What are some of the *worst* KPIs to commit to achieving?

Some of the worst KPIs to commit to achieving are usually around Talk Time. God gave you 2 ears and one mouth for a reason. We should look more at engaging questions asked in a sales cycle. Sharing is caring. You can ask different titles within your organization how they would like to be asked these types of questions or what's the last time they purchased and what made it a great experience. 

I think about this in two ways:

1. Vanity metrics
2. Key business metrics

• Activity: Leaders should care less about the mass quantity of emails and calls and focus more on quality and conversion rates. How and why did someone respond should take priority vs. how many voicemails did you leave today.
• Revenue: Rather than looking at how many MQLs we’ve generated, let’s determine how many MQLs converted to SQOs, which converted to SAOs, which converted to annualized revenue.
• Why did a meeting not convert? Title? Need? Poor AE discovery?
• What patterns can we surface in deals we won? Multi-threading? Key persona/industry?

I encourage leaders to focus less on vanity and myopic metrics. Your attention should be geared towards metrics that help inform future strategies on how to improve business outcomes.

The worse KPIs to commit to achieving are those that you and your team do not have direct control over. If the KPI is highly reliant on the coordination of cross-functional partners your control becomes indirect. If your KPI relies on the action of a customer or prospect (which can you influence but not control), then you are putting your chances of success up to fate.

Ideally, you are committing to inputs and not outputs. You can’t guarantee a commit to pipeline build goal (output), but you can commit to each rep completing a certain number of high quality, highly personalized outreach to new targeted prospects every week which will ultimately lead to pipeline.

Committing to the output of “building $5M of pipeline in a quarter” ultimately is not in your control. It depends highly on the response rate of your prospects, number of meetings your team is able to book, the conversion rate of those meetings to pipeline, the size of those opportunities related to your average sale price, etc.  

Instead focus on the behaviors, frequencies, and quality that you can control and measure your team on those inputs. If you control what you can control, the inputs will eventually lead to the outputs.

KPIs which are not tied to objectives, initiatives or strategic goals are irrelevant.

E.g. why should someone focus on ratio between emails sent to meetings booked if meetings will only be scheduled via phone. Why looking at seasonality or amount of revenue booked in the final 2 days if the pattern stays the same month over month or quarter over quarter?