AMA: Outreach Director of Strategic and Enterprise Sales, Greg Baumann on Sales KPI's

I stole the idea of “WGLL” from Kevin Dorsey, who works across his leadership structure in sales teams to be maniacally focused on what good looks like, and work backwards from there. As such, I’ve rooted our metrics in support of WGLL - not from the perspective of “Amy & Bobby are the best, let’s have everyone do what they’re doing!”, but rather in using WGLL activities across my sales leaders to understand specific wins from the sales funnel and the supported customer experience to drive those metrics of success. For an example: we found that Amy is delivering a lot of value in the on-sites she’s running in her territory, let’s equip the team with her model (How far out she schedules, targeted personas, decks + sequences to set the meeting) and then hold them accountable to a number that Amy has driven to: 2 on-site meetings per month. Bobby is doing fantastic work top of funnel, and so we’ll capture what personas he’s engaging, what content and sequences he’s sharing, and communicate that as the KPI to the rest of the team.

Great question — I would recommend a few principles here for setting KPIs into new markets: * Start small: understand what the 2-3 wins will be over the first few months into this new effort. Let’s set KPIs in accordance with those wins, and communicate them clearly to the team, and to the executives supporting that new endeavor. * Report on them early and often: stay close to the KPIs in a new market endeavor—it’ll help identify trends to early wins and opportunities for adjusting KPIs. * Retain the right to get smarter: You need buy in from the team that we’re starting with these KPIs, but we will get smarter and will edit those as we go along. If you have an enterprising team, they’ll want to provide feedback and you’ll want to hear it from them, and adjust course.

Great question! A big one too…for a startup GTM hire looking to develop and own KPIs, I’d recommend working with leadership to align to the KPIs that are most imperative to driving success for your business. For a startup, it can look like steps to traction in a space, or finding the first few customers — in that case, focus your KPIs on pipeline generation, lead creation, and more. I’d even say that you should be setting KPIs for inverse ICP discovery—what are we learning about the market that we should not be in? For a more established company, focus on owning KPIs that are within your realm of action. If you can’t influence the KPI, you’ll be hard pressed to meet them.

The worst KPIs to commit to are the ones that: * Don’t drive to business outcomes (if we hit this KPI, does it bring us closer to our goals as an org?) * can’t be communicated easily (if it’s not understood, it won’t be adopted!) * aren’t tracked against a source of truth. (need a single view into how we’re performing against the KPI) Work towards the opposite of that list when validating the effectiveness of a KPI. Hope that helps!

KPIs can be over-hyped when they solely focus on action and lack direction. E.g. “make 100 dials” can result in sellers sacrificing quality for quantity, or in the case of a company I’ve spoken with — hundreds of AEs calling a now-defunct local pizza line to pad their stats. (True story!) More helpful is to direct the action towards an end that benefits the seller and the business — “make 100 dials or key personas in our database to accomplish this relevant CTA”.

Very interesting question — and one that brings up a few more! * Quota attainment is a KPI that is directly meaningful to a seller—if she can hit her KPI of quota attainment year after year, that will be meaningful to her personally! * However, quota attainment isn’t a helpful KPI to the company by itself — we could find out that the above seller is selling bad deals — selling deals that have low margins, high churn rates, and more… This is why it’s important to have a several KPIs that are developed to the needs of the business—and to the needs of the seller. Otherwise, it’s like judging someone’s safe driving ability solely by whether or not they drive the speed limit. Many people drive the speed limit, but are looking at their phone, or are ignoring their turn signals, etc. It’s one KPI that will help inform whether a driver is safe, but it’s not the only way of determining whether a driver is safe.

KPIs are helpful in unpredictable markets, because they remove a layer of uncertainty. If everyone is making 100 calls per day, and then pipeline generation expands across that channel, then we can help validate that channel - we can then properly inspect other indicators for success in this: what time of day are people calling? What are they saying on the phone? What is their call to action? Frequently, sales teams are lead by the unpredictability of a market and get swept away by a specific pitch, a singular customer response, or a particularly lucky day that a rep was having. Successful KPIs will provide a range of outcomes for each action (good/bad/indifferent), but will still allow for predictability at the top of the funnel (demand planning / capacity planning), the middle of the funnel (demos, meetings, on sites, etc) and bottom of funnel (quotes distributed, scoping calls held, ROI exercises held). Very thoughtful question — hope this helps + very interested to hear other voices on this topic!

Top performers can distort KPIs that you want to roll across your team. On one hand, sales professionals are able to achieve excellence because they do the right things consistently “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”. For a salesperson like this, we will strive to understand how those habits inform their success, and which of those therefore should be transmutable across the team to drive success for others. On the other hand — this is not popular to say - some of your best sellers are simply far more talented. They will not need the same amount of “at bats” that you’re measuring throughout your sales funnel as the sales reps who are a standard deviation or two less talented. Do not build KPIs off of these individuals.