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What kinds of insights are you gaining from your GTM metrics? Do you take the numbers at face value, or do you read between the lines to uncover what’s really going on in your Revenue Factory? Metrics don’t always speak to us directly.

The kinds of insights a revenue leader is able to gain from their metrics can make or break the impact they have on the company.

If you have GTM specialists (like us) supporting your RevOps team, you can:

• Monitor performance and adjust execution
• Identify gaps in team training and enablement
• Reliably plan growth for next year and beyond
• Rely on your metrics to be accurate and process-driven

With the right team, your metrics become a window into what’s working, what’s not, and where to invest time, money and resources.

Here’s how we use metrics to gain insights for our own clients.

Uncovering Lack of Process

Let’s say our team at USC has started working with a new client, teaming up with their CRO to improve revenue. One of our first steps is to look at their metrics. Most of the time, they’re an absolute mess. We want to see if reps know how to close a deal, so we look at Close Rate. Bob’s Close Rate is 84%. Tom’s Close Rate is 13%.

On the surface it looks like Bob is an amazing salesperson and Tom is falling behind. However, this is usually a warning sign that the sales process is lacking.

Bob might be sandbagging deals, waiting to enter them into the CRM until he gets a verbal. Tom might be creating pipeline every time he gets a warm body on the phone. We have no idea if either of them are any good at closing the deals they should actually be working.

Here’s an example of some anonymized data from a real sales team we’ve worked with, to give you an idea of what this might look like:

To solve for this, we have to ask the CRO we’re working with for details of their sales process:

• Is marketing aligned on ICP definitions and feeding sales quality leads?
• How do they define an SQO (Sales Qualified Opportunity)?
• What stages do they have in their sales process?
• What is the entry/exit criteria for each stage?
• Is stage criteria built into the CRM?

Most of the time, this needs a lot of work – and we won’t have truly insightful metrics until that work is done.

The same is true for the metrics and processes for inbound leads and outbound prospecting, as well as onboarding, retaining, and expanding existing customers.

If you’ve hired a GTM strategist to lead RevOps, these questions are hopefully being asked. RevOps should be looking at these metrics on Day #1 and trying to figure out if they’re accurate, why or why not, and what part of the GTM Engine to optimize.

Unfortunately, RevOps is often too focused on working through an endless list of requested updates to Salesforce and doesn’t have the time or skills to do this strategic work.

We’ve outlined where we look for many of these gaps in process across GTM in our GTM Efficiency Pyramid.

Identifying Where Training is Needed

Let’s imagine there’s a solid playbook with clear sales process documentation, sales stage criteria, and metric definitions – but close rates are still all over the place. The next thing we investigate is whether reps are following this process.

If the CRM is set up properly, we can usually tell by looking through it. Or, we can just ask the reps. Most of the time, this issue comes from a lack of adequate training. The playbook is sitting on the shelf but no one is using it – which means it may as well not exist. If we want to ensure our reps are following the sales process, we can get a really good idea by looking at Sales Velocity (Pipe Gen, Close Rate, Average Sales Price, Sales Cycle) and then digging into each deal where needed.

If you’re working with an experienced GTM Strategy and RevOps team, they’ll be able to proactively track/analyze metrics from lead to close to NRR and spot training issues.

Systems admins on the other hand rarely catch this stuff, putting the responsibility squarely on leadership to notice.

Monitoring Execution

So our processes are well-documented, they’re built into the CRM, and our teams are well trained on them.  Now, we can narrow it down to execution as a potential cause for low close rates (or any underperforming metric).

Keep in mind that metrics can be qualitative (data that isn’t numbers). We can use these metrics to see if reps are mastering soft sales skills. For example, whether they understand the buyer’s needs, decision criteria, and decision making process. We can (and should) track this in Salesforce.

This is a lot of work and while CROs should be looking at these numbers every single day, so should RevOps. In my Podcast interview with Tim Strickland, former CRO of ZoomInfo, Tim said that he looks at numbers every single day and brings issues to RevOps constantly – but RevOps wouldn’t be doing their jobs if they weren’t doing the same.

Having a proper pipeline review process (as well as a pipeline council) is also crucial to monitoring execution, catching issues, and coaching on solutions. We help our clients build and manage all of these processes, so leadership can spend more time on high value activities.

Planning for Growth

As we get into Annual Planning, far too many CROs fall into this trap:

“We need to grow revenue from $50M to $70M next year. We’re going to do that by achieving an NRR of 100% and doubling the amount of New Business ARR from this year. We’ll do that by doubling the headcount of the sales team and our marketing spend.”

Don’t we all wish it were that easy? Sadly the math doesn’t math that way. We need to see exactly where all that pipeline will come from next year. Can we really double it from paid spend, from outbound prospecting, from SEO, webinars, conferences, etc etc?

Can our team maintain or improve Close Rate, Average Sales Price, and Sales Cycle as we double the amount of pipeline from all of these sources?

This is a very hard question even with all the right data. If we don’t even have a clear definition of a Marketing Qualified Lead or a Sales Qualified Opportunity, it’s impossible to use our data to estimate how much of it we can expect next year.

If you need some support with GTM Process Design for 2025, get in touch with us here.