The founders of the Sales Ops Leaders Slack community have partnered up with OppGen Hub to answer your questions on all things Salesforce metrics related. Learn the crucial B2B SaaS sales metrics that you might have overlooked and how to get them from SFDC – without the headache.
Tom Andrews – Revenue Operations Manager at PassFort
Tarnjeet Nandra – Sales and Revenues Leader at TCM Consulting
Kevin Probst – Business Intelligence Manager at Alasco
Yash Arora – Business Operations Manager at Returnly
Below, is the full transcript from Oppgen’s webinar on Crucial B2B Sales Metrics. Keep reading or check out the full video here.
Kevin Probst: Hi, guys! Everybody who just joined, happy to have you here. We can also do some intros already of the panelists while people are dripping in. Who wants to start? Tommy, you want to go first?
Tom Andrews: Sure thing. So, I’m Tom, and I look after Revenue Operations for a company called PassFort. We do essentially Compliant technology and Regulatory technology. I look after everything from Marketing Systems to Sales Systems and Product Systems; Pretty much anything involving a system used by the team rather than part of our product itself.
Kevin Probst: All right, Tarnjeet, what about you?
Tarnjeet Nandra: Sure, I love to go next. So, I’m currently working for TCM Consulting. I’m a Consultant myself, and what I think Consulting does is help scale and develop more effective Sales Operations. Especially for new startups or companies that are actually scaling quite fast as well. So again, specializing in the operations field and meeting many different types of customers with similar objectives. I’m sure today we will be sharing some of those experiences I’ve had.
Kevin Probst: Great.
Yash Arora: I can go next. Hi everyone, I’m Yash. I’m based in Spain in Madrid. I work as a Business Operations Manager at Returnly, a company based out of San Francisco, and we have an office in Madrid. What the company does is; we have a returns platform. Basically, we help improve; We help the Brands improve their returns experience. And what I do for the company is, I manage all the business operations, sales operations, and basically, everything that has to do with the CRM, in this case, Salesforce CALM calculation for Marketing Ops. It’s a mixture of working with Finance. I guess typical business operations roles, and I also work a lot with data science, like on some analysis that we need to do from time to time.
Kevin Probst: Cool. Thank you for being here, Yash. And me myself; My name is Kevin Probst. I’m going to moderate this webinar today. I’m a BI manager, Business intelligence manager of Alasco. It’s a Munich-based SaaS start-up, and I’m looking after all the operations from Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success. And also, of course, I do my BI role, and I do in all go-to-market metrics.
Kevin Probst: Thank you, everyone, for joining us today. And for everybody who joined later, I’ll do a quick review and introduce the panelists again, so we have Tom Andrews from PassFort with Tarnjeet Nandra from TCM Consulting and Yash Arora from Returnly. I Am thrilled to have them on the Panel. They’re all experts in the Operations field, and we have prepared for your questions.
And also everybody, Hello and thank you for joining us today. I see many people from the Sales Operations Slack group, a community that we have found recently and where we will post a link to this webinar after. And I’ll summarize the group; We noticed that Sales Operations and Marketing Operations don’t have a community to come together, ask questions and support each other. That’s why we created this select group, and it’s a great source of information regarding all the operations topics from metrics to dashboards and so on. From here is where most of the questions were coming from, and I think we can start getting into it.
Kevin Probst: And I want to highlight that we want to keep this more like a discussion. And so, everybody who has a question can wave or turn your camera on and speak up.
Kevin Probst: So what we’re going to cover is the first question is going to revolve about the top of the funnel metrics. We also want to talk about Salesforce Dashboards and give examples of helpful tools to get your head around Salesforce. We will also talk about Account-based selling and how you can do it in Salesforce. And last but not least; Our last question asked before the webinar. We want to talk about OKRs and what kind of metrics we can use with that. And in the end, we are going to have a live Q&A.
Kevin Probst: Jules shared the first question. So, thank you again. And the question is:
What should key top of the funnel metrics be shared weekly to Sales and Marketing leaders and Panelists? Do you have the right to share your opinion on that?
Yash Arora: I can begin. Some of the metrics that I think we discussed together were: How many leads entered the system last week? How much of those were converted to Opportunities? were they disqualified? Also, the response time, in which I will get a little bit more into detail later. Leads assigned and the activity on those leads related to how many opportunities were created and not just created, but they are advanced. So I think I will talk a little bit about leads disqualified last week and Lead response time.
Tarnjeet Nandra: Yeah, I would agree with Yash about all of the metrics that you’ve highlighted there. To add some additional metrics to that, I would say Top Campaigns. I think between Sales and Marketing, you need to understand what campaigns are affecting and what are being used the most and are the most effective.
Tarnjeet Nandra: That gives Salespeople a good idea of knowing if specific leads have come from a particular campaign. They know that these will be good quality leads, and they will then end up making sure that they can work those leads. And if they’re working those leads, then, of course, marketing can focus more on those particular campaigns. I would also say conversion rates are key.
Tarnjeet Nandra: Understanding what those conversion rates look like and understanding the number of new leads. I would certainly agree with that and would also select these by status and owner as well. But yeah, it’s always good to have something to compare against. It depends on what way you are tracking those leads particularly. So, if you’re doing it month by month or quarter by quarter, it’s always good to take a look at. For example, this quarter versus the last previous quarter. What does your next quarter look like? What does that year-to-date look like? And to have that comparison as well at the same time. So, I would say those are probably the additions that I would add and the ones that you’ve got here as well.
Yash Arora: I think if we’re talking about conversion… One of the things that I’ve noticed in terms of measuring in Salesforce is, we measure a lead when it’s only converted to a contact and not converted to an opportunity per se. So we can efficiently work around that by creating a field called “created from lead” or something like that. And make a simple formula that you can even share later, or you can easily find it on Google. If the opportunity was created, but it was not created from the lead, you will see that it doesn’t show up in the conversion metrics. That can happen sometimes, and it was happening indeed in our case internally, so I made a change there.
Yash Arora: I also wanted to discuss leads disqualified. We must look at that because then we can see where the problem is in the funnel. Is it because of the leads that came in from marketing? We’re not good enough? or did the SDR not do a good job? Things that you can easily see, and it’s vital to select maybe six or seven good reasons why leads are being disqualified and relevant to your business. It’s usually something like pricing, timing, no Market fit, whatever it may be.
So, it’s important to train the SDRs team there. One of the things I’ve noticed is, sometimes SDRs mark the leads as unresponsive when they only try to contact the lead ones, and that’s not enough for me. We need to capture that kind of stuff in terms of; When leads are being disqualified, are leads? or bad? or the SDR Didn’t do a good job.
From the leads that are disqualified; Which are relevant to your business?
And one more thing there is; leads assigned versus activity. In terms of activity, what is right is that if you have a tool that automatically logs the activity into sales for something, like Outreach is an example. When someone sends an email from Gmail, It blogs into Salesforce calendar events are synced into Salesforce; So that way, you’re saving the time of the Salespeople so that they don’t have to go each time to Salesforce Blog at a call. But all that activity is on Salesforce, so you can see these many leads were assigned. What is the activity level? Are the SDR’s in this case, doing a good job there?
Kevin Probst: And we have a question from the audience. Javier asks; what about account-based TOFU Metrics?
Tom Andrews: I think the main thing to think about with account-based TOFU metrics is that the lead still matters, but it’s where those leads are coming from. Moreover, it’s trying to understand your accounts as something that lives and breathes and where they are in a process, so they should be moving through overtime and going through something. We always have opportunity stages, and it’s something that any CRM understands.
What I’d recommend to people who are moving towards a company selling or account-based marketing or account-based everything; is to create spaces on your accounts that are as automated and understood by everyone. As you have on your opportunities, you can see with every account like; is it early days or do we have a bit of data? Have we started to fill out everything we need to know to qualify them? Have we started to engage them? Are we Working with them? Have we got that response, so it becomes a two-way communication? And from there, how does it move into the discovery stage of the opportunity and through something much more comprehensive?
Once you can see that the entire flow of all the data moves through the accounts, that’s when you start to see not just the leads and how they feed into the account; but see it almost as an overall flow of data through your business. Lead contacts and opportunities all become part of that overall account-based workflow.
And that’s where you can also start to bring in some innovative Revenue attribution models. Revenue touch models and multi-touch attribution with marketing; To not look at leads generated and who generates them, but where are those opportunities, those conversations, and the progression of that data within the account being accelerated by the efforts of marketing. To get to a point where If you look at an account and see everything that’s happening from your marketing team, your demand team, your outbound team, and your sales team. How it all comes together to move through… I wouldn’t even call it a sales cycle anymore; I call it a relationship cycle because that’s what it is about, like relationships.
Kevin Probst: Yes. Yash, Were you pressing or stressing that the right quality of leads is critical? And I know for a fact that you brought us a little tool that you liked about Salesforce and what it can do while distributing. Maybe you can add to this.
Yash Arora: Sure. So, I use a tool at Returnly called Lead Distribution Engine. It is a tool that is also being used by Salesforce themselves. Lead Distribution Engine, probably mentioned in the APP Exchange, but the tool is great because of the way we used it. Most of our businesses are inbounds, and when a lead comes in, we have set up teams. We have a mid-market team, a small business team, and we have BDR’s and SDRs.
So, when a lead comes in, the Lead Distribution Engine takes that lead. Based on the criteria I’ve set it up, it distributes it evenly based on round-robin automatically in Salesforce. The Salesperson has the option to reject the lead for some reason, like a wrong lead was assigned to them, and then they’re automatically compensated. So the next time lead comes, it is the first in the queue.
Yash Arora: The other things that I’m using here are things like; Leads assigned 24/7 to the salespeople, but I want to be able to measure the response time during business hours. Because if a lead is assigned to them on Sunday and I start counting on a Sunday, that’s 24 hours gone because they were not working on Sunday. So, this has the functionality basically to set business hours. So when a lead is on the same day, it doesn’t start counting until the next day, Monday at 9:00 a.m. And if the salesperson is at the pond at 10 a.m., the response time was 1 hour in this case, because they came into office at nine, they saw the lead and responded within one hour.
We have set up SLAs. So, our response time is: you have to respond to a lead in two hours. If you don’t, I assign it to someone else, and I use Lead Distribution Engine. And if someone goes out of the office, I can easily go to Lead Distribution Engine and select out “of the office,” and that person does not get any leads. You can go pretty much with this tool, and I recommend it; you can get all the metrics you need as well. It’s very well integrated with Salesforce, easy to use, and you can assign leads using territories as well. So, there’s a lot of stuff you can do there.
Tarnjeet Nandra: Yeah, sure, I agree with that. I mean having like a lead assignment, distribution engine… The amount of time that you can save by implementing something like this goes such a long way, and therefore leads are instantly landed onto the ladder of your SDR or maybe yourself stressing; depending on who’s managing those people leads and it’ll also affect the quality of the leads as well. You get to manage that as well. So, you’ve got good quality leads coming in in a perfect time frame, and at the end of the day, that’s better customers, you know, to experience for the end person, right? So, yeah, I agree. If you can Implement or introduce something like this, I definitely would.
Kevin Probst: Thank you, Tarnjeet, for sharing, and we have also bought something with us… or let’s say Tom was requested, for example, foreign dashboard used in Salesforce and tackling this issue of or this question of; what to report weekly? And so, Tom can say something of the great dashboard that you brought to us today.
Tom Andrews: Yeah, of course. One of my many pet projects is building this dashboard as soon as I get into this company where I am at. Now, this dashboard is essentially our kind of account-based Hub. It looks relatively simple on the surface, but the idea is it unlocks a lot of value. It gives you a view into, not quite a velocity, what we probably understand the sales velocity, but something more akin to account velocity.
There’s a huge workflow of different rules, built-in process builder in Salesforce based on the criteria. The data on an account, from the data completeness to the data quality to specific parts of the data, are answered that categorizes the status of an account. So, in the leftmost column of this dashboard, we look at the amount of the assigned account as you look at it. So from our entire, what we consider to be our total addressable Market; what percentage of those or what part of those?
Tom Andrews: How many of those accounts we assigned out to the team in their active books? A funnel is so we can see how they’re moving through the different stages of assigned work. Discover opportunities and customers for any period of time, see how they drop through with over account activity at the bottom, and what this looks like is the bar chart representing the total number of activities per account stage.
But then the line that you can barely see represents the average number. We see that the total number of activities goes down as we engage more with the account, but the activities per account go up. So you can almost see the impact of the outbound there, which is a question. We kind of just got asked around the outbound. This represents a lot of that activity moving into the working accounts in that Central column. That is where we kind of look at.
Okay, if these four hundred and forty accounts are signed out, how many are actively worked through Cadence’s and using tools a lot like any insect Sales engagement tool.
We use SalesForce’s version of how they all filtered through and into the meetings booked, which is a number every sales leader loves to hear about, and then finally in the gate engaged account. So how many accounts do we have active two-way potentially profitable conversations? With that are either very early-stage opportunities or relatively late-stage opportunities that are just getting towards the end of them. And on these accounts, you can see in the bottom right-hand corner; I look at the activity in the last seven days and their last 30 days and based on the amount of activity. I use that as part of my Risk-appetite when we go into forecasting.
So if I do not see very much activity on a late-stage opportunity, it’s going to be a big red flag for me because really, if you’re getting towards closing a deal, you expect the communication with the client to go up, not down. So this view lets us take you to know an overview of everything, both inbound and outbound; a working on how it’s all working together and then, almost be able to forecast a period of time of where the opportunity forecast is. Because we know how many accounts are in this working phase that could suddenly engage, so then go into the real pipeline as we see it.
Not seeing very much activity on a late-stage opportunity? Big red flag! The communication with the client to go up, not down.
Yash Arora: Tom, I have a question. I’m just curious to know how you guys are doing it? So, when it comes to account-based selling, the account has been created. Does it first go to the BDR? or is it going to the sales team directly? And how are you disqualifying accounts? Like you disqualify an opportunity? If the account is already disqualified, you do not revisit it, or are you revisiting it in the future?
Tom Andrews: Great question, so I like the work of Model where every team touches every account, which some people think is a bit Rogue. But I think it’s the way you should do account-based marketing and account-based selling. I think it demolishes any mention of silos. So, for every account that comes in, we will be marketing to them. Hopefully, they will see our ads then we will always align them to one of our account development reps, which is essentially like your classic SDR or BDR role. Should they disqualify them out for any reason?
Tom Andrews: I put a moratorium on the account and then follow it for three months to ensure we’re not over engaging them or spamming them. In that period, we start to move them onto a soft touch nurture Campaign, which will be around, like product releases. We try to really understand why we disqualified them and then send them relevant content because it should be interesting. Still, more importantly, it should bring them back into the active pipeline. If there were a specific feature that we did not have yet because we’re still relatively early stage, it would be marked when disqualified.
And as soon as that is ready to go, they’ll receive the release communication. So we try always to keep them kind of vaguely aware of what we’re doing and then try to bring them back and that we’d wait a minimum of three months before we read the central column of working accounts; And then it’s up to the Pod leaders. So, we use a pod system with an account development rep aligned to AE.
Whether they fully disqualified the account or moved it out of their portal together… in which case I take it back into the staff. I overview and watch fit inbound traffic, or we keep it in the Pod as an assigned account, and we wait a period of time before we re-engage. So that’s why there are about 200 accounts on the right two columns and another 200 that just sat there, and that’s because some of those, we believe we will engage with them, but it will be a little while until we do.
Yash Arora: I had something to add, but I think we have a question. So, Kevin, if you can, go ahead.
Tom Andrews: Okay. Looking at dashboards, I wanted to ask you guys… and because that’s somehow as I see it; Much focused on activities. And I want to ask you guys if you have any idea or feeling for the right balance between activity metrics and productivity metrics in the dashboard or a weekly sales dashboard?
Tarnjeet Nandra: Yeah, I think productivity really tells you exactly how well you will achieve at the end. Where’s your activity? Just really understanding the engagement that you’re going to have with your particular customer. And I think, the activity. A lot of people don’t see this. Still, the activity can forecast predictability in terms of how well a particular account is doing or an opportunity is doing. It can help people cast in terms of; if that deal is going to be coming in.
So, I think there is definitely a difference between the two. I think there need to be measurements of both, and they are equally just as important. Without activity, then you won’t understand that productivity in itself. I think what Tom is showing here is great.
This can work for new businesses, and the steps can also work for existing businesses. So, I think you have engagement scores around the existing customer base that can also give you some great insights into how many of your customers are going to renew with you. Whereas in your new business. It tells you exactly if you are going to be making or meeting your opportunities. So, your metrics.
There’s a lot of talk about account-based planning around this, and I probably take a little bit of a different approach. But not to say that what Tom is showing is incorrect or wrong, because I think this is fantastic. I always think that, if you’ve got customers already, you are probably already segmenting your customers within your organization, and they’re going to be segmented into common Attributes. Every single one of your customers has a strategic pyramid that they follow. So all those companies have a vision and mission, core values, smart goals… And your account managers and all your sales reps who are managing and looking after those particular accounts will probably be looking and understanding what those objectives are.
Tarnjeet Nandra: And this is where you overlay account planning into place as well. So, if you do account planning with each of your particular accounts, you get to see these particular organizations’ true problems. And when you see these particular organizations’ true problems, that then gives you the target of accounts that you need to go after probably. And once you’ve got that Target Market, that then creates repetitive business for you very easily as well.
So, there are so many different ways. You can go about account-based planning, or one of the ways is what Tom has shown here in terms of real sort of analyzing and looking at your accounts. The other way is this, looking at your existing customer base and understanding what the true problems are. And because you will have many other customers, also having those particular problems as well, and that will help with some of your account based metrics through account planning, to help you identify those quite quickly as well.
Account planning each of your particular accounts can help you see the true problems of these particular organizations and use them to generate new business.
Kevin Probst: We got from our sales dashboard directly to the next question, which was: Everything revolving around this new topic or relatively new, account-based selling; and how can you if you have any tips and recommendations about that when working with Salesforce? and you already made your first tips of recommendations on that. We have a few more you guys have collected a few more that we can share here.
Yash Arora: So, one of the things I wanted to talk about account-based selling, as you have mentioned, is what we’re doing is the customer success team, right? They work with the accounts for more than a couple of stories and stuff. What’s important is that we have segmented our clients into; tier one, two, and three. So we want to make sure that we are touching especially the tier one clients enough.
That’s where the activity comes in, but we also use a tool called Atrium in this case, which I won’t get into much detail here, but it gives us alerts every week based on… Okay, this account is at Risk, because it’s important to know that you know the risk of turn, but also you might get a sense of expansions coming in, in terms of you know, an extra business, a new business that is generated from renewals.
So, outside of the purely new business, it is important to look at the existing accounts. And I wanted to mention this, in this case, in terms of new accounts. Why I did this is funny because we did it with some of the team from bloobirds. We are also doing some salesforce consulting, so I have worked with them in the past.
Yash Arora: I think it’s kind of cool the idea that we came up with when we were doing all of our business was outbound in one of my old companies. So, we created a custom object that is a little bit advanced in salesforce, I guess, but we created a custom object called “qualified companies” and attached it to leads. How is that helping? We were making sure that if a lead or qualified company, in this case, was discarded, it never converted into an account. So, the SDR would disqualify it in the initial phase, and it would only get converted to an account when I had a meeting booked in their calendar.
In this way, you are not cluttering. You know, we are not creating five thousand accounts. You were creating many qualified companies, which was attached to the lead. So when you would convert a lead, the lead and the qualified company would get converted into account, contact, and opportunity. We were then able to see the SDR work separately, which is a standard Salesforce way. If you do not do a common base set, you will get inbound leads versus the account Contacts and opportunities created and how the account executive was doing. So that was something that helped us a lot, and in terms of not cluttering Salesforce too much with kind of bogus accounts because they were not the right fit.
Tom Andrews: That’s a significant one. In one of the previous companies that I’ve worked for, I won’t name names, but we did a remediation exercise on the number of accounts we had in Salesforce, and 18,000 of them didn’t exist. They had gone out of business into liquidation or just like merging to others. So, the total addressable market was cut by 40% instantly, and all of the protections they made were wrong because of that. So, it’s really cool to hear how you use that custom object.
Tarnjeet Nandra: it’s quite interesting because sometimes you think about, you should have more EDRs, or should you invest in getting data into your system, so that you have more leads into the system. You try to find a balance between the two and, if you want to sort of save money, what you could do is have fewer EDRs and buy more prospects, and be fed in. But then it results in what you are saying: you’ll have the customer, you’ll have council companies that may no longer exist after a year because they just no longer do business anymore. So then, you have got so much redundant data in your system, and then you know EDL’s or salespeople can be completely fogged as well. So yeah, definitely having that right balance is definitely crucial and critical here.
Tom Andrews: I just wanted to jump into what is actually on the screen now as well. So, these are some top tips I always give to companies around account-based dashboards. What I have seen so many times is people creating their own dashboards for everything. Every team has its own dashboard, and then someone asks for the sales number, and everyone has a different number. Then everyone argues about it and then one truth, and everything goes a bit pear-shaped. So yeah, I think it is essential for companies to define the way they Speak about data and words they use and in certain things, and it normally is something that becomes quite colloquial to companies.
I’ve talked a lot about point one here, but I just wanted to say on point two and three; build as few dashboards as possible, with as many layers of drill-down as possible, and always use the same terminology. And if you have to create a glossary, create a glossary so that everyone uses the same word for what is an order. “What is the sale? An account? A qualified company?”
These different things because as soon as you can get every team using the same language, it speaks the whole point. If everyone knows exactly what a certain word means and they know which dashboard to go to, and every region is looking at the same dashboard, or new business and customers are successful in the same dashboard with a different filter; It gets rid of so much of that miscommunication, and it also makes reporting at the end of quarter really easy.
Tarnjeet Nandra: I completely agree. I mean, I cannot stress enough that dynamic dashboards are the way forward for every single organization. And don’t get stuck in the habit of everybody having access to dashboards for them to be created independently. I like to create dashboards where you have, like you said, all the same sort of metrics that everybody’s looking at. You can then filter by a team, maybe a Region, or maybe you can even drill down by forecast category itself. And then, you can have a separate dedicated dashboard for a rep.
Salesforce does this quite easily: it’s one dashboard everybody still sees, but if you are a rep and log into that dashboard, you only see your metrics. But then you’ve got a manager that can see everybody’s plus the teams as well at the same time.
I think definitely for existing accounts, I love to track metrics such as Gross metric, the net retention metric, and then you’ve got net dollar metrics as well, which is, you know, your gross plus your net plus any upsells and cross-sells as well. And then what that looks at; by the team, by region… And having that audience sort of one place. It makes so much of a difference-making it a lot more visible in terms of how those accounts are doing. If you already got your segmentation setup, you can clearly see how well those segmentations are doing and how well those teams are doing as well.
Yash Arora: One of the things here that have helped me in the past and dashboards is upgraded like usual. I tend to create home dashboards. So, what I did was that it only displayed the person’s data. So what happens here is that, for example, if they have certain accounts to focus on, or they haven’t had certain accounts, haven’t had activity in the last few days, someone as a salesperson comes in in the morning; They hit Refresh on their home dashboard and, they’re sitting there with their coffee, and they see everything they need to do on this day.
They can also see things like, okay, how far we are? I am from my quota. What is my pipeline looking like? So if they have all that information on their homepage, it also does not give them an excuse to say, “Oh, I haven’t updated my data because I didn’t know which dashboard to go to,” or something like that. They have all the information right there. So, in one-on-ones and stuff, that also makes it easier because they’re on the same page as their manager, and they have normally seen the homepage and whatever they had to do in that particular case.
Kevin Probst: Hey, thank you, guys, for sharing. And looking at the time, I would like to jump to the next question, which was delivered to us pretty much on short notice, but I think it’s also really relevant. Anastasia did the question. And the question was; is it good to use OKRs for defining the metrics for SaaS sales? And what is your opinion about that?
Tom Andrews: I think it’s an excellent methodology. What I would say is, I find a lot of people underestimate the amount of work it takes to implement it and get everyone bought in properly. Not to labor the point of consistent language, but so many times I’ve seen OKRs, and no one agrees whether or not the key results have been met because everyone understands what the key result is different.
But half the companies I’ve worked in; we’ve had chaos, and they’ve been very successful. I think you have to get to a certain point of maturity and growth before the companies are ready for them. But if they’re implemented properly, they can be brilliant for really pushing the team towards the right metrics. I think the best implementations of OKRs that I’ve seen are where; The revenue function has a rollup of what is essentially sales and marketing.
Using OKRs to guide metrics can be great for pushing your team towards the right behaviors. But make sure your company is mature enough to set the right ones in place.
Tom Andrews: I have seen it in the past. They were marketing’s OKRs and especially key results that completely separate sales. And if one team is hitting and the other isn’t, to me, that says like the whole system is a little bit broken. So, it is important to make sure you build them correctly, which is a scalable way.
Yash Arora: Yeah, I totally agree here with you, Tom. We are also using basically, like how we drive all or try to create all our metrics. And the nice thing about this is that: I think all the sales and marketing metrics are not separated from each other, but they all pay into our overall company goal. And this is what I really like about the OKRs; it looks like a waterfall where you say the diff.
The metrics are the key results of a single department. They pay them each one to achieve the overall company OKR. This is a really nice thing you can do when you can achieve it, but I totally agree. It’s tough to keep doing that because key results are not so easy to be defined; And then that they all pay like not even into the OKR is sometimes really difficult.
Kevin Probst: Totally agree with you.
Kevin Probst: Okay, I guess we can only cover the last question quickly, which is: What’s your opinion on any metrics? This can’t be missed in nowadays operation landscapes that everybody has to track quickly and dirty. What is your point on that?
Tarnjeet Nandra: A public affair very quickly. I think for me, there are three key areas that you need to make sure that you measure. You’ve got your lead activity, you’ve got your new business activity, and then you’ve got your recurring activity. So I think those are the three areas that need to make sure I measured and tracked in all cases.
When you’ve got leaked lead activity, you need to make sure that you understand exactly; how many leads are coming in? What channels are they coming from? How many of those are excellent leads? Etc. And that can also be done how the leads are working as well from an opportunity to perspective. You’ll want to know where the top campaigns are coming in from; the average order value as well as your particular opportunities. How much is being one?
The three key areas that you must measure: lead activity, new business activity, and reoccurring activity
Tarnjeet Nandra: And then you would always want to understand your retention rate for your reoccurring side of things. So you want to understand gross or net and also your net dollar as well. And understanding any past-anything overdue that should have been done. How much of those were lost? I think the biggest one is your turn rate as well; in terms of your account turn: How many customers you’ve had? And then how many of those have been lost along the way as well?
Tarnjeet Nandra: I think that will be my quick and dirty overview of the key metrics you should have.
Yash Arora: Yes. Sure. I think I pretty much covered most of it. But in general, what I tend to focus on in terms of metrics is also the trend. So, I look at the last “X” amount of days and see if something doesn’t match. The given example of an imaginary conversion is 30%. Suddenly you see a dip, and there’s a trend that is like going downwards; that is directly an alert that something is going on there in terms of pipeline.
Yash Arora: I call them zombie Ops, basically. For example, opportunities that haven’t moved are ancient, and they’re still stuck in the same stage. That’s one thing. I like to do it. I grill the sales reps on that. Another thing is the opportunities that haven’t changed stages in a long-time opportunity; these accounts have known the next steps, but the opportunity is open.
That’s another good one. I always track that because if an opportunity is open and there is no next step, I assume the rep will not work on that opportunity. Not only go into the theme that if it’s not on Salesforce, but it’s also not true. And that’s another thing that I make sure of in terms of people like; updating all of their data in terms of the RCs team. We track expansions. Turns and expansion; we track them separately in a way so that we can see which accounts are growing.
Yash Arora: And I like to do it at that hierarchy level. So, I look at the parent account. In our case, we have multiple Brands under the parent account. So, I look at it at the Brand level, an account level, and the parent account level. That’s one thing that is very interesting for us because we can see: “Ok, this account has three brands under it, which are our biggest accounts.” So, we look at it at parentage on the level.
I tend to focus on metrics and trends, so I look at the last X amount of days and see if something doesn’t match.
Kevin Probst: One that I became a big fan of in the last couple of months, and which I think, and I can’t stress it enough, is looking at cohorts when you want to see where you’re standing. We are using Bloobirds for that. And basically, it shows us, “Okay, and what happened to the different companies that were signed in a different week? How are they converting? In which states they’re stuck? And also, we can then, as you said, Yash; try to drill down further? So, to understand what is the difference between these. We see that all our sales leaders are taking this metric, using it every day to steer the whole team, is it account Executives or BDRs. So that’s something that I became a big fan of.
Kevin Probst: Okay. Do you guys want to add up to this? Otherwise, I would like to get to the end of the webinar.
Tarnjeet Nandra: It’s been a pleasure speaking to you all about these metrics that we need to have. Thank you.
Kevin Probst: Yeah.Thank you, everybody. Also to Tom, Yash, and Tarnjeet for sharing your insights and your expertise here. I think that was valuable—also, guys, everybody, thanks for joining us today. And from the Slack Leadership group today who joined us, and from other parts, like everybody who’s not yet part of the community.
I think we posted a link already in the chat where you can join, and for everybody who is already part of the community, you can write to Tom or me or one of the admins directly because we want to know from you. How can we grow this week? How can we get this group to the next level? What are your ideas that should be doing more events? And should we be doing more webinars like this? And what should be the medium? For all of that, write to us directly. We’re delighted to get your feedback.
And also, feel free to check out Oppgen Hub. This is where his webinar is hosted from, and these two things are connected deeply with many from the sales of the operation leader group—also, the Oppgen Hub. Yeah, check it out both, and thank you very much again for joining was nice to have you all here.
Want to put faces to the text? Check out the full video of the webinar.
Want to keep reading? Check out more concrete sales tips and articles.