Slide Deck

Welcome, everyone. Hello. Hello. Good afternoon.

Perhaps good evening.

I hope you are all doing well. Welcome back. So happy to see you. How's everyone feeling today?

Good? Okay. Thank you. Thank you. I love to see the thumbs up. We are super excited for today, week six.

Cannot believe we are here. We have made it. I have no housekeeping today, but please feel free to reach out to me if you do have any questions. I'd love to hear from you.

Thank you, Brian. I'll pass it right over to you.

Alright. Thanks, Allison. I appreciate it. Thank you guys, for joining as always. I'll probably give it another thirty to sixty seconds, and then we'll go ahead and get started.

Welcome to those of you that just hopped on. Great to see you today.

Alright. We can go ahead and get started. Thanks again, Allison. Thanks for all joining. This is, session six. Reminder, we've got eight sessions, and so two weeks from today will be the last session.

Next week, we're gonna talk through, hiring and how to kind of onboard plan and, kind of map out, like, a a RobOps role within your org. So we'll kinda take a little break from, like, the the data side of things. And then session eight will go through the RobOps maturity levels, and we will wrap up with the summary and then the final exam. I did turn the final exam in. It's only twenty five questions. So, hopefully, you guys aren't too worried about it, and it's all multiple choice for true or false. So, hopefully, you guys, are able to kinda complete that, and it's no big deal.

Alright. We've got, several more people that have joined, so I'm gonna go ahead and kinda kick this off with, session six, which is all about the goal matrix, telling stories with data, and running quarterly business reviews.

Alright. So the agenda today is gonna be talking through goal setting and, determining SMART goals. So how do we look at, lead gen and sales goals by source?

Then we're gonna dive into the goal matrix. This will be an interactive part of, the session today. We'll talk through what is it, understanding the eight primary KPIs, and how time affects KPIs.

I do have a template for this, and we're gonna walk through the template in its entirety. And so all of you will have a full gate goal matrix filled out, by the end of the session, which I hopefully, will be, something you guys enjoy.

We'll go we'll then dive into how to tell a story with data. So go through tips, best practices, and examples. And then finally wrap it up with quarterly business reviews, why to run them, and how to run them.

So let's first dive into goal setting. So before we kind of set our goals with very specific numbers and parameters, let's talk through some things to think about as you think through goal setting.

So here are some steps on where to start. And before we get into, like, building out the actual numbers and benchmarks that you're gonna be, kind of tracking towards, we wanna kinda go through some things that you should be thinking about as you come up with some of these goals. The first is review historical performance. We've obviously talked a ton about this with the different data model charts that we've kind of, analyzed, together. But looking at previous sales data to identify trends, seasonality, and performance patterns is super, super important. The more data, especially past data that you have, the more these trends begin to identify themselves and the easier it is for you to prepare from them in the future.

Seasonality is it happens to all businesses. And so looking at some of these factors that might not be obvious to plan for it, makes a lot of sense. And so, for instance, in in my business, you wouldn't really think seasonality makes, you know, a ton of sense because it's kind of like a fractional roll up service and kind of a consulting service. But our, our close rate, our deal conversion rate is also is is always the highest during the summer months of, June, July, and August. And so we plan accordingly, and so we have higher goals sometimes in q two than q three because we expect that seasonality.

Looking at your performance metrics, of course, looking at KPIs and seeing how they're tracking over time and tracking those against goal is super, super important. Those are all looking at the primary KPI data model charts and the secondary, KPI charts that we've that we've kind of established. And then segmenting your customers by those secondary KPIs is super, super important. So this could be by product. This could be by company size, company type, industry. There's a ton of different factors to go into, but you should expect different, source volume, deal volume, conversion rate volume, based on the different customer segments that you serve. So reviewing these and aligning on these will help you set your goals.

Also looking at marketing and competitive analysis. What are market trends telling your business that you need to adapt to?

What's the competitive landscape doing? Evaluate the competitive environment, understand what companies are doing, and how it might influence your strategy.

So, my company, we realized that the market was tending towards instead of hiring, or signing up for, like, a long term twelve month contract, they wanted to limit their risk and do a lot, shorter shorter term. So they have paid more per month to do to do a shorter term, and they also wanted to, have something that was a little bit less customizable and a lower price point. So we rolled out two products over the last, year and a half to assess these market trends and competitive landscape to be able to compete better. And so always looking at where you sit in the market and what the industry and, market conditions are telling you and adapting to that is going to help set your goals. Our goals completely changed by product type from twenty thirteen to twenty fourteen because of these market trends. So understanding these is really, really important so that you don't just assume that a certain product category or customer segment is gonna grow year over year, at the same rate.

Setting strategic objectives.

It's always important to communicate your company goals to the entire team. What are the objectives of the company? You know, whether it's a yearly objective or a quarterly objective. And then how do sales and marketing and other go to market teams goals roll up to that? And then looking at the product road map, we've talked a lot about how, you know, I think if the CRM is a product and not a project. And so if we think about the product road map, whether that's your CRM product road map or potentially if you work at a software company, your actual development pipeline, what sort of things do you have coming up that might affect how you would set goals?

So looking at these three things historically is gonna really help you set proper goals and not, over allocate certain resources for certain areas that don't make sense based on where your business is headed.

Because it's not always the same of where it's been.

Customer and sales insights. Always getting customer feedback and sales team input is really, really helpful, especially because these contradict each other sometimes. So customer feedback based on the feedback, are your products and services serving them correctly, or could you adjust them to serve them better? And then the sales team, when they're talking to prospects out in the field, are they saying, you know, we don't have products or services or goals that will actually support them? What are their challenges, and how do we actually, you know, aim to, justify those for them? Based on their input, let's look at resource capacity. So sales team capacity, evaluate the current capacity and capability of the sales team.

If you only have two sales reps, it probably doesn't make sense to have, a deal creation goal of five hundred. Now that may seem obvious, but as you'll see in a second, when we start plugging in the numbers with different conversion rates and volume metrics, it might spit out a much larger number than you think. And so in order to hit some of these revenue goals in the future, you're gonna need a resource plan effectively. So what's your budget for that?

What's the sales team capacity? Can your sales team hold you know, handle more deals and maintain the same conversion rate? If not, you're gonna have to adjust things up funnel. So a lot of these things kind of cascade on top of each other.

And when you're thinking about goal setting, keeping these things in mind is super important.

Lastly, I strongly encourage, using a goal setting framework.

I also strongly encourage not just to set company goals, but also department level goals and even individual goals and use the same framework throughout so it can be consistent.

The most popular one that I've seen is what is called smart goals. So these are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound.

And you can also take a top up or bottom up approach.

The goal matrix has both of these built in, but you can combine top down goals set by executives with bottom up estimates from the sales team.

So an executive might say, I I wanna close a million dollars this quarter.

Whereas when you go bottoms up from how many deals your marketing team can generate with your current conversion rates, how many deals can your sales team execute, what their conversion rate, what is their average deal size, If those things don't match up with your top down goals set by the executives, you need to kind of align and make sure you find a middle ground. So having both approaches is super helpful because you might have, you know, a top level goal that a lot of people seems achievable. But when you dive into the data, you might be over or underallocating based on your current resource planning.

What about CSM? Go to market includes sales marketing and CS as well. Yeah. Absolutely. So customer, customer success depending on your business model can definitely be part of the go to market team.

Absolutely. It just depends here. This, I just said, sales team capacity and sales team input to keep it simple. But as we know, everything that I'm teaching you guys can be applied to different parts of the business.

This could be marketing team input, finance team input, customer success team input, development team input, whatever you guys have resource wise. The the intent here is that when you're setting goals to think through these six categories to make sure you're setting things that actually are achievable for your business.

Okay. So once we go kinda go through these goal steps, what I want us to think about is what's a tactic to expand our sphere of influence.

And so there's tons of roles within this, pavilion course from, you know, CEOs down to individual contributors, and we all have a certain sphere of influence. And so yours might be the entire data model, but for many of you, it might fit in a couple sections of the data model.

So by being a champion for setting goals properly and understand how they connect to different parts of the business, you can begin to expand your sphere of influence, which will make you more impactful.

So as an example, let's say that you currently work in the marketing department, and your current ownership kinda goes from the leads volumetric to the opportunities volumetric.

When the leads get added to the CRM, you kinda really help manage those, qualify those, and pass those to the sales team.

But when the sales team qualifies those as opportunities, your sphere of influence kind of ends, and then you're not doing anything once the customer is closed.

Going further up the funnel, maybe you only interact with contacts that are in your CRM, and so you don't really have any influence on the page strategy, the SEO, the blogging, the website optimization, and so actually capturing those sessions and turning those into leads.

So if this is your current ownership, that's, you know, totally fine and fantastic, but I would encourage you to try to expand this sphere of influence so that you can impact more parts of the data model with the goal being the entire data model. If you are in a rev ops role, maybe you already touched the entire entire, entire, data model. But if you are, kind of on a specific go to market team, you might only, really focus on one of these, you know, core areas.

So an example of this is if you're trying to expand your current ownership up funnel a little bit into this awareness stage, you can begin to understand the session to lead conversion rate. So that's the conversion rate one. And so understanding why that conversion rate is happening and drilling down into the lead source of the go to market source and how it connects to the demand generation efforts is gonna be really, really impactful.

And so by showing the data model, promoting the data model, and sharing these metrics, folks that kind of sit in the educate and select phase begin looking more at the awareness phase and seeing how this conversion rate really affects the volume that they get in their current sphere of influence. So expanding that could be very beneficial to them.

Expanding down follow to the sales side, the select side, understanding how sales is performing with their KPIs is super, super important.

You know, passing important information from the contact or marketing area to the sales area and connecting your marketing MQL or SQL goals to sales target is super helpful. Right? You don't have to generate as many MQLs if you can help the sales team increase their conversion rate by passing them more qualified marketing qualified leads.

So whatever your current sphere of influence is right now, think through expanding that, and that's really through understanding the goals of different departments and different priorities within the company and setting these goals in, yourself to really be able to impact those different parts, of the data model or your entire business.

So let's talk briefly about how to set SMART goals. Again, this is a a very common framework. You might not like it. You may like it, but at least it, is pretty consistent, and it's pretty clear on exactly what goals need to kind of achieve. So SMART goals, they are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound. That's where the spark monitor comes from.

So why use them? Besides, it has a ton of information online, and it's a pretty widely established framework. It provides a very clear understanding of what is to be achieved. And so if you use these type of smart goals across your entire organization, it should be very clear on what needs to be achieved, by who, by when. It helps focus actions that align with key objectives.

So smart goals for the marketing department need to roll up to the smart goals of the company department, and the smart goals of the marketing manager should roll up to the marketing department.

Motivation, it breaks down large goals into more manageable steps, making progress more tangible.

And so if if you're if if on January first, you say, hey. We're gonna close a hundred million dollars in sales. That seems like a, you know, a pretty tough goal to achieve. But if you break that down into specific milestones that you can impact, it makes it a lot more manageable.

People overestimate how much they can get done in a week and underestimate how much they can get done in a year. And a big part of that is just breaking things down into smaller chunks and motivating yourself to achieve those milestones along the way. And And, of course, measurement. A ton of this course has been around measurement. How do you establish clear criteria for tracking progress and success?

So, of course, we can use CRM reporting or reporting in a tool, but how do you actually track progress along the way if it's more of, like, a change management initiative, which we talked about in previous sessions as well?

So I think smart goals provide clarity, focus, motivation, and measurement. So I think it's a good framework to kinda use as you're thinking through this.

So how to set these smart goals?

I mean, just kind of making sure that each of these goals has these five different criteria, makes it pretty simple, but just going through examples.

Is it specific enough? Have you clearly defined the goal and what you wanna achieve and why it's important or who is involved?

There's a lot of under communication on this. Why is this goal important? And we have set a lot of these goals, but don't give the clarity to why. Especially if you're an executive, on this call, there's probably been several times where on a call you you keep talking about this this main metric or this main goal that your company has. But if every single person in your company doesn't understand why it's important and how they can contribute to it, it makes it very hard for them to connect the dots.

So an example of that is increasing monthly recurring revenue by acquiring fifty new customers. So the fifty is a very specific goal here.

How are we gonna measure it? How are we gonna, determine progress and success? So you can say, hey. We wanna acquire fifty new customers. We want them to have an average of a thousand dollars a month of your current revenue, which will allow us to increase our MRR by fifty thousand dollars within the next quarter.

Is it achievable?

Do we actually have the capacity to bring in fifty new customers?

Looking at the previous performance and market analysis, can we actually acquire these fifty customers within the next next three months? Making sure it's achievable.

Making sure it's relevant. Again, does it align to broader company goals or objectives as well as career aspirations?

o if you're not if you're not aligning the entire team to company goals or objectives, it makes it very hard for an individual contributor to understand how they fit, you know, as a cog in the wheel and what they can actually impact.

So if we increase our monthly recurring revenue, it aligns with our company's growth strategy.

And then finally, time bound. What's a clear timeline for achieving this goal? When will they achieve this goal? For revenue goals, a lot of times, it's, you know, quarters by the end of the quarter. But if you think about, you know, goals that have to be revenue based, they don't even have to be numbers based a lot of times. And so a lot of these things might not be time bound, but having that, time allows you to project plan and work backwards for it.

So as you're thinking through goals using the smart framework, if you just kinda look at things that you might have already set for this upcoming quarter, if they can't be, aligned to each each of these five things, I would challenge you to kinda reframe them or reword them so that they hit all five of these, objectives here.

So I just talked about SMART goals as kind of a framework that I've heard about. Are there any other goal setting frameworks that you've seen or used or how you think about, like, setting goals for either your yourself, your team, or your company in general? Anyone seen other other frameworks?

OKRs. Yep. That's what I use internally too. OKR stands for, objectives and key results.

Fast objectives.

Amelie, what is the what is the FAST stand for?

The f a s t.

We are just ruling it out, so I'll actually found out in the next week.

Okay. So you're not sure what fast means?

That's fair.

Well, I'm sure it's some kind of, catchy, acronym.

Yep. It's been a while to MOA. Out in the, in the product team first.

Okay.

So I don't know.

Well, I look forward to seeing how relevant it would be to us in the sales and marketing team.

Yeah. No. Makes a ton of sense. V2MOM, I've never heard of that.

Vision value method obstacles and measures.

Kevin Koki, I think you might have just made that up. Critical few just kidding.

Yeah. Key outputs and key inputs.

So if you Oh, I like that.

Identify the output that you're looking for and the proposed and the suggested hypothesized input.

You you can measure you might do you might meet your OKR or the input in this case, but not get the output. And so you might need to adjust the actions to get the outcomes.

Okay. I like that. That's it takes a simplified approach. Denise, tell us about critical few objectives.

It's as simple as two, three things that everyone rallies around, so it's not, like cross functionally, we have the same objectives in the same priorities. Like, if number one is APAC for, like, win two enterprise deals. Like, we all rally around.

Okay. So it's you set two or three critical objectives for the entire company or for each team?

For, it's it filters down. It rolls up to the the company critical few objectives, and then it's, in a way, similar to OKRs. Yeah?

Okay. Yep.

About six or nine months ago, we did OKRs, and everyone had, like, five or ten per department, and we never ever hit them. So I tried to make a rule.

You could only have two objective each quarter for your team to try to simplify it and try to actually hit our goals that we are setting out for. And then after two quarters, we just did it again, and people have five, six, or seven each. So, that did not work very well, but I think limiting the things that you're working on is a super, super smart idea.

Looks like Ricky, determined what what fast was, frequently discussed, ambitious, specific, transparent. I think a lot of these kinda fall into the same things. GEMs, goal experiments, measures, and then SMART and OKRs should not be moved into exclusive. Yep.

So there's a ton of w w there's a ton of things out there. So whatever framework you use, I don't really I'm not saying SMART is the is the the best one out there. But, clearly, these frameworks help organize, especially as you're trying to make goals cross functionally. So what what other goal framework we use, kind of a a planning tool to actually see what the outputs are, is is a goal matrix.

And so let's talk through what it is and why it's important.

So the goal matrix helps organize your go to market teams on the metrics they need to hit to achieve your revenue goals.The matrix takes into account eight primary KPIs that helps quantify both top of funnel and deal metrics for each calendar quarter while overlaying those with product and source types.The matrix is very customizable, so it'll allow you to play many good, better, best scenarios to see which fits your business best.And so the thing that I like the most about this sheet is that I can change a conversion rate from twenty percent to forty percent, for instance, and see the output and the effect it has down funnel for all the different metrics that roll up to it.Now for this specific, thing, the outputs, these are eight core KPIs that drive revenue.So this is more like net new revenue. If you're thinking about recurring revenue retention, you can obviously have different outputs. But for this exercise, I'm focusing on kind of traditional net new mark, net new revenue with the go to market functions of marketing and sales. So the eight core KPIs are leads created, lead conversion, deals or opportunities created, deal conversion, closed won deals, average deal size, and total revenue, and then finally, average sales cycle. So you'll see the top seven really correlate with each other while the third is kind of a time scale or the eighth is kind of a time scale here.So here's an example of the output, and we're gonna dive super deep into this in a in a couple minutes. So here's the revenue goal matrix. So we're looking at historical data, and we're trying to track our future revenue goals correctly.We're trying to track them our products and services, by sources, by different conversion rates, different life cycle stages, and different or the same average deal sizes. So all the historical data will give us inputs on here, and the output is this goal matrix template that kinda goes through goals.So if you look at the bottom right corner here, this is saying the sales goal for this calendar year is twenty million dollars. And so that's kind of the top down approach. How do we get to twenty million dollars? We wanna be a twenty million dollar company this year. Great. This is what we need to do each of these quarters to achieve this goal.So if you set the quarterly goals first, you can see that quarter over quarter, these quarterly goals, mostly go up. So in q one, your goal is three point six million. In q four, it's six point four million. So, obviously, this company is growing, and they're gonna have to have a lot more resources to hit the six point four million dollar goal than they're gonna have already in q one.Then you look at conversion rates and average deal sizes to find the volume metrics in between.So once you put on all the inputs in, the outputs are in q one, I need a hundred and forty four leads. I'm gonna assume a sixty five percent conversion rate. That'll give me ninety four opportunities to the sales team. I'm gonna include a fifty two percent conversion.That'll give me forty nine closed won deals. And then the deal size, I'm gonna estimate at seventy two thousand dollars, which will get us our three point six million dollar quarterly goal.You can see here this is a very basic example, but you can see that, conversion remains stable and so does average deal size. This can definitely change based on your business. Maybe you're going upmarket, and so the deal size will increase. Maybe you're rolling out a lower product line, and it's gonna actually decrease.Maybe you're being a little bit more realistic, and you're saying, hey. If we have sixty more leads created from q one to q two, the conversion rate might go down a little bit.Or if we have to, handle a hundred and sixty eight opportunities versus ninety four, we might not be able to expect the exact same deal conversion rate. So these are the inputs that you guys will decide, and it will spit out what you need. But, obviously, if this deal conversion rate goes from fifty two percent to forty four percent, this number is gonna probably jump over three hundred for total leads created. And so does your marketing team have the capacity to hit that? And so the interesting part about going through this is that when you change the different conversion rates, it changes the volume so much that you can cut a capacity plan and plan for it.Deal size is ACV.This would be the the annual contract value. Yes. So, again, this could be a a nonrecurring business, a recurring business. It could be a phased rollout.It could be a multiyear contract. So for simplicity, I'm just saying whether it's, a onetime fee or it's the average annual contract, we're just gonna say, like, the the the total deal size. Because some people do total contract value by years, by months. So we're trying to simplify here.Don't think about the schematics because as they apply to your business, you can go ahead and make those changes.Lindsey asked, do you set these goals from a bottom ups roll up, or do you start with the top downs format and allocate across the teams motion and segments? I think you kinda play with it a little bit. I think, generally, what we do is that we kinda have a, like, a growth percentage that we wanna achieve over the year. So that'll kinda spit out some of these quarterly goals from here based on, like, a twenty five percent, you know, compounded annual growth rate, whatever whatever it is.And so these give us a starting point, and then we work backwards from it. And then based on other things in the business, like profitability and things like that, we'll have to adjust that growth rate. The growth rate will adjust the quarterly or annual goal, which will adjust the inputs in the in the, the things from the bottoms up. So I think that might have made sense, maybe not.But, essentially, we have, like, a a company growth rate based on our profitability and kinda where we wanna be metrics wise. That spits out our annual and quarterly goals, and then we work backwards from that.Yeah. What Gil said. Tops down and then discuss what the team's bottom up.Okay.So I understand the the eight primary KPIs. I think all of these are self explanatory.And, again, these can kinda be customized to your business, but I'm just keeping this as simple as possible. So I don't care if it's leads created or marketing qualified leads created or kind of whatever you guys wanna call it, but we're just saying this is kind of a volume. And then the opportunities or deals are our volume, and we're gonna have one conversion rate in between.So for you guys, you might have a lead, MQL, SQL, SAL, qualified deal, whatever it is. But for simplicity with this matrix, we're just picking two of those. So if you wanna pick SQLs and then deals and have that conversion rate be very high, you could do it that way. If you wanna pick leads that are way up funnel and then opportunities that are way down funnel and have that conversion rate much lower, that's totally fine as well. It's kinda whatever you whatever you're thinking.Deal conversion.And this is not, like, if you wanna look at conversion like cohort base, that's fine. You're just adding in a, a percentage.If you wanna just look at a rolling kind of average, whatever it is, but the idea here is that you're setting estimates for some of these rates. Average deal size, if you track monthly recurring revenue, annual recurring revenue, you know, onetime fees, total contract value over several years, that's fine. It doesn't just whatever the average deal size you wanna track is the input that we want. And then average deal length should be in days. It's just much easier to track.Lee Levitt, do you wanna explain, sales coaching and expect to converge rates by stage and time and stage are great metrics for people in need of intervention?Sure, Brian. So from from that standpoint, you know, as as a sales coach or sales enablement person, I'm looking for where where are the specific strengths and weaknesses with, you know, with within a sales team or or across reps. And if I'm seeing that the average length in stage three is length today is in stage three is, you know, twenty two, and I've got outliers at thirty or forty, you know, the question is, what do those people need? Right?What kind of coaching what kind of enablement do they need?So so that's these metrics are great signposts, leading indicators of we're gonna have a revenue problem, and here's here's where to intervene.Yep. One hundred percent. If you can get average deal size by rep by or sorry. Average sales length by rep, by product, by some of these other secondary KPIs and then overlay that with specific individuals, it's a great way to see where deals are getting installed.Yeah. And it's it's not deal time overall. It's time in stage.For sure. But time and stage, if you add all the stages together, we'll get you the the overall link.Okay.You would think.Yeah. Well, sometimes the math doesn't check out, but ideally. Okay. Speaking of math not checking out, this is a primary KPI ladder, which I think is a good visual on how these eight metrics kind of roll up to each other. So this is kind of the tops down, bottoms up approach. So tops down, I just give you total revenue and you worked backwards, but we'll start at the bottom here.So the bottom here, we got total leads generated. And you can break this up further into marketing generated, sales generated, channel generated, referral generated. If you tag those, you might not, but it's just an idea of how you can take total leads, but also segment those down. Then you have a conversion rate. You can have one conversion rate or you can have conversion rates between, each of these different segments.The number multiplied by the conversion rate is gonna give you the count for, you know, MQL or marketing qualified leads, sales qualified lead, channel qualified lead, whatever it is.So, obviously, if you have a hundred down here, fifty percent conversion rate, you get fifty percent into this value.Total numbers of qualified leads, we're gonna equal deals created. I know that's simplifying things, and you could have several steps in between. But for the purpose of the math equation, we're gonna assume that all of these qualified leads are deals.Multiply deals created by conversion rate. That gives you the number of closed won deals. You multiply that by average deal size. It's gonna give you total revenue.And then total revenue in what time period, that's the x, like, the unknown variable that you decide. Is it year? Is it quarter? Is it month?So, obviously, you can have average deal size, different product categories, different customer segments. But if you average that all, it's gonna add a total revenue.But total revenue is just one input. If you look at the deals created and look at the category that they forecasted in, whether it's best case, upside, or commit, and then you have the average deal length or the the estimated close date, it ups your quarterly revenue forecast.So what I see with a lot of people that they'll put deals into commit and say ninety percent probability of closing. So their weighted forecast average is super high. But if I dive into the data, I'll see that they only close these deals at a rate of seventy five percent. So if your quarterly revenue forecast looking ahead is not accurate, you're gonna miss these revenue goals, and you're going to resource plan.It's gonna be very hard to do that. So these kinda really tied together. And so top of funnel stuff right here is super important to be predictable because if you can actually, forecast correctly, you're able to resource plan in between. You're gonna forecast that you're not gonna hit your revenue goal and only hit seventy five percent.That's too bad. But if you're right about that, you can resource plan effectively.If you think you're gonna hit seventy five percent and you hit fifty percent, well, you probably resource plan ineffectively, and there are some consequences to that.Well, I don't see So there's a simple math example here.I'm not gonna go through this, but you can kinda see if you just multiply the the volume metrics by the conversion rates and then the average deal size, you kinda get to the total revenue number here.So how does time affect primary KPIs? So time is kind of the the thing that I said early on in the data model. It's really hard to track because it brings in a lot of other variables into play. But in this case, average deal length, which is the time component, it doesn't actually increase or decrease revenue. It just moves revenue left or right across time by pushing or pulling revenue into another month, quarter, or a year.Right? So if you close a deal on June thirtieth versus July first, it's gonna be in a different calendar quarter. And that deal length, it just moved it to a different time period. It didn't actually increase or decrease, like, the revenue.But as we look at goals and they're really time specific, this is obviously super important.And then as we saw in the math example, seven of the eight primary KPIs are measured across a fixed time period of time, while the eighth one, deal length, determines which bucket of time it's attributed to.So that last one about deal length really shifts things forward and really affects how many things you gotta generate, because of how long things things take. So if you have a really large, long sales cycle, there's obviously a lot more risk to that at times because if you're halfway through and things are going really bad, it's taking you six months to to realize that.So, Lindsay, and so, like, we definitely do break our revenue goals down by customer expansion, new business, and different product lines we have.But in this example, you could probably add that to it, but I don't necessarily have that for the gold matrix example of the template that we have. But, yeah, for our q three, we've got three different revenue goals, and those tie into, like, an overall revenue goal.Okay. Secondary KPIs. So once you've aligned on your primary KPIs and you've set your goals, you wanna build a dashboard, of course, that, you know, charge tracking these things.And then you wanna start making sure that the secondary KPIs, you can dive into to see it.Because if you're off in one of these ones, you need to kinda figure out why, and that's where the secondary KPIs come up. So leads Remtool is created. You can, do it by contact source, go to market type, contact owner, lead form. Lead conversion rate has different ones. And then deals created, conversion size, and revenue, they all can kinda be, partitioned out by source, deal type, deal owner, product type, and pipeline. So just like so if you wanted to, like Lindsay said, if you wanted to do deals created by product type or, you know, deal type, you could certainly do that. You would just have a much larger matrix.

So this is how the secondary KPIs partitions fit in. Again, we're passing data from object to object so that we're able to keep consistency and track the full the full funnel of some of these some of these sales folks. But it breaks different objects in the CRM, so you need to pass it along to be able to report on this stuff.Okay. Let's go into the goal matrix template. So here is the workbook. I'm gonna put it in the chat. You guys should already have it. And, again, what I always do, I'm gonna take these five slides, and I'm gonna copy this to my master workbook.Alright?And then slide two, this is my example, and you'll see it says complete the goal matrix template and then post your screenshot below. So you're wanna gonna you're wanna gonna you're going to want to open this up, and then you're wanna gonna wanna make a copy. We're gonna walk through this entire matrix, and so I think it makes sense for you guys to follow along. If you have a second screen, you can kinda follow along here.If you have just one screen, I should, it should be it should be easy enough to follow. So please duplicate this because you'll be customizing this on your own, and you don't have edit access. I'm gonna walk through an example, and then we're gonna build this out step by step. If anyone has any issues, and here's the direct link to the goal matrix template.Alice, it could probably get you the link if you guys are having trouble. I think the access should be fine, though.Yeah.Actually, this is this is why I need to double check this stuff. Okay. Need permission. Sorry, Gary. Okay.Let's repeat that. If you refresh your page, you should have access. You can't edit it, but you can view it and copy it. Rich or Gary, can you confirm that the edit access is now what you guys need?Looks like any move the link. Okay. Sorry about that, guys. Okay.So the first thing to note here is that these are all formula based. So if I go to any of these here, you'll see these are all formula based. So you only wanna edit the yellow inputs. So we're gonna do make, like, twenty five inputs, and it's gonna give us, like, a hundred and twenty five outputs.So we're gonna start with our revenue goals year over year.Start with these. And, again, I'm just gonna I'm gonna run through this briefly, and then we're gonna build it step by step. Then you're gonna enter in your product categories. If you only have two products, that's fine.If you have more than five, it's gonna be kinda hard. So maybe just so much four and the percentage of revenue per product category year over year. So this can change year over year. It can't change it can be the same.Then you wanna do the distribution based on your net new as when you said versus expansion cross sell. Those can be other categories here, but how much of this is net new? We'll just focus on that for now.Then we wanna look at your top four lead sources and the conversion rate for the products underneath.So, again, we're just making estimates here. If you have the data, fantastic. But for this, we just wanna make estimates and make sure the total column equals a hundred.Then we're gonna look at average deal size per product.We're gonna look at deal conversion rate by source and by product.Again, this could it does get pretty granular, but you can just make your best estimate.And then finally, we're gonna look at our total revenue breakdown based on our goal.

So there's a lot of inputs here, but it it makes a lot of sense, and I'll go into each of these in a second. But the output is you get all of your primary KPIs in a really nice table with the yearly total for your goal.And then you also get them by product and by source for each of these different goals, so four products.And then this summarizes to, like, the opportunities needed for each product, each source, and each quarter.You've got sales velocity by product, and then you've got the summary of the primary KPIs, by month and then all the leads down there. So I know I went through this quickly, but I'm gonna go through a live example, and it will make a lot more sense. And then up here, you've got your average sales cycle. So, hopefully, you guys have copied this, and you're able to follow along as I build out a live example. So I'm gonna duplicate this self, and I'm gonna start walking through this.So we're gonna go through this, and we're gonna fill out the yellow fields. Fill this out based on your business to the best of your knowledge, based on your team. But you can see that this is kind of, like, defining revenue goals, but this could be a lot of different goals that you do try out.So for this, I'm gonna say in this fictitional company, last year, we did five million, and this year, our goal is seven point five million.So that's a fifty percent increase. So everyone fill out, sells c six and d six for either your company or, like a fictional company just to kind of follow along. And the easiest way to think about this is net new revenue.It can be total contract value. It can be monthly recurring revenue, annual recurring revenue, whatever you guys wanna do, but just put in overall revenue goals from last year, to this year.Next, label your top four products. Or if you have less than four, then label that there. So once we go do that, I'm gonna do our we have a rev ops product. We have a growth marketing product. We have a fast track product, and we have a migration SOW product.So these are by four product categories, and you see it begins to auto update in different parts within the sheet.Then what was your product? What was your revenue breakdown per product?So last year and this again, I'm just kinda making these up. But it was about sixty percentThis was ten percent.This was twenty percent, and this was ten percent. This was my product breakdown for my revenue.Now in twenty twenty four, I'm gonna change this a little bit. I'm gonna drop this down, bring this up, bring this up, and bring this up. So the total breakdown is still a hundred percent, but we took fifteen percent off the rev ops product, and we added five percent to growth marketing, fast track, and migration SOW.So, obviously, the goals for revenue and deal generation are gonna be less in twenty twenty four than they were in twenty twenty three for this product, but there'll be more for these other three products.So by looking at this split, you're able to plan. If we want to increase this by five percent, how many more leads do we need to generate for this product this year. Is everyone following along? Just wanna make sure I'm not going too fast. If I am, just tell me in the chat, please.So we've got our revenue goals. We've got our product percentage for revenue goals, and then we have the math.So you can see here that the rev ops product line, by going from sixty percent to forty five percent, it still grew twelve percent year over year because our revenue went from five to seven point five.But we've really taken to effect, growth marketing going from five hundred k in twenty twenty three to one point one million in twenty twenty four. This is a hundred and twenty five percent year over year. Same with migration, eighty seven percent fast track.So if you're planning ahead, you need you know you need to resource plan on how to execute these products because we're a service services company and staff for these positions as it makes sense.This team doesn't need to grow as much year over year. These three other teams really do.So a real word example is that Fastrack was a product that we launched last year, and we just had one person on it. And now we have three people on it because of the increased demand and and the increased goal.We we had to hire a solutions engineer and a solutions architect on our sales team to be able to support deals that were complex enough to be able to hit this goal. So we're making business and resource planning decisions based on what we expect to happen in this year.So now we're gonna look at different sales motions. And so in this case, for simplicity, I'm just gonna say a hundred percent of my revenue is net new for all audience.Now there is obviously a lot more complexity to this if you're a recurring revenue business.If this is like cross sell, it's possible that fifty percent of this revenue is actually in a cross sell category or a good expansion category if you expect twenty five percent of your revenue to be expansion.And net new would only be fifty percent or seventy five percent. So if you wanna add these columns and figure out the formulas, you can certainly do that. But for simplicity, I'm just gonna say all of my revenue is gonna be for net new. So that puts us at, again, seven point five million, and all of the revenue is gonna be, associated to the net new sales go to market motion.Okay. Let's look at lead sources. What are our top lead sources?So hope you're still following along. Go ahead and put in your lead sources.So we're gonna do inbound, HubSpot, BC, and then we're gonna do, like, referral. So these are kinda what I showed last week and some of the, insights I was doing.And then what is your lead source distribution for the deals or the leads for these?So I'm gonna simplify this and just do fifty percent, twenty five percent, ten percent or, yeah, ten percent and then fifteen percent to get to use to a hundred.But as you guys know, for certain products, this could easily be eighty five percent or whatever it is. Obviously, you need to make sure this equals a hundred, but I guess maybe I'll just do that for for one of these to kinda show the different how it looks. But let's just do sixty five percent and then ten percent here. And it's gonna really, really impact this.So what are your four sources? Again, you need to fill these out because it'll begin to fill out some of these other formula fields in here. So inbound HubSpot VC referral that will go into the other part of the matrix.And then this is, lead source distribution.So if you generate a hundred inbound leads for for rev ops, what are the sources here? It's not a vertical. It has to be up to a hundred. It's a horizontal by source.Alright. What's our average deal size?So let's say seventy five k, fifty k, twenty five k, and forty five k. Alright.Obviously, this is gonna really affect things. If you do, like, a million, you're only gonna need to, you know, close two deals. If you do something less, it's gonna be less than that. So average deal size. And then we have deal conversion, by source.So these are the sources above.And I'm gonna make this really simple. Again, I'm gonna do this is deal conversions. I'm gonna do thirty five percent for inbound.I'll do sixty five percent for referrals.I'll do fifty percent for VC, and I'll do I don't know. Maybe I'll do thirty percent and thirty five percent.So, again, this could drastically change.But, you know, the idea is that for some of your better sources like customer referrals, which is right here, you should have a higher close rate than inbound, for example.If this number is three percent, you're gonna have a ton of deals you need to create for this.Again, our annual revenue target's here. And then what's our quarterly breakdown?So I'm gonna say we're gonna grow each quarter.So I'm gonna say fifteen percent, twenty percent, twenty five percent, and forty percent. That's kind of a lot. Let me smooth that out a little bit. Let me do twenty, twenty two, twenty five. Let's do thirty.So twenty, twenty five, twenty five, thirty. So we're gonna close one point five million in q one, and we're gonna close two point two five million in q four.Okay. So we completed the the left inside of this. Is everyone with me? Can anyone comment that they that they fill this out?I know I'm kinda going fast, but if you just kind of the the the intent here is just to understand how the formulas work so that you can go back, you know, home and kinda figure this out. Alright. So at least Chris is with me. Anyone anyone else with me here?Partway, Darren, Trevor.So, Natalie, the sales motion, this is so you if you look at different I'll just put this here to so if you'd like net new cross sell expansion, maybe you have upsell. That's kind of expansion. But, if you think about the different product categories, some, like a land and expand play, you get in for a small amount, and then usually, a lot of your revenue comes from expansion. Some of it can come from renewal. Some can come from it for cross sells. And so it depends on how you're generating that revenue in the beginning.So in this case, we're using net new. But for a lot of companies, especially recurring revenue companies, for different product categories, they actually have a a different percentage of what revenue comes from what sales motion.Alright. We got a lot of goods here. Okay. The last input here is gonna be our average sales cycle, and you see the products come all done come from all here. So I'm gonna say this is, let's just say, sixty forty five forty five sixty.Let's do ninety for this one.So this is the last input, and this is in days. So two months, six weeks, three months, essentially. So let's put in our average sales cycle by product.

Okay. So we just put in a bunch of random numbers, but the cool part is the output, which I can show you now.So here are kind of our primary KPIs that allow you to kinda to our data model.So this is the number of opportunities that I need to create per quarter overall.So I'm gonna keep a consistent, like, thirty five percent conversion rate.The deals closed is going to go up based on the opportunities I have.The average deal size, even though I put different average deal size in each category, it's actually going to, average it out for me. So average deal size down here was way over here, but it's gonna average it out to me to forty six thousand. And that's how I'm gonna hit my quarterly goal.So in q one, I need ninety two ops, thirty five percent conversion. That'll give me thirty two closed deals on average across all my product lines. Forty six k, that's one point five million.In q four, I need forty eight closed deals to hit my goal.Alright. So let's break it down further. These are the secondary KPIs.So the rev ops product is forty five percent of my revenue and has a seventy five percent or seventy five thousand dollar deal size. I've got my four main sources and the distribution of these sources.So if the rev ops category is forty five percent of my revenue and the inbound source is sixty five percent of the volume, I need to create twenty opportunities in q one with my thirty percent conversion rate to get to six closed deals.My average deal size is seventy five percent, so my goal here is four thirty eight.Now HubSpot's away ten percent of my distribution.I only need three opportunities.But with my conversion rate, I can close one deal.And then, my goal for that quarter is sixty seven thousand dollars.Does anyone know why my goal can be sixty seven thousand dollars, but my average deal size is seventy five thousand dollars?

Anyone know how I can have one deal closed, sixty seven k, but my average is seventy five percent k?Because it's an average.Yeah. These are formulas. So this is obviously, like, point eight or something.So this is, like, point eight of seventy five percent. And so if I want this to you can see it's point nine.Obviously, we can't close point nine of a deal, so we round up.But you can see here that that's why the the goal is slightly off because it's actually only point nine of an opportunity.Okay.And why is it here? The formula is actually going up, and so it's actually point nine divided by thirty five percent equals three.It's not three times thirty five percent. So we start with the number closed. Anyway, that's kind of, like, some formal schematics, but it was kinda it kinda made made made me confused a little bit, so I wanted to explain it. Alright.So let's go down to growth marketing. This is only fifteen percent of our total revenue, fifty k average deal size. So we only need to do eight opportunities. We still have a and we have a lower conversion rate, a thirty percent conversion rate, so we have two closed deals.Right? This is two point two five.So, again, it's not gonna be perfect, but it's gonna give you different categories and different things. But because our revenue goals increase, the amount of opportunities we need to generate increases, the amount close increases, and then the, you know, the volume increases. And then we have per source, the revenue attributed for that year.Okay?So these are the four product categories.This is the percent of revenue I'm gonna attribute to it. This is the average deal size.These are the four sources, the distribution of leads from that source or deals from that source, the conversion rate of that source, and then the the output is the revenue we're gonna generate from that source in that product.That's why it's called a gold matrix because this is kind of like a matrix, like a ton of a pivot table.So you can see down if you add all these up, it's going to, hit the seven point five million dollars. So if you look at this and adds these up, the rev ops product is in a close three point three seven million, and I really hope that's kinda what it says over here. Yeah. Three point three seven million. So all that stuff could make up. So this is kinda like the source and the product category details.Over here, this is a this is a, an easier summary. It doesn't have any revenue numbers, but we need to, you know, have a hundred and thirty ops created versus sixty three.Down here, this is leads by source. So the conversion rate until a deal. That's the lead conversion to deal. We need four hundred and sixty three leads generated to come up to the amount of deals we need to close that. So if you look up here, you'll kinda see the discrepancy between the amount amount of leads versus the amount of deals.This is the closed one distribution, so this is the new customers. So, again, we're we're taking the information from here and just breaking it down into tables that you kinda see exactly what's going on. We're gonna close forty five of ops deals next year and twenty three growth marketing deals.And this is the closed one by source. So ninety one deals are gonna come from inbound, and eighteen are gonna come from referral.So we're breaking this down into the secondary KPIs so that we can compare and contrast.See how many inbound deals you closed last year.You know, if it's forty and you're trying to grow up fifty percent, it's only a sixty per sixty right here would be the estimate, and so you kinda figure out what you're gonna do there.Then we have our deal velocity. So these sources, again, could be updated to inbound HubSpot, BC, and referral.And this is like the sales velocity, which is opportunities times close one ratio times average deal divided by sales cycle length.So you want the higher number here because that's the highest velocity. That's the highest ROI. That's the highest, you know, bang for your buck. If I update this to a hundred and eighty, you'll see how low the velocity gets.We generate few few deals from this category. It doesn't convert as high. The sales cycle is super long, so our velocity is way lower.And then primary KPIs by month, to get to our goals here. This is and I'm not even sure what this I'm not sure what this is because the the monthly goal is gonna be this is only two point five million. This might have been for something different.Cycle length is the number of days in your average sales cycle. So how many deals does it take from the day it gets created until the day it's closed one? Okay. So we're already an hour in.I really like using these tools because I I can mess with this and look at, you know, thirty percent and sixty percent. I guess this would be fifty percent and see exactly how things like velocity changes or the number of deals I need to close and things like that. So by playing with this, you can see by different go to market strategies you're trying to employ, what goals you need from top of funnel, middle of funnel, and bottom funnel to hit different revenue goals or whatever goals you want. So this is a good template in base.You can totally you have access to this. You can totally duplicate it and change this to, you know, marketing qualified leads goals, retention goal, you know, new customer upsells, whatever it is, and you can break this down. Instead of having, products, you can have, you know, the the name of the CSM on your team, you know, the name of the the sales AE, whatever it is.If you have different, you know, revenue motions, you can add those in there. So it's pretty customizable. And even though the templates are gonna say, like, product and source, you can obviously change that. If I change this to, you know, Brian and Ricky, well, now, you know, Brian's quota should be whatever this is added up to, and Ricky's should be this. Right? And so be creative with this because you can do a lot of different things with this base template.Chris likes the, the template, and Lindsay likes it, which is great. So all I can do is provide the source. However you use it is great.And I don't know. Maybe you wanna, you know, help my company go from seven point five million to seven point five billion. Right? And maybe that's what I'll do one day year over year.That's what we do in rev ops. Right? This is the ROI that we need. Alright.So for the workbook, if you just take a screenshot of this and you complete this out, that's kinda what I want you to do in the workbook, and show it to people on your team. Customize it. I'd be really curious if you customize it and you use it as a team. But, but let's dive into the rest of the session.Hopefully, that was fun and interactive. I could honestly I spent, like, an hour in it yesterday just changing different things. And so that's what exercise one was. Fill out slide three in your okay.So we have all the we have our goals, and then we have our results. Q two just ended, you know, June thirtieth for most of you. And so how do we tell a story with data?And, you know, none of this stuff, none of the goals, none of the cool spreadsheets that rev ops does, I do, have you know, they don't matter once you tell a story with data. Because if you send this beast of a chart to someone on your team, they're gonna have no idea what to do. But I but I could come up with a pretty compelling story about how we're gonna hit seven point five million by turning this into a story.So this is a, this is probably an image that you guys have seen. I've seen it a bunch, but I really I I kinda really like the message it sends. In rev ops, we have all these Lego bricks, different colors, different sizes. We have so much data. We have thousands and thousands of different data points within our CRM, our different tools in the tech stack, and our, you know, our data warehouses, our BI tools. And that's all it is. It's just data.A lot of us like to sort data. Right? Sort by number of deals, you know, per month and put the highest on top or whatever it is. We sort it. We can arrange it. Right? We can put it into different reports.We can put it into different modules within our BI tool. We can present it visually. We can do a bunch of charts and graphs. We can create dashboards.I don't know about you guys, but we probably have, like, seventy five dashboards created in our in our in our, instance. And, like, probably ten get used.They're presented visually, which is fine, but they're not explained with the story. So down here, you connect all the different pieces, all the different colors, and explain everything with the story.You're gonna have much more of an impact if you're able to explain all these things you do with an actual story. So a lot of times, we take this data and we say like, I did this all the time with my Boston times. I'm like, look it up beautifully I presented this. He's like, well, great.But that's not the point. What is the story behind this? Convince me of the story. Why should I care about this?So what I think is that the point of rev ops is to really generate this flywheel. We've talked about a couple of times. We had growth in the middle. We're organizing our process and data, all those LEGO bricks, to create reporting, to present it visually, but then we need to create the actual insights, which is the story we're trying to tell to improve the process for performance, and then we rinse and repeat. Down here is all about the storytelling. We're usually pretty good at this, but the story is really where the impact comes, especially for people that are not technical or don't dive into the data a bunch.So there's a couple options in storytelling, and I'll be honest. Option a is kinda what I, I I want to gravitate to if I'm talking to someone that knows the data as well as me, but that's just never the case. I have to present this to people that don't live in the data every day. So option one is a data overload. You share several data points and insights.I mean, think about all the slides you could do for you know, we've got secondary KPIs. We got primary KPIs. We've got goal attainment. We got all this stuff, all these reports and dashboards, and we wanna share it all because we think it's all so fun and interesting. So you're doing data overload.You know the data so well, but you're presenting it, especially in a slideshow format. Not everyone is gonna know it as well as you. So what are these curated insights? Share only data that's relevant.I made this mistake, last week. I was doing a presentation, and I had this really cool data point that I found that was only accessed last quarter. And I I really, really wanted to share it, and so I did. It wasn't quite relevant to the section I was explaining.It was really for me. I wanted to share it, but it wasn't quite a curated insight. It wasn't quite relevant.No interpretations.We leave the reader to interpret takeaways. We put the chart on the screen, maybe explain a little bit of it, but what's the actual interpret interpretation? What's the takeaway? Each slide should have a clear takeaway.It should be in a sentence. What is the takeaway from the slide? I don't wanna look at the chart necessarily. I wanna know the takeaway.Then jumping around, it's really hard to jump around the data model, different goal attainment, different parts of the data model, different primary KPIs, secondary KPIs. You got all this data here that if you don't jump around, it makes it very, very confusing. And if you don't have a story, you're asking your reader to create the stories for you. That's never good. You wanna control the narrative. You wanna control the story. They can act they can interpret it or agree with it or disagree with it, but you don't want the person to create the tour story for themselves.You wanna create the story by organizing data and takeaways into a story.Also, if you read a book, a lot of times, it's in sequential order. So if you organize data but the takeaways are jumping around, it's not gonna be a clear story.So here's what I call a data story storytelling one zero one. Again, this is kind of the framework, and this is kind of what I use. You might have other suggestions, but this is kinda how I think about it. Start with the primary KPI. Did we achieve our primary goal? It doesn't even have to be a KPI.Right? But did we achieve our primary goal? Just start there. Don't dive into why you did it or why not.Just did we achieve it? Yes or no. Black and white. Then go to the data model.Almost everything in our rev ops world can point to the data model. Start there. Doesn't matter if it's not a super, you know, data driven presentation.If you're telling a story, how does this connect to the overall business? Why should we care? What is your starting point? I think most stories should start at the data model because then you focus on exactly kind of what we're looking at here.Going through clear insights, what is the main takeaway? Give them the main takeaway. It's really hard to interpret, interpret charts on the fly. And then pyramid principle, this is how I organize my story using the pyramid principle.So what does this look like?Start with the primary KPI. I'm gonna go through and we're gonna talk about next the quarterly business review. So here, I always start by answering the primary question.The primary question for that quarterly business review is, did we hit our q two revenue goal?The goal was two point five billion. The actual was two point three million. We are ninety four percent of goal. To start with, did we achieve it or not?No one as long as the data is correct, no one can say anything different. Do we agree this is the goal? Do we agree this is the actual grade? Here's our starting point. The rest of the presentation is gonna explain why the ninety four percent happened.So if you guys have I actually don't have enough time. But if you guys want to do this, I think it's important to go here and just fill this out, and then give us the biggest takeaway.And I'll have examples, but fill out your goal, your actual your percent to goal, and then go through the takeaways about your q two. This July seventeenth, for most of us, quarter quarter two ended seventeen days ago. So going through this is is really impactful because a lot of the storytelling you'll tell is to align the team on this.Okay. Data model. Second, highlight the questions to be answered at the highest level.So when Lindsay says, when you say the data model, are you referring to this? Well, part of the pyramid principle is answering the own question with subsequent slides. So what am I talking about when I say data model? This is what I'm talking about.Right? This is, again, this is for a quarterly business review that's very metrics heavy. If what you're presenting on is slightly different, that's fine. Maybe you're only focused on part of it.But if everyone knows your customer journey in your company and you can focus on a subset of the areas, that makes a lot of sense.So I'm doing the entire data model, and I'm calling out specific things. I'm not diving into the analysis here. I'm not jumping around to different pieces. I'm just highlighting areas that I wanna dive into.Then I'm gonna give clear insights.Every side includes the main takeaway in the top header.If I covered up this sentence and I just told you this, you would not be able to interpret it. But that's what a lot of presentations do.Conversion decline. Great. I already know what I'm thinking of. So if you look at here, we can look one of the things was conversion decline. The header is conversion decline.Why did a conversion decline happen?Conversion fell due to a shift in distribution of deals to reps ramping up.You can see the colors paint the story.Blue goes down. Purple goes down. Yellow pops in.Right? I need to make this anonymous, but you can imagine this is, like, conversion rate by, like, sales rep. So you can see as deal volume goes down, how does it affect their conversion rate? Right?Conversion decline. We hit ninety four percent of goal. One of the reasons we did not hit a hundred percent was due to a conversion decline. The reason for the conversion decline is explained in the chart.So what does this look like visually? This is the pyramid principle framework that I use. Organize your presentation and then insights into a clear story.What is the main takeaway? If you give them one slide, what's that main takeaway?Within the main takeaway, you should have, you know, up to three supporting data details.So that the main takeaway is we hit ninety percent of goal. What are the three details below it that support that? And then within each supporting detail, you've got data one, two, and three that rolls up to here.So we hit ninety percent of goal or whatever the takeaway is.The supporting d data one was deal conversion declined.Deal conversion declined by this product category, by this deal owner, by this other subset. Kinda looks like a pyramid. That's why it's called it. Pyramid principle is a book by Barbara Mintu, and it's just a a framework on how we can tell stories with data that really align to kind of human psychology and human brain.So using this visual, what does this look like in an actual slide?So our main takeaway is at the top, the bluff, the bottom line up front.Win rate hit all time highs. We need to ninety percent goal attainment, but the ten percent gap was due to missed targets on both deal creation and qualified deal percentage.So in the one takeaway sentence, we've got three supporting details.So we have our main takeaway and our supporting data and then data beneath.Supporting data was around win rate, deal creation, qualified deal percentage.So the win create win rate increased forty four percent over previous quarters.What is the supporting data? Each of these would have a slide. By owner, person x had highest win rate of all time. By source, inbound and HubSpot hit all time win rate percentages. By product, achieved highest win rate in past four quarters.So we talked about win rate.We described it in detail, and we told you the supporting resources. And each of these would be slides.Deals created, we hit seventy three percent of our deals created goal. That's part of the reason why we missed the target, and we are ninety percent of goal attainment and not a hundred and ten percent.We missed by source, by product, by type, and each of these would have their own slide, and it would look it would look like this with a clear insight, a chart to back it up, and a metric to go on.So when I when I go through my query business review, it's, like, got twenty or whatever fifteen slides of it because I've got a slide for this, a slide for each of these, and then a slide for each of these, and it all follows the same story.Looks like Trevor put the pyramid principle, so I appreciate that. Thank you.So what are the benefits of the pyramid principle framework for revenue operations?It creates clarity to complex and operational or technical challenges.It's pretty complex to say why we hit ninety percent of of plan. Right? We're generating millions of dollars of business. We've got hundreds of deals, hundreds of leads. We've got a team of, you know, fifty or a hundred people working on this stuff. We gotta create clarity and start with the main objective and just go down.It helps structure your go to market plans and training content, or it just helps structure your story on a very a clear framework to follow. And exactly, you should know for with each slide, what you should be rolling it up to and making sure that slide rolls up to the main takeaway.It helps logical why is this initiative and why now narratives. Why are we why are we investing in go to market resources? Because the main reason we get ninety percent of goal was because our deal creation was down.So when I recommend initiatives and why now, this explains it, and it builds consensus play by laying out a clear reasoning. It follows normal human, processing, and it has a very clear framework. It's very easy to understand.Gary, I'm I'm really hoping the pyramid principle I'm I'm using it here because, this is exactly what I'm gonna explain now. Okay.So we talked about setting goals with the goal matrix framework. We talked about using the pyramid principle to tell stories. What is the format to tell stories?I'm gonna be talking about a quarterly business review process. We call them QBRs. Once a quarter, we meet, and I and I run these. I ran it on July twelfth. I spent, like, forty to forty five minutes with the general team going through it. Right? This is what we use.But this like, the the format of how you consistently present data can be whatever you use. Again, this is just kind of a framework, and I think it's helpful to use examples to compare them to what you guys wanna use.So what's a quarterly business review or a QBR? It's a business revenue performance review. Every quarter, we deep dive into our business to do kind of a a full performance review on our business. We do performance reviews on ourselves. We do it on our business as well.Why? It's the backbone of strategic alignment, and we do it at the beginning of every quarter. So I did it, like I said, last Friday. It's still not way too late to do it, but, you know, usually in the first month of a new quarter, you wanna do it. So what are the objectives here?We want to assess performance of a business over the past quarter and align our strategies for the upcoming period. So that's what Gary just asked. Where do you put recommendations? This is the format that I do recommendations.It's not helpful mid quarter to say, hey. I saw this random chart. I'm gonna recommend doing this. You wanna be you wanna, you know, really think about it and align on it and play in ninety days ahead.So within the QBR, we have a performance evaluation. Did we hit our revenue targets? Right? That's entering the primary question.Problem and opportunity identification.Why did we or did not hit our targets?That goes that goes into this supporting details.Did we hit them? Why or why not? The answer, why or why not, is the data analysis and insights.We identify trends and make data driven decisions.I wanna look at the the past four quarters, past twelve quarters, whatever it is to identify trends.The result of this is strategic alignment, are all go to market teams working towards the same objectives and accountability, assign owners and drive accountability for next steps. If you don't assign owners to drive accountability, you're gonna come back, and it's not gonna be fixed.So how do you structure it?So I structure it with an executive summary, which is a high level overview of the qualitative progress we've made over the last quarter. And then the rev ops deliverables that me or my team contributed to.So high level company qualitative progress, but also what are what were the deliverables that we agreed on last QBR that I delivered on this quarter? The bulk of this is the metrics review, comprehensive analysis of all the KPIs. We've got our goals. We've got our primary metrics.We've got our secondary metrics. We got all the reports and dashboards. We all have the main takeaways. This is the bulk of it.This is probably, like, thirty slides or so. Highlighting areas of success and opportunities for improvement.Then the recommendations. Review recommendation based on data insights.Align them with the company's strategic direction, ensuring informed decision making. Talking about setting goals. If the company level has not set goals with the strategic direction, is it gonna be hard to roll it down to me for me to fit my recommendations as part of that strategic alignment?Because I want the metrics to align the things that I can prove with the company's direction.So who are the stakeholders? This is leadership. You can bring whatever leadership kinda team you want. I think we had, like, fifteen people on set or seventeen people maybe on the one that that I ran in.Again, you can invite the whole company if you if you really want. We share ours internally as well, just because we want people to be informed. But, usually, it's leadership, to kind of make sure that we're aligned on kind of the initiatives. Go to market teams, so marketing sales service, whatever go to market teams, influence a lot of this stuff.You wanna invite them. And then rev ops, whether that's a department, whether that's a person, whether you have a data analyst or strategist, an admin, whatever it is, they're really leading the meeting. So they obviously need to be there. And, really, rev ops can be the entire company, but it's all about your sphere of influence.If this was more of like a sales QBR and the sales ops team, their sphere of influence was only on the sales pipeline, you'd probably only invite the sales team members and sales leadership, maybe marketing, depending on what you guys need. But those are usually the key stakeholders.And here are the expectations.The leadership stakeholders should understand goal attainment and why are we not to hit it. If they left leave the meeting, not understanding why we hit our goal, you know, we failed as the rep ops person.We wanna set and communicate clear goals. A lot of times, they do top down goals, and we need to communicate the goals, you know, prior to the meeting to make sure that we're tracking the correct things to plan. That's how, like, the goal matrix, you know, comes in. It's great to say we've increased quarter over quarter, but we can't say but but if we're still missing fifty percent to plan, it's still a huge, red indicator we need to track. Goals are super important.And then afterwards, they can expect to recap with decisions made, decisions pending. And if we need a follow-up, we need to dive into additional details.The go to market teams, which are the individual teams, they want to understand the impact of their work and revenue attainment. They wanna see how they fit over to the, company's goals in this specifically for QBR, this revenue attainment.They wanna pre they wanna communicate and confirm the previous goals and the next quarter goals and the campaigns or initiatives that gonna roll into them.So we know we hit exit to play on on these goals from last quarter. We know we have these goals on the upcoming quarter.Here's the different campaigns or initiatives we're gonna use to try to focus on that. So this is kinda like marketing focus, but it could be anything. You wanna invite feedback. Right? These are the people actually doing the boots on the ground work. So So they might have different vantage points, and so they might have a little bit more context into why or why not that a report might not show. So it can capture some discrepancies and objections.This report is wrong because of x, y, and z. This report doesn't tell the whole story because of x, y, and z. That's fine. Just capture these discrepancies and then review them.So the objectives recommendation is all about revenue goal attainment and drawing into positive, negative, and neutral trends, looking at our upcoming rev ops road map, aligning on next steps and any blockers, and then confirming the goals and, initiatives for the go to market teams so that they understand how to fit in the picture. Of course, I've got my goals to enable some things on our CRM or other things, but our marketing team, our sales team, they've got other initiatives and goals too that are going to help us achieve those. Right? We have to work as a team together.Alright. Let's talk about how to prepare. There's only three phases, and I'll go through examples, of these in a second. Hey, Brian. Yep. Sure.Before we get into that, I I would just, suggest that, you that this not just be a data intensive conversation, that there's some room for color commentary.And, here's a specific reason two specific reasons why. One, if you've got, a sales organization there or sales team, they're gonna get lost in the data. They they just wanna know what can we learn from this conversation so we can do better. And here's this here's a specific example. I had a rep in a QBR last Thursday who, who told a story of getting an RFP written with his checklist.Right? So so he he got he got an RFP that was custom tailored to what he wanted to to, to to then respond with. And the reason he was able to do that was several months earlier, he had reached out to the customer and said, hey. Here's a quick checklist for things for you to consider when you're putting together an evaluation.And so that that color commentary was really helpful for the entire organization.And so if it's Hundred percent. Purely data intensive, we we miss out on that kinda color commentary.Agreed. It changes for every company. Right, there's reasons why we do it. So I I do rev ops for a rev ops company, and and I want my my sales team is selling rev ops.And so I want them to be masters of the data because they sell that that's what we do for them, and that's a part of our value prop. And so I totally get what you're saying, and I think you need to kind of see what your audience is and make sure that is based on my company. This is exactly what we want to focus on because it's the most successful use of our time. We do definitely talk about some of that color commentary, but you do need to customize all these presentations and tell the story for your audience.So definitely agree there.Okay. Three phases of prep. First, the logistics. Schedule the meeting. Review the last ninety days of projects that you worked on. Brainstorm the next ninety days, and then track some trends throughout the quarter.Then we do the data deep dive. We start with, did we hit our revenue goal? Why are we not? Complete the entire primary KPI table, highlight areas of emphasis, do the secondary KPI deep dive, and then gather the data insights. This is the pyramid principle right here. We just keep going down, and that's the data deep dive.And then the when you present it, you wanna finalize the next ninety day recommendations with the team. You wanna deliver it. Obviously, execute it. It's usually, like, I don't know, sixty minute meeting could be longer if your company's bigger. Confirm the next quarter's goals, and then confirm the priority and project plans for the next ninety days. So we're using this time, you know, maybe not locking a hundred percent to basically lock in what is my team working on the next quarter.You know, alignment with key stakeholders, you need to kinda do this. And then what does this look like? And so I find it's easier to a lot of people just like to list out all the cool stuff they did. I think it's easier to look at the three rev ops pillars, team efficiency, visibility and adoption, and then performance.And then what objectives or key results fit into this? So we use the OKR methodology. And so, you know, based on the month, so April, May, June, what objectives did did we contribute to throughout there? And objectives and key results could obviously span more than just month.So this is kinda how I visualize it. I also look at, some of these things, like, in our project management tool to show kind of over time what we worked on.So a couple of different visuals just to confirm what we did, and you can add screenshots of confirming what some of these objectives were. So I align I align on the data model results.Right? I just highlight certain things, and then I go through the bottom line up front. What's the main takeaway?What are the supporting metrics? Good areas for improvement, and what are the supporting details? So you can kind of set this visually however you want, but the idea is that the rest of your slides follow this format.So we got the bottom line up front at the top. What is the main takeaway? What were some of the reasons why? How do you explain the chart? And what are some insights here? So it's a simple slide, but it tells us average deal size decreased twenty percent year over year, and and this is why. Right?So I'm not gonna go through this, but you guys in your workbook, I'm just asking you to kind of go through your company and find one slide that you could try to replicate through this. One slide, one metric, one takeaway, couple insights.So the next quarter recommendations, again, I think, visually, this kinda helps with exactly what you're looking for, and you kinda give the same message in a couple different visual ways. So we've got our pillars, performance, efficiency, visibility, and we have the category of something I'm working on, deal segmentation, and then the two potential objectives in describing what I'm looking at. So this is, like, the areas of emphasis for me.So this is not, like, the exact project plan. This is kind of a brief summary of kind of what I'm trying to solve under sales automation, which is part of efficiency.So what does that look like?It looks like our next ninety days, we look at July, August, September.What areas am I working on within which pillar of rev ops? And then going through these. Right? So these are, like, you know, real examples of different things you can work on. And then how am I gonna execute it? Here's my product road map.And so the output of this is that we've reviewed our progress to plan. I've dug into the data. I've got all the insights. I've made all these recommendations, and I begin to prioritize the different, hit list for this.So I wanna align on my prioritized product road map because our CRM is a product, not a project, with the owners and objective start and end dates. So I've got a couple, I've I've got a couple things already in progress. And so, obviously, not everything ends the the last day of the quarter. So some of these are in progress here.And then I've got eleven things that I've kind of committed to for the next quarter, and I've got different start dates and due dates. So, obviously, we're kind of agile on things that kinda come in as they do, but I've got a clear plan from now and through September that me and my team is gonna execute, and this is what we're gonna do. And then twice a week, I give status updates on this. And then, obviously, to complete all these, I need to meet with different individuals.But the output of the QBR is this product road map that aligns to the goals.And each of these, areas of influence or most of them, are trying to potentially either capitalize on something that went really, really well in in one of the QBR slides or really course correct something that didn't go well in one of these. We talked about the all bound play last week. Well, that's that's right here, and then we have a couple other things that kinda fall right after that. Right?And so, like, I'm trying to help run, my own, you know, not my own business, but the business I work at. So these are real examples of things that I work on, and the exact approach that I'm taking is exactly what I did last Friday for our QBR and exactly how I built and communicated our product road map. So instead of just making this up and giving you something that I read online, this is exactly how we do it. You could disagree, but this at least is a a clear repeatable way that we can standardize and really align the entire team to company goals.So what's the summary? What are the three things today?We went over the goal matrix. You all guys all have the goal matrix, how to set benchmarks and goals from your team, and how the eight primary KPIs affect your go to market strategy. You can customize that a ton. You if you don't care about products or deal sources, if you care more about individuals or teams or whatever, customize it all you want. And how do you use consistent secondary KPIs to enable reporting trends?If it says you're gonna have to generate forty deals from this source and you have no plan to actually, you know, operationalize that source this quarter, you need to readjust those inputs.How to tell a story with data? Start by answering the primary question. Stop diving straight to the data. Just answer the primary question.Highlight questions to be answered at the highest level, which is what you're gonna do. And then the pyramid principle is really how you organize your presentation and insights into a clear story.Just follow just be consistent.Pick a metric, dive deep into it. Pick a metric, dive deep into it. Offer insights along the way, and just keep the story consistent.And then the way that I organize these on a a consistent basis is quarterly business reviews.I create this consistent cadence to highlight key data insights. I don't get requests from the CEO, you know, June fifteenth, but two weeks per minute quarter. Hey. How are we looking?What are we looking? You know? He knows. We have the QBR on the calendar. He's going to attend it.And ninety five percent of the questions he has, I'm gonna answer in that. Right? And the entire team kind of, you know, follow suit. And use the time this time as an opportunity to align key stakeholders on the value you are providing, whether in rev ops, marketing, financial, or whatever it is.You wanna your story should we talk about the value you're providing and how you are contributing to your business goals?So what's the value and how are you contributing to the business goals? Because as we said, the business and the company goals, everyone knows them, and everyone knows how they fit into them. So those are the three things that we talked about today. I'm right on time. Maybe the first time ever I finished right on time, but the goal matrix template, go ahead and use it. We've got the workbook.We got the workbook here. The workbook's really short this week, guys. It's just the goal matrix template, which, again, it can take fifteen minutes to fill it out. Just did you hit your revenue goal and tell me, you know, the key takeaway bottom line up front?And then just give me one slide about what's the metric bottom line, what is the main takeaway or insight, and how are you know, how does this interact with the chart? I'd love to see an actual chart in here to show that you've got some of this reporting in the CRM, and this is an example of what this looks like. So only really, two or three sides to fill out this week. Hopefully, that makes a a lot of sense, and we'll get right back at it next week, with talking through hiring and some other some other things I hope you'll find interesting.So, I'm gonna go through the chat right now. Obviously, if you have something else to go to, you guys can go ahead and enjoy the rest of your rest of your day. But, I'm gonna go through the chat and see if there's any questions that I missed. But as always, thanks a ton for attending.Okay.To be that are jumping off, thank you for being here, but please will stick around.Thank you, Brian. See you everyone next week that is hopping off. Take a moment to share your feedback.Thank you. Thank you.Looks like Lindsay has a question about waiting and wagging indicators.Yeah. I mean, I think we just gotta be reasonable here. Like, I'm not just sitting on my hands all quarter and saying, I'm not gonna look at the data until the next, you know, until the quarter ends.The reason the reports are set up so we can track key trends and and and we report on some of some of these KPIs on a weekly basis in our leadership team meeting. So if we're falling behind, we can course correct the mid quarter.And so next Monday on, you know, July twenty first, if we're already, trending negatively into our deals creation goal, we're gonna we try to address that as a team immediately. And so we're trying to course create throughout the quarter, but, obviously, once a quarter, we will get the results.And we'll Sorry.Real quick. On the on that topic, one other area I was just curious about is, leading indicators on the expansion side.I do think we've gotten a lot of support, and there's a lot of publications out there that that, can guide us through the leading indicators, number of leads that you need, amount of pipe gen that you need to stay on target for acquisition.It doesn't seem like we've we have the same level of equation math based approach to expansion deals. And it seems like we can start having a lot of the those types of equations.But I'm just curious, like, what you've seen and how you think about the math in regard to, we need x number of leads and x number of pipe gen to hit a new business revenue target as well as needing x number of customers doing x, y, z, to hit the expansion target.Yeah. I I don't have a a great answer for that. We don't track that as well or plan for it as well.So, I mean, I think that's a missing piece in kind of the ecosystem right now is that we have this recurring revenue. We have this achieving impact. We have lifetime value. We have net revenue retention.But the math is a little bit harder to figure out. It's a little bit more nebulous. And so I have not seen a template like the goal matrix that allows me to instantly put in a couple inputs and find the outputs. And so it's something that we forecast to kind of look at historical score.But quite frankly, we've been pretty I wouldn't say poor, but we've had to resource plan on kind of a reactive basis because of missed targets, because it's not as predictive as our our net new goals. And so especially with if you don't have, like, locked in yearly contracts and clients can turn at any time, a couple of things happening at once kinda creates this avalanche and snowball effect that's really hard to plan for. And so, and certainly on that side, we've had similar struggles and expansion too. You know?We've had a bunch of customers lined up for expansion, and then, you know, the economy tanks. Their their funding runs out, and now they're never no longer expansion candidates. And so I think there's a lot of other, you know, marketing forces that it's it's just much harder to forecast. And if I had a goal matrix template to solve this, I I would give it to you.I just don't have one.I think you're I mean, that's been my experience too in doing this that it it seems like it's a lot of talk right now. And Yeah. I I really and maybe it's a call to action for all of us in rev ops that we kinda need to put our heads together and come up with more of a formulaic approach to it, in the same scientific manner in which we're approaching acquisition targets.Yeah. I mean, there's a way to do it. It's just, you know, net new acquisition was, like, everything that people cared about for a while, and so people got really good at it. And now it's completely shifted, that everyone's thinking about sustainable revenue growth, and it hasn't caught up yet. So we're we're definitely thinking through it. There's there's nothing, codified that I feel comfortable with sharing with you guys because we're trying to figure it out ourselves, and I think a lot of you guys are as well.Thank you.Catherine asked, is completing the workbook the best way to study for the final exam?Because the the exam is easy. It should it should be easy. If it if it's difficult, let me know.Maybe it can be open book. But, no, it should be pretty obvious which, which of the slides it it goes to. And so, I think the workbook's not gonna be the best place because the workbook's more output based where all the key definitions are more on the actual individual slides.Alright. There's a couple of you still on. Are there any more additional questions I can answer before I hop off?Try to think. I really appreciate the questions. Lindsey had a bunch today. I really appreciate your participation, and a lot about you lot of lot of you guys. Looks like Nat has a question.Yeah. It's me again. Thank you for the information about the data matrix.So on the sales motion piece, it sounds like or, the net new revenue piece. We're we're we're saying that sales drove a hundred percent of it. But if we have some net new and recurring revenue, then it would be like, we'd put ninety percent in there instead.And I was curious if there's or, yeah, maybe maybe I'm getting that wrong, but I guess I was curious if, like, this could be, repurposed to take into account, like, expansion revenue across sell or upsell?You know, does any of this investment affect that?So it's kinda like what Lindsay was saying is that the the output of this, as you remember, is, like, basically, qualified opportunities created.And so what you don't want this to do is spit out a a massive number for, like, expansion, and you don't even actually have enough deals to potentially expand. And so that's the risk of of, like, adding different, you know, sales motions to it is that you might say seventy percent of this product need to be from expansion.But if it spits out with different conversion rates, you need a hundred of these deals that are qualified with this close rate, or this average sales cycle.You might not have that. And if you think about sales cycles, especially with recurring revenue, like, those all are determined by, contract date. And so now you're trying to, like, pair this with, like, when contracts are coming up, and you can expand at any time. But, like, if someone's coming up for contract, you know, in in May and the renewal is July first, you're probably gonna wait to that renewal conversation.And so that's where it gets more confusing is that, like, recurring revenue or expansion or churn, you can you can do it, but the numbers might not make sense. And so what we do for our goals is, like, we've got a cross sell, which only happens with contract end dates since we look at all of our contracts that are ending that quarter, and then we put that into a bucket and then apply a conversion rate in an average deal size and get that goal for us. But we don't we don't have, like, a a q four qualified opportunity goal for cross sells because that really depends on the actual deals we close in q two and q three.Otherwise, that's not gonna get hit. And so it it kinda comes into this compounding effect that if you're trying to do, like, four quarters out and you don't hit the like, it stacks up if you over allocate or under allocate earlier on. So simplicity net new is what I did for this. You can make it work.You're just gonna have to be pretty creative with the formulas.Thanks so much, Brian.And if you think about products, like, an expansion sales cycle could be, like, two days because they raise their hand and say, we just hired twenty new sales rep. I need to add twenty new seats. Whereas for net new, it should take three months because that's your normal sales cycle. And so that also makes it difficult because then you're like, holy matrix chart where you have a sales cycle per sales motion per product.And then sometimes you're just kinda I don't know. Maybe you're smart enough to do it. You probably are. But sometimes it's like, am am I thinking about this a little bit too hard?Alright. Anyone else?Do you recommend good Excel boot camp?I just no. No. I can't. I wish maybe some other people do, but I don't have a good Excel boot camp. I've taken templates for other people and just repurposed them.So that's why I try to share stuff with you guys because, like, having something to go off of instead of this nebulous, this is what a goal matrix should do, I think it's just way more helpful. And so eighty percent of the things I've learned, I've looked at other things, you know, that I've learned from clients or from this and just kind of applied it to my own business. So, anyway, I'm gonna let you go go, go now, Nyes. Hope you have a great Wednesday.Please fill out the form that Alison sent, the feedback form. If you have any questions, just reach out to me in Slack, and I'm happy to answer those. Thanks again for all the participation in the chat. See you guys.

Bye, everyone. Thank you so much. See you next week. Bye.