Demand generation teams, revenue development teams, AE teams, and CSM teams comprise the modern revenue organization. While they engage with prospects and customers in different phases of their life cycle, collectively they are responsible for customer and revenue growth.
Data driven revenue teams strive to achieve and exceed growth goals with predictability and efficiency. These goals are connected to output metrics like Bookings, Revenue. In addition to these, there are 87 other essential KPIs that should be tracked but rarely are. Why? Because analytics teams have a backlog a mile long and business teams can’t get these KPIs built for months or even years. More on how to address this later.
Here’s the complete list of KPIs revenue leaders should demand. Without these, you’re flying blind.
These are the outputs that ultimately determine whether a company’s revenue organization is performing well.
Most companies have these output KPIs defined but often lack input KPIs, team performance KPIs, and rich and actionable ways to slice and dice them. More on these below.
These KPIs are often an early signal into whether the team will meet its output goals. Many organizations also have 50% of these KPIs. Even these lack actionability because there’s no way to slice and dice them deeply. For instance, if Opportunities Created is decreasing, what regions, channels, campaigns, ADR activity, prospect touches, explain this decline?
Another common problem I’ve discovered is that many KPIs are misrepresented as “Averages” which hides what’s really going on.: I was recently talking to a RevOps leader who said “Even though our average deal size is 100K, 90% of our accounts are either significantly larger than this or significantly smaller.” So then that average deal size KPI doesn’t really tell us what’s going on. More on this in a related post from the lead data scientist at Falkon on how averages go awry.
Most of the KPIs above are focused on desirable outputs. To achieve these outputs, 80% of our focus as practitioners should be on the inputs! That’s all we control. Roughly speaking, the inputs are all about the productivity and effectiveness of our teams (ADRs, AEs, SEs, CSMs etc.) and our engagement with customers (channels, campaigns, content). I will leave product out for now (since that is not directly controlled by revenue teams).
For all the KPIs above, they only become truly powerful when they can be sliced and diced in actionable ways. We classify these attributes into two categories: descriptive attributes and actionable attributes.
Descriptive attributes: These are useful for segmenting prospects based on common attributes.
Examples include:
Actionable attributes: These are actionable levers that we control.
Examples include:
Circling back to the example I started with, Opportunities Created are going down. If you have all of the attributes available for this KPI, you can quickly figure out that Opportunities Created are going down primarily for SMB and Mid Market, for Product SKU: CRM, driven by 3 specific channels, and 12 campaigns. This in turn is because of an anemic Lead Mix for this segment.
There are two serious obstacles for revenue teams to become data driven:
Often the backlog to create KPIs is a mile long and it takes months and hiring dedicated analysts to put all this together. These analysts get pulled into 20 other initiatives and the backlog is never completed.
Fortunately with tools like Falkon, these KPIs can be created in weeks, not months for companies that use Salesforce, Salesloft, Outreach, Gong, Chorus, Marketo, Hubspot, Gainsight, Zendesk, and other well known tools.
Processing this much data to identify the top 5 things you really need to pay attention to is not a human scale problem.
At Falkon, we’re helping revenue teams overcome these obstacles.
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