What KPIs should I own and not own?

If you have a quota, you should take ownership over all your KPIs. Make sure you make them easy to find in one dashboard. I usually call this my "Birds Eye View." I usually see sales leaders not asking enough demand generation questions. What keywords are you bidding on? Why? Why haven't we tried these keywords? I take my top 10 objections in my sales cycles and turn them into collateral. Whether it be a blog post, webinar or ebook. It's easy to user in sales cycles to farm prospects when you already know their objections. 

You should own every single KPI that impacts revenue. As a seller or leader, you need to ask yourself which KPIs influence your ability to overattain.

For example, do you know the top 5 reasons why you lose deals? Are you able to work with enablement to create collateral on how to get ahead of those top loss reasons at Discovery stage moving forward?

Do you know which AE moves deals through the pipeline the fastest? What are the top 2-3 reasons why that is happening? How can you build a process around this for the rest of the team?

I encourage all sellers and leaders to do some introspection and dig deep into common roadblocks to iterate and also pinpoint key successes in your sales motion to scale. Ask yourself how you can partner with your revenue partners (solutions consultants, solutions engineers, marketing, enablement, etc.) to get ahead of key objections that you commonly face and start to adjust your playbook based on this.

Here are the KPIs I believe a Sales Director should own:

• Regional Revenue:

  • Total revenue generated by the sales team.

• Sales Pipeline Value:

  • Measures the total value of all potential deals in the regional sales pipeline.

• Conversion Rates:

  • Track the percentage of leads or prospects that convert into paying customers. For me, there is a strong focus on tracking conversion of Stages 1 - 3 to identify potential selling gaps within the rep and/or team.

• Average Deal Size:

  • Can add insight into product offerings, the potential for upselling, and how we are selling "value".

• Team Performance Metrics:

  • Tracking individual and team performance metrics by the number of closed deals, revenue contribution, activity levels, and quota attainment

Here are the KPIs I believe Sales Directors should not own:

• Sales Cycle Length:

  • This should be monitored by every sales leader to identify bottlenecks within the sales process but should be owned as a revenue team due to it involving a number of cross-functional folks that play a part in this. Whom the KPI falls under depends on the org.

• Net Dollar Retention:

  • Since this is tied to retaining and expanding revenue from existing customers, account management or customer success should own this with the support of sales.

Everyone should own the KPIs which are relevant to achieving the goals. If you can't influence the KPI they become less relevant and impactful. The context of the KPIs are also important if the intent is to drive behaviour. If there is no attention from management to KPIs this is probably also a good indication that they are no longer a priority.

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 we should not be in?

For a more established company, focus on owning KPIs that are within your realm of action. If you can’t influence the KPI, you’ll be hard pressed to meet them.