Scott Barton

Bottlenecks can typically be identified by your conversion rates within your pipeline. First, you should map our your buying stages. Typically this starts with Stage 0 (a meeting has been set) to maybe stage 7 or 8 (closed won). Most companies have the same stages across all customer segments. Once this is defined, you can start to measure how many leads are making it through. For example, most companies want at least 30% of their stage 0 opportunities to move to stage 1. If you're below this or ...Read More

I really like measuring how many net new companies and how many net new people your sales team is reaching out to each month. Some companies only measure one (or none). Both KPI's are easy to set up if you're using Outreach or Salesloft + Salesforce. Measuring these two KPIs will help you understand how wide (# of companies) and deep (# of people) that you need to go to get your desired results. Pro-tip: Find out what's been working for your top performers as a benchmark and then work with your ...Read More

I think the key here is set proper expectations. You can still get team members to buy in to some of these metrics that may be arbitrary if you let them know that you might have to pivot. More specifically, if you set goals based on your own personal experience, review them every quarter, and then are open to making changes when appropriate, most sales people will respond well. This really comes down to having senior sales and ops leaders that have industry experience. You don't have to perfectl ...Read More

The most important metric here is your attainment. Leadership is going to look here first as they'll want to understand how you performed against your target. They'll then compare that to the team average while factoring in things like ramp, seasonality, etc. In addition to this, you should think critically about how you contributed to the culture of the team. Are you a good team player? Do you add value in team meetings? Did you partner well with sales enablement? Did you help with a new proces ...Read More

The burnout can be very real here. Here's how I avoid it/manage it. Focus on what's in your control. I get less upset when things out of my control don't go my way. Take PTO This is especially hard when you're on a monthly quota. That said, it's still important to take time off. You'll be able to push harder when you're in-seat after some time away. Set goals for yourself. You'll always have a target to hit. While it can be common for your level of burnout to be tied to your progress against thi ...Read More