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 t ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 develope ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 pi ...Read More