 3. Lean on your investors for support and guidance 4. Do you have the technologies to support this transition at scale? 5. Customer support 1. What are the needs of your current Enterprise customers? 1. How will you scale in order to support more? 6. Revenue streams 1. Top down - ICP, key targeted accounts, ABM/pure outbound 2. PLG - Free, bottoms up, pilot + PoC process 3. Community Led - Empower people to become an extension of your brand, product feedback, customer advocacy, resellers, consultants (creating additional revenue streams)

As mentioned earlier, KPIs vary depending on the business and teams specifically. Below are a few metrics that I find businesses neglect to prioritize: * Employee satisfaction * Retention * Burnout and mental health are critical topics managers should be maniacally focused on * Manager call reviews (Gong, Chorus) * Managers should be constantly providing constructive feedback and hearing more from the customers' voice in order to improve performance and sales motions * Delineating engagement by location and persona * Far too often I see leaders report total metrics without the proper insights into trends by geo, title, etc. * Discounts * How often are you bringing in revenue at your list price? * Are we losing deals due to costs? Budget? * Why, how, and when are we discounting and how does that impact the business? * Proposals sent * I’ve seen frontline managers assume that their reps have sent a quote or order when a buyer has reached a certain stage. Never assume. * SLA * How long does it take for your inbound team to follow up with a lead? * What percentage of leads are followed up with? * How quickly do your AEs follow up via email with a summary from a discovery call? * Meeting acceptance rate * % no shows * % conversion by title and location * Conversion rate * Lagging and leading indicators/trends * Opportunity lifecycle * % of opps by stage * Length of stage progression * NPS * Promoters vs. passives vs. detractors * Customer lifetime value