Nick Feeney

As mentioned earlier, KPIs vary depending on the business and teams specifically. Below are a few metrics that I find businesses neglect to prioritize: * Employee satisfaction * Retention * Burnout and mental health are critical topics managers should be maniacally focused on * Manager call reviews (Gong, Chorus) * Managers should be constantly providing constructive feedback and hearing more from the customers' voice in order to improve performance and sales motions * Delineating engagement by location and persona * Far too often I see leaders report total metrics without the proper insights into trends by geo, title, etc. * Discounts * How often are you bringing in revenue at your list price? * Are we losing deals due to costs? Budget? * Why, how, and when are we discounting and how does that impact the business? * Proposals sent * I’ve seen frontline managers assume that their reps have sent a quote or order when a buyer has reached a certain stage. Never assume. * SLA * How long does it take for your inbound team to follow up with a lead? * What percentage of leads are followed up with? * How quickly do your AEs follow up via email with a summary from a discovery call? * Meeting acceptance rate * % no shows * % conversion by title and location * Conversion rate * Lagging and leading indicators/trends * Opportunity lifecycle * % of opps by stage * Length of stage progression * NPS * Promoters vs. passives vs. detractors * Customer lifetime value

Moving up-market is no easy task. It adds a great deal of complexity, precision, and requires more people, processes, workflows, and technologies to do it effectively. This initiative must be done company wide and has to address the ongoing challenges that your target (or evolving/new target) audience must solve at a global scale. Here are a few things you’ll need to think about as you shift from a velocity to a transformation motion: 1. Historical success 1. Have you closed up market in the past? 1. Can you create a playbook around these successes? 2. What deals have we lost up market? Can we take learnings from these losses in order to adjust our sales motion, product, security, legal, etc. in order to win? 2. Product 1. Are you solving an enterprise need? 2. Are you sustainable for an enterprise wide deployment? Have you done this in the past? 3. Integrations and workflows 4. How do you differentiate in the competitive market? 3. Security 1. Configuration and posture management 2. Architecture 3. Monitoring and threat protection 4. Automated workflows 5. DevSecOps 1. SSO, SAML, authentication flows 6. Governance and risk compliance 7. System functionality and APIs 4. Marketing and Sales alignment 1. Target audience 1. Does this change as you go up market? 2. Target account list 1. Firmographic + technographic data 3. Segmentation 2. ABM (account based marketing) 3. Lean on your investors for support and guidance 4. Do you have the technologies to support this transition at scale? 5. Customer support 1. What are the needs of your current Enterprise customers? 1. How will you scale in order to support more? 6. Revenue streams 1. Top down - ICP, key targeted accounts, ABM/pure outbound 2. PLG - Free, bottoms up, pilot + PoC process 3. Community Led - Empower people to become an extension of your brand, product feedback, customer advocacy, resellers, consultants (creating additional revenue streams)

OKRs can vary depending on how your specific business and team are measured. It is crucial to first understand what the business OKRs are before you can be prescriptive in delineating key objectives to your respective team. Team metrics: * Data trends - SCL, ACV, WR + pipeline (3x) * Days within stage * ACV (average contract value) * ASC (average sales cycle) * Delineated by stage * WR (win rate) * Delineated by stage * New logos * New logo vs. expansion revenue * SQO to SAO production (sales qualified to sales accepted opportunity) * Your team should have ~3-4x pipeline coverage in order to feel confident in attaining the number * Activity to SQO production (how many activities until a meeting is booked) * % to quota attainment * There is a fine balance. ~125%+ attainment across the team to me means the number is too attainable. I like to see performance average ~90-95% attainment across a team by region. Business Metrics Great metrics to ask in an interview * Run rate vs. growth rate * Path to profitability * At scale, do these unit economics work? * Revenue now vs. targets for the year vs. projections * Revenue streams * Market share * CAC (Customer acquisition costs) * NDR (Net dollar retention) * What is the current valuation vs. projection for next year

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.

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.

This isn’t a one size fits all approach. Every leader should bring a different focus to their 30-60-90 day plan based on their leadership style, the stage in which the company is at, industry/market dynamics, immediate challenges/goals, etc. That said, the high level framework below is something I’ve used at several companies which has proven to be quite successful: Days 1-30: Listen, Learn, Connect * Establish presence and connection with team * Roll out User Manuals: How to guides for working effectively with one another * Product, value prop, and competition proficiency * Cross-departmental tour of duty (ally building) * Benchmark data (lagging/leading indicators) * RevOps partnership/hiring is critical * Understand first before suggesting any changes * Understand the challenges specific to the business and team in exceeding targets * Never assume what worked historically will work now * Deeply understand your customers Days 31-60: Align, Implement, Measure * Align before setting unrealistic expectations * Generate path toward exceeding targets * Provide clear measurables on path to targets (SMART goals) * Drive winning culture * Leveraging benchmark data to drive process improvement * Solve process inefficiencies Days 61-90 * Establish virtuous cycle with team and peers * Generate quick wins * Create constructive feedback loop * Scaling a repeatable outbound playbook * Address team and business challenges with clear solutions * Sell 90 initiative: GTM team should spend 90% of time with customers * Performance management: make smart decisions, clearly communicate

Compared to a sales-assisted org, your KPIs change with a self-serve product. You want product led growth that funnels your NRR (Net Revenue Retention) to feed your MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue) that feeds your ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue). Some of my go-to self-serve product metrics are the following: * NPS (net promoter score) * CAC (customer acquisition costs) * Customer retention * Customer churn * Unique traffic visits * Conversion ratio broken down by marketing event/engagement * Content vitality * % of self serve upgrade to sales assisted ARR * How can Marketing increase this %? * What are the trends for those upgrades? Can we adjust our Marketing efforts based on this? * Abandon rate (visit and never return) * Recontact % * Escalation to sales assisted communication

Sales and Customer Success shouldn't be two separate islands. These groups have to be incredibly synced in order to best serve your customer base. This is why I recommend a business hire a revenue leader who oversees both customer acquisition and customer retention. That way, you have an executive who isn't selfishly focused on one area of the business. Roles & Responsibilities + Compensation Incentivization: * Be sure to clearly define roles and swimlanes between AEs & CSMs * Recommend AEs build pipeline, close deals, expand accounts (full stack AEs) * Clearly defined handoff/partnership process once initial land is closed. * Account plans are a must based on mutually identified threshold (i.e. ARR, propensity to scale) * Customer journey mapping: Outline clear partnership touch points from pre to post sales to determine contribution amongst account teams. How might you quantify services for large scale deployments? Don't give anything away for free, use your concession playbook if post sales services are included. * Recommend CSMs renew customers * CSMs incentivized to generate expansion opportunities and will get % payout of net revenue retention (expansion) * Recommend RevOps is also incentivized to hit a revenue target. RevOps is the most crucial partner to your revenue leader. They need incentivization to support the sellers get their job done. Make them feel a part of the team and reward them for their work. * Shared KPIs: * Customer obsessed culture: 1 team, 1 dream, always asking “what’s in it for the customer?” * Pipeline (conversion vs. vanity stats), new business vs. expansion revenue, NPS, retention, churn vs. contraction, product/feature adoption * AEs & CSMs must have have consistent meetings to knowledge share, discuss and implement process improvement, strategize on key accounts, share feedback from the customers, etc. Pairing AEs and CSMs by segment can drive a much more seamless working relationship internally and for the customer Don't forget, hiring A+ talent is what keeps these teams motivated most. People want to be surrounded by high performers. The moment you hire a B player, the entire attitude, work ethic, morale, and throughput of your team completely changes. Never settle for anything less than A+ talent/ * Identify needed skills by role in changing landscape. Don't hire the same profile every time. Find teammates who balance each other out. Look for innate skillsets you cannot coach (persistence, hustle, humility, selfless, grit, competitiveness, hunger) * Performance management: Atomic unit of efficiency * Continuous coaching: Call reviews * Career development: Career laddering across the entire organization. Invest in your SDRs and build a low lift, high return SMB segment to promote them into. * Sell 90 Initiative: * Frontline reps spend 90% of time on customers * Automate/remove as much manual friction as possible from outbounding to accounts to renewing customers. Your customer facing team should never worry about anything other than their customer

There isn't a one size fits all approach, however, this framework is a good place to start in order to deeply understand your customers. I like to position each obstacle as a "how might we" question in order to solve: 1. Assess & Define Customer Lifecycle: What are the behaviors of our most successful customers? What did their customer journey look like? How were they onboarded? What are the behaviors of customers who expanded? How might we scale the successes and learn from the failures? 1. Awareness: How might we get our product in front of more customers with the right messaging at the right time? Which channels are most/least effective? MQL by source. 2. Evaluation: How might we customize the customer experience to solve specific pain points to drive customer acquisition? How do we get to realized ROI faster, specific to a use case? 3. Acquisition: How might we drive time to value faster and reduce onboarding so customers expand sooner? What onboarding hurdles can we eliminate? How might we automate onboarding and reduce internal resources to support our customers (turnkey vs. CX resources needed). 4. Value Realized: How might we drive quantifiable impact faster and get multi-threaded across the executive team to instill value at the business level? What value do we provide at the departmental level vs. corporate/business level to solve organizational wide challenges? 5. Rules of Engagement: Audit exisiting process, identify gaps, inefficiencies, and opportunities for improvement. Interview your current team and customers to understand current challenges and customer needs. 1. What is your CX team responsible for? How might we put together a comp plan that incentivizes the outcomes we're aiming to drive with our customers? 6. Customer Support: How might we drive impactful QBRs with our customers in order to be a mission critical solution globally? 1. Product Led: To reiterate, how might we automate more of the onboarding process? 2. Customer Maturity Model: Prescriptive with our customers by creating custom milestones of achievement throughout their contract to guarantee renewal. 3. Segmentation: Defining where CS/Support resources are best spent based on CAC. How might we remove internal blockers to our CX team so they can spend all of their time with our highest valued customers? 2. User Engagement & Referral Programs: Encouraging existing users to refer new customers can be a cost-effective way to expand the customer base * Insert referral bonus in our product * Incentivize G2 review post positive implementation 3. Data Monetization: Leveraging product insights to determine which accounts have the highest propensity to expand & which should be flagged as churn/contraction risk. * Advocacy: How might we build a customer advisory board as a revenue stream? How might we get our customers on stage touting about the impact our solution has on their organization? * Churn: How might we reduce regrettable churn? How do we measure customer health? How might we get ahead of customers moving to a “red” stage? How might we identify at-risk customers sooner in order to reduce risk of churn? * NRR: What is driving the most successful NRR outcomes? What can we replicate in our motion across each segment of our customers to drive renewals? How might we drive more multi-year contracts to drive longevity with our customers? How might we get in front of our customers far before renewal to ensure they’re healthy (reiterating the customer maturity model from day 1 of onboarding) 4. Expansion: How might we get multi-threaded sooner and provide more use cases to our customers? 1. Create expansion playbooks & account plans for high growth propensity accounts (ARR threshold, employee size, etc.) 2. Training CS on discovery (value selling, multi-threading, solving for outcomes, driving solutions vs. selling features) 3. Enable your entire revenue organization on how to negotiate (give/get) 4. CS opportunity to build muscle by identifying opportunities. Incentivization around expansion pipeline creation (% payout for expansion deals) 5. Customer Health: Define, report, measure, analyze customer health to ensure gross revenue retention? How might we create a customer maturity model that guides our customers through custom journeys to realize ROI quickly? 1. At Risk: How might we implement a system to identify at risk customers in order to act quickly to eliminate regrettable churn? How might we get to a fast yes/no sooner to ensure we don't waste resources on renewals that are already lost. What learnings can we take?

You have to have a glutton for punishment moving from structure to no structure, take it from me, but it can be such a rewarding and fulfilling experience to build something from 0→1. Throughout my career, I wouldn’t say there have been many surprises, moreso ‘opportunities’ to put a positive spin on it. Systems & Reporting: We forget how easy we have it being at a larger organization where you have countless resources for technologies that have already been vetted and rolled out, and full funnel reporting to support pipeline/revenue trends, forecasting predictability, etc. * My advice for any revenue leader starting from scratch is to bring in a RevOps hire. This is the most critical investment you can make to build the foundation for your revenue motion. Market Positioning & Value Prop: Don’t expect a clear deck with clear customer case studies, ROI metrics, customer facing collateral, competitive positioning, discovery questions, pitch scripts, etc. As the first sales hire, you must build this. * My advice: Customer tour of duty. This is your opportunity to connect with customers to understand how they use your product, what’s resonating, what needs improvement, etc. Pipeline: You likely won’t have a marketing engine generating inbound leads, let alone an outbound engine targeting key accounts that have high propensity to engage with you. * My advice: Partner with RevOps to understand your target audience by: * Defining your ICP: company size, industry, revenue, geographic location, and technology stack * Leveraging Data: CRM, historical deals, and win/loss analysis, inbound analysis, etc. to find patterns in successful accounts * Intent & Firmographic Data: Third-party tools to gather intent signals (hiring, tech stack, funding, ICP profiles, etc.) and firmographic information (company size, geo, industry, etc.) Hiring: Do not rush this. As the first sales hire, you should be running every single deal for the first 30-60 days. Deeply understand your customers, their challenges, and how you can solve them. * My advice: You must fire “Full Stack AEs” who have something to prove and are willing to hunt, convert, close, and expand. Bring on talent who can do it all. Less is more and remember to hire for the innate skillsets that you cannot teach: grit, humility, curiosity, high EQ, perseverance, hunger, etc. Product & GTM Alignment: This is one of the most critical relationships to get right if you want to grow your revenue engine. * My advice: Create a shared vision with Product and how you plan to differentiate in the market. Create a consistent and clear feedback loop between you and your revenue team and Product where you sync often to understand which key features, workflows, and customer requests would impact the most ARR if rolled out. Communication is key, but ensuring you cut out the noise from one off feature requests is most important. Decisions should be made in a binary and objective approach (ARR).