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What are some KPIs that you find over-hyped and/or unimportant?

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6 Answers
Sales KPIs
  1. George Cerny
    George Cerny

    Collectly VP of Sales • 2y

    By far the most over-hyped KPI is total pipeline created. This is certainly a key metric to track week over week as a health check, but it provides little insight into what's actually going on. The problem with total pipeline created, is at no point should the conversation end with that KPI. If it's low - why? If it's high - why? Was it one large opp? Was it a bunch of baby opps? Was it quality pipeline? Was it from one AE/Segment/Business Unit - or is everything firing on all cylinders? At best ...Read More

    2,938 Views
  2. Yusuf Bulan
    Yusuf Bulan

    HubSpot Director Sales DACH • 1y

    There are plenty of KPIs which are not relevant if not used in the right context. Ultimately, revenue is the most important KPIs in sales. You can look at plenty of activity KPIs which are less important when revenue and pipeline are in good health. If not, then activities become more important. So it depends on the context.

    1,146 Views
  3. Brian Tino
    Brian Tino

    AlphaSense Senior Director, Strategic Sales • 2y

    Sheer “number of activities” (calls/emails) completed is one of the most over-hyped metrics. While it is easy to measure with modern tracking tools, I find it incentivizes the wrong behavior of reps and ignores the importance of quality.  Now often the best sales reps in an organization also top the leaderboards in the frequency of their activities, but volume alone is not the solution. Today generic templates & sequences spammed out to hundreds or thousands of prospects is a losing strategy ...Read More

    663 Views
  4. Katie Harkins
    Katie Harkins

    Glide VP of Sales • 3y

    Some KPIs that are over-hyped and unimportant is Talk time. Did you hit your number? Are you asking great questions? Are you pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone on every pitch? It's cool now that we have visibility into the longest monologue or team talk time, but total talk time I've seen misconstrued and abused in different sales organizations. 

    1,476 Views
  5. Greg Baumann
    Greg Baumann

    Outreach Sr Director of Strategic and Enterprise Sales • 1y

    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”.

    881 Views
  6. Helen D'Abreo
    Helen D'Abreo

    SurveyMonkey Director, Expansion Sales • 1y

    A challenging question and probably different across organizations. The one that I always find a challenge is the expected volume of outreach emails sent per week. This number could be huge and look great on a dashboard but if the quality is poor, then what good is the volume and what outcome will this achieve? Here we need to be looking at achieving the right balance of activity and being smarter about how we message clients in order to maintain quality. With all KPIs the data can only tell us ...Read More

    609 Views

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