Akira Mamizuka

Correlation between Go-to-Market actions and renewal success is one of the most studied areas in SaaS firms. Although the answer will vary for each firm, having a data driven point of view on actions and indicators that lead to positive renewal outcomes is imperative. Examples of actions and indicators: - Seat utilization - Renewal meeting 90 days ahead of renewal date - Account continuity - Customer-specific metrics (e.g. HC growth) - Documented and updated customer objectives With clarity around actions and indicators that influence renewal outcomes, the next step is to define: - Which team own each action/ indicator? Roles and resposibilities/ "swim lanes" - What "good looks like" for each action and indicator? - How to report performance against each? - How to ensure accountability? In my experience, the "blame game" as referred comes from lack of clarity and alignment on the steps above.

First of all, let's not convolute KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) with targets. KPI definition should happen independent of our knowledge of the market or the availability of historical performance data. It simply means defining the metrics that matter for your business. After your KPIs are defined, setting targets is the next step. In the context of a new market, where there is less information available than in a mature market, a few approaches can be considered: * Benchmarking: looking at comparable markets, both internal and external references, to use as a guide post. * "What you need to believe": backsolving the KPI to allow the business to hit certain financial goals (e.g. return on investment) In new markets, we often get targets wrong initially. However, the discipline of setting KPIs, tracking and learning from them, is what matters most.

If we think about the revenue flow in terms of a funnel, demand generation would be at the top and revenue or bookings at the bottom. KPI definition should follow roles & responsibilities. Along each step of the funnel, it is critical to first define: - Which function owns that step? - What are the activities and expectations for that step? - What a good handoff looks like to the function owning the following step? After those questions are answered, defining KPIs and targets becomes natural, in the sense that they should manifest how effective the company is both within each step and across the whole funnel. For a "new business" funnel, common roles and responsibilities and KPIs across each step of the funnel are: * Top of the funnel: typically owned by Marketing. Common KPIs: lead volume by channel and type * Middle of the funnel: typically owned by Sales Development. Common KPIs: volume of opportunity creation * Bottom of the funnel: typically owned by the Account Executive. Common KPIs: bookings, conversion rate, average selling price (ASP) A good understanding of the funnel requires the different functions owning the funnel to be in lock steps, and in some organizations (including LinkedIn) Revenue Operations (aka GTM Operations) also own Planning & Performance for Demand Generation.

This is a non-trivial topic since Revenue Operations is often a "recommender" in many decisions, as opposed to a "decider". The "dual mandate" of the Revenue Operations function is: 1. Grow revenue faster 2. Make the go-to-market resources more productive I believe best-in-class Revenue Operations teams should have a seat at the table, with direct influence on the outcomes above. With that in mind, Revenue Operations should be accountable for: 1. Revenue growth, addressable market penetration, market share expansion 2. Revenue/ FTE, FTE HC growth vs revenue growth Since an important part of the function pertains to running effective operations, it should also be accountable for: * Plan and forecast accuracy * Rep quota attainment distribution (50/50 or equivalent philosophy) * % account transitions y/y (lower is better)

Although I am not a Systems expert, I have experienced this challenge as part of my RevOps career. From my standpoint, the root cause maps to the fact that most CRM Systems are built with the "Sales" use case at its core, and often the workflows and capabilities for Customer Success and Support can be limited. A separate ticketing system for CS is not an issue on its own; however, if you respond "Yes" to any of the questions below, you might have an opportunity to enhance your Tech stack: - Do Sales Reps have proactive visibility and alerts on CS tickets? - If a Customer mentions a CS ticket to a Sales Rep, can they check the status and interact with the ticket (i.e. ask for an update)? - Are there clearly defined SLAs, and are CS teams accountable for the SLAs? - Is the ticket data ingested in Data Warehouse and aggregated with account and opportunity data, in order to enable effective performance reporting?

At LinkedIn, we believe that customer value is a "true north" objective. In fact, we know that successful customers tend to expand their relationships with LinkedIn over time, leading to revenue and profit growth. On the B2B Tech space, multiple functions interact with customers and users along their journey, from pre-sales to post-sales. However, often those functions roll under different parts of the company, which results in misaligned goals, inconsistent measurement and inefficient resource allocation. Such misalignment can lead to poor customer experience, value delivery, and missed revenue growth opportunities. Revenue Operations can play a key role in removing those silos and inconsistencies. In the Customer Success example, the main goal of this function is to ensure customers are making the most out of their investment (i.e. value is being delivered), which leads to future revenue growth. Since the CS function is part of the Go-to-Market equation, there is tremenduous value in having Revenue Operations take CS responsibilities, in addition to Sales, Demand Generation and Support. Within CS, Revenue Operations can: - Harmonize Roles & Responsibilities between Sales and CS Reps (aka "swim lanes") - Define and track input metrics (e.g. # quarterly business review meetings) and output metrics (e.g. seat utilization) - Allocate Sales and CS resources consistently by segment, aligning resources to value.

At LinkedIn we use the TAM (Total Addressable Market) approach to tackle this problem. First, we separate the "New Business TAM" from the "Existing Business TAM", in order to understand penetration and "headroom" in each category. Startups, early stage companies (and even mature companies potentially) tend to have a "New Business TAM" that vastly exceeds their "Existing Business TAM". This tends to be the main reason companies prioritize New Business over Existing Business. A secondary and more mundane reason is, from a financial standpoint, all new business sales contribute to growth; however, a flat renewal has zero growth contribution. I believe both motions are critical to achieve short and long term growth aspirations. A B2B Tech firm should have a well oiled New Business Engine (Marketing Lead Generation -> Sales Development -> Sales Hunters/ Closers) to capture the New Business TAM as fast as possible. At the same time, we know that successful customers tend to expand their relationships with LinkedIn over time, leading to revenue growth. Therefore having a Go-to-Market model that ensures value is being delivered to customers is also critical for future growth. P.s.: in SaaS, it can be difficult to measure growth within existing customers - especially when a portion of customers are on multi-year deals. A "same store sales methodology" can be an effective way to measure existing customer growth.

Dashboard proliferation and staleness is an issue companies often deal with, including LinkedIn. Bias to action leads to multiple different dashboards being built over time, leading to: * Inconsistent metrics, since not always the builders align with metric owners on the same source of truth or a consistent way to calculate metrics * Staleness, with dashboards not being maintained to accurately reflect changes in the business * Confusion, with users not knowing which dashboard or report they should refer to To avoid these issues, I’d encourage dashboard builders to ask themselves the following questions before building a new asset: * What is the problem I am solving for? Who is the audience, and what are the key set of metrics needed? * Do we need a new dashboard, or can this use case be solved by augmenting an existing, well-established one? Minimizing the number of surfaces that users interact with is key * What is the established source of truth for the data needed by the dashboard? Who owns the metrics that will be displayed in the dashboard, and how to correctly calculate them? * Who will be responsible for maintaining the dashboard on a recurring basis? Additionally, from time to time it is helpful to do a “clean-up”. For example, remove any dashboards that show limited use in the last 90 days. Also, try to stop sending that weekly report to see how many recipients will reach out asking about it.

A junior hire who is the first Rev Ops hire is an exciting role to be. They will lay the foundations for the company to grow and scale. However, this is also a chaotic role. At such an early stage, the company likely has gaps in processes, systems, tools, training and reporting, just to name a few areas. The first Rev Ops hire will be pulled in multiple directions to close those gaps. Here's some advice I would share with them: * Be intentional about the mix of your time spent between "run" and "build" work. While "run" work is fundamental, it is through "build" work that you will bend the growth curve of your company. * Build for scale. Most companies regret choices they made when they were small (e.g. how to design their Go-to-Market data architecture to offer users real-time, high-quality data), as they chose solutions that worked fine for a $50M company but are extremely taxing for a $1b company. Always ask yourself, "if we were 20x larger, would I be happy with this solution?". * Embrace the struggle. The first 2-3 years will be difficult, but if you excel at your role and the company is successful, the job will look and feel a lot different and bigger after that initial period. * Learn every single detail and aspect of the Rev Ops function and get your hands dirty. This unique context will set you up for success even after the initial phase of scaling.

I see 4 key steps as part of an effective KPI-setting process: 1. Align on the right KPIs. Employees need to understand why certain metric matters. Connecting any KPI to key business outcomes is crucial. 2. Socialize the method and numbers. Some KPIs are complex to be calculated and can be perceived as a black box. The more your employees understand how KPIs are calculated and how their efforts influence KPIs, the more effective this process will be. Also, explaining how targets are set and the philosophy behind them is key. 3. Track and publish KPIs. Make KPIs widely available through dashboards, newsletters, team meetings and 1:1s. Discuss trends and insights. 4. Use KPIs to make your business better. Take learnings from KPIs and propose changes to the business based on them. Hold individuals and teams accountable for underperformance. Celebrate overperformance.