Key performance indicators (KPIs) should never just be data for data’s sake. They are meant to tell the true story about where you are having success or challenges in meeting your business goals. On the go-to-market side of businesses, the story should look at how you are building your revenue pipeline, the journey of the pipeline, and how efficient you are at winning revenue.

But all too often the desire to regularly track and review KPIs within and across teams runs into any number of obstacles that get in the way of that effectively happening:

• There isn’t agreement on which KPIs are most important to measure given where your business is at today
• There isn’t shared understanding and clear definition about what the chosen KPIs mean 
• The data behind the KPIs isn’t trusted, depending on the data source, calculation model, and latency
• There’s not central source or scorecard and no clear owner to maintain this

Mastering this process means you are equipped to identify and react to issues as they arise and spot emerging trends (both favorable and unfavorable) sooner. You can shift resources, hiring plans, and investments accordingly. You are prepared to answer questions from executive and the board of directors. And you are working more collaboratively and synchronously with your GTM stakeholders and partners.

It is with that goal in mind that Revcast provides a solution for not just developing your GTM plan but for continuously measuring and adapting based on actual performance insights. It’s also why we just launched volume 2 of our Big Book of Great Revcasting series: “The Essential KPIs for Revenue Insights.”

This 60+ page reference guide is a must-have resource for anyone involved in GTM performance measurement. It breaks down the definitions and calculations for dozens of KPIs, describes and illustrates examples of each, and recommends best practices for customizing your own scorecarding and enabling oversight.

Revenue insight KPIs are the focus (this isn’t a book on CFO-oriented financial performance KPIs) and are grouped into logical categories that also follow a revenue-building pipeline journey:

• Hiring and Attrition: First, you must understand your available human resources (capacity) to build pipeline and work deals.
• Quota Capacity and Attainment: You must know how much revenue production those hires realistically should be able to deliver when performing well.
• Ramps: It’s necessary to know how long it takes to get new hires or org changes productive. 
• Pipeline: How are both your marketing and sales organizations doing in generating demand and how is that moving through the stages towards close?
• Sales Execution Cycle: Among the most familiar KPIs, this tells you how well you’re performing as revenue is closing, in terms of deal sizes, velocity, win rates, and more.
• Productivity: It’s important to fold in the costs to build pipeline and revenue and understand how efficient you are.

This knowledge-sharing resource was written by Revcast’s chief RevOps officer, Jeff Serlin, drawing on his extensive experience working for companies including Pendo, Marketo, Intercom, Campaign Monitor, and IBM. 

As Jeff writes in the opening chapter: “We are no longer in an era of the zero interest rate policy (ZIRP) – which was characterized by a growth-at-all-cost approach when raising capital was cheap. In today’s climate, fundamental inefficiencies are harder to hide with capital. Companies must now approach GTM differently. More accurate planning and agile optimization are needed to drive success. And that means insights, which requires an increased emphasis on GTM KPIs.”

In the closing chapter, the book makes recommendations on how to develop the best KPI tracking strategy for your company – so that you don’t feel overwhelmed by all the possibilities:

1. Identify the questions you most want to answer. Prioritize where you want to have the most insights across the parts of your GTM ‘supply chain.’ What are the burning questions that keep coming up? 
2. Don’t boil the ocean. Take the outputs of your planning strategy that relate to your main priorities and growth levers, and then determine which top-level KPIs you need to measure to give you the best insights. Focus on where your business is today and your goals for the current and upcoming fiscal year.
3. Create scorecards. Do this as a team, build consensus on what and how to track so you’re not constantly changing or being inconsistent.
4. Define the KPIs. Make sure everyone understands what the KPIs mean and how they are being calculated.
5. Improve the infrastructure. Determine the best plan to get to the data to calculate the KPIs and how to present the findings. Consider the addition of third-party tools like Revcast or others to help.
6. Establish cadences. Determine how often certain KPIs make sense to refresh and to discuss within and across teams.

We hope this new ebook becomes an invaluable resource for your organization. A big thanks to Jeff for his expert work on putting it together. We’d love to get your thoughts on it too, which you can send to: marketing@revcast.com

Download the free ebook now

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