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

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. 

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 it provides directional guidance to tune into major variances and inspect. At worst it provides false confidence in a pipeline that won't get you to goal.

Typically addressing total pipeline creation falls into one of two camps:

1. Mention & move on. These are meetings where the metric is called out, compared to last week and it's either

   • Good - "great job, let's see if we can stretch this 10% higher next week"

   • Bad - "we really need to prioritize pipe gen this week. Get on it."

2. Paralysis by analysis. These meetings show the metric, and then dive into 40 slides with individual permutations of how everything performed over the past week; leading to information overload and very little insight into what actually needs to change.

This is why instead of just tracking total pipe creation - we want to take a three-pronged approach:

1. How are we tracking towards our pipeline generation goal (which is a leading metric against future bookings)?

2. Identify the factors that are contributing to the current results.

3. Define strategies to optimize the path to goal

The standard discussion described above hits the first objective, skips number 2, and the only strategy is often "do more."

We could write an entire post on steps 2 and 3, but here are a few variables that can take your basic "total pipeline creation" reporting to the next level

• # of opportunities created & average opportunity value. This controls for the one big opp skewing results. You generally want more big deals, but don't want to have to rely on only one big deal to hit the goal. This helps monitor quality & quantity.

• Split by region/segment/AE's - this allows you to identify people and parts of the business that are doing well and understand why (do more of it, share learnings, double down). It also ensures that those who aren't doing well don't hide behind overall success of the business and get neglected. We want to identify why they're struggling, and ideally get them unstuck to improve performance.

• Pipeline by opportunity source - attribution can lead to some sticky conversations, but tracking where the pipeline is coming from is necessary to improve the overall output. This isn't meant to start a blame game, but you can't optimize something you don't measure. So if AE's, SDR's, Marketing, Partnerships, or PLG is slacking - what can we do about it? If something is working incredibly well - how can we do more?

• Pipeline conversion metrics - how is the pipeline that's coming in converting through the funnel to closure? Are disco to demo conversion rates improving, declining or staying the same? What about win rate? Any new trends where we should ride the wave? Anything that's not working which we should stop doing?

These metrics will give you a much deeper understanding of the factors that contribute to current results and lay a strong foundation so you can define strategies to help optimize results. With a strong team and partners in marketing, partnerships, SDR and RevOps leadership - you're a brainstorming session away from having your best pipeline generation quarter yet.

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. Even with the support of the best AI tools today to “customize” sequences, the results pale in comparison to truly personalized outreach.

To truly make great connections, if you spend time researching your prospect, understanding the context in which they operate (company strategies, challenges, personal motivations, etc.) and personalizing your outreach to their specific situation, you will find higher rates of success.

AND if you do that successfully at a high volume & frequency, you will top the activity charts with higher quality meetings.

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.

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 so much and there will always be a need to delve deeper to truly understand how effective your sales team is.

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”.