(How) do you include top performers on certain KPIs to set benchmarks you want people to work against?

Absolutely yes! We celebrate high performers in team meetings (also broader teams) and share their attainment and other KPIs (not all of course). We also share averages amongst all team members so that everyone can compare themselves with others. We do have a culture of transparency established very early on.

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.

Sales leaders can set KPIs around behaviors we want to see and hold the team accountable to them but top performers will disregard them if they don’t find it is what puts them in the best position to achieve their growth targets. That’s why it’s really important to spend meaningful time with your top account executives upfront to be sure you have a pulse on the ways in which they are translating the strategy you’ve set into actual work in the field. If I believe based on the data that it will take five customer on-sites per qtr to drive expansion then I want to be sure my top performers also see that as the benchmark, are consistently driving towards that mark and that they have scalable methods for doing that. Not only does this increase the confidence I can have in the target I set but I can also now enable and inspire the rest of the team to do the same because I’m using a top performer to drive belief and show them how it’s done. Absent this important context, you run the risk of setting unattainable targets, or worse, targets AEs drive towards only because they’re being asked to, not because it actually drives the behavior and results you know lead to the ultimate growth targets every sales leader is out to achieve.