The most important key to success is defining what it looks like and how you will achieve it. Many companies need to clarify their goals or implement systems to gauge progress. As a result, teams can end up working against each other instead of collaboratively towards collective success.
It is easy to underestimate the importance of well-defined targets and key performance indicators (KPIs), but they are necessary for any company that wants to optimise its performance. Fortunately, there is a tool that can help companies align their go-to-market (GTM) teams around common targets and KPIs: revenue operations.
What is revenue operations, and how does it work?
Revenue operations intersect sales, marketing, customer success and finance. Its goal is to ensure that all departments work together efficiently to generate revenue. One way it does this is by setting and tracking OKRs (objectives and key results).
When everyone is working towards the same goal, it’s easier to ensure that quotas are being hit and outcomes are met. This alignment around common targets and KPIs helps optimise performance and ensure that the company is hitting its revenue goals.
Here are a few things to keep in mind when setting up a revenue operations team:
- First, data is key. Ensure you have access to the right data sets and that everyone knows how to use them.
- Second, define your OKRs. This will help everyone stay focused on the same goals.
- Finally, set quotas for each team member and track progress towards those quotas.
By doing these things, you can align your GTM teams around common targets and KPIs to enhance performance. While this seems simple, the process can be challenging, but there are some important benefits to be gained.
Benefits of setting clear targets and KPIs for the GTM team
1. Track progress and identify areas of improvement:
By setting OKRs, the team can measure whether they are on track to hit their targets. This process can uncover issues that need to be addressed to improve performance.
2. Allocate realistic quotas and resources:
When all members of the GTM teams understand the target and the KPIs they are working toward, this enables them to set quotas and allocate resources more efficiently.
3. Create ownership:
When the team shares clear goals, a sense of accountability is created, which can lead to improved performance. Additionally, understanding what everyone is working towards can make it easier to develop creative solutions to problems and optimise the work process.
Finally, when everyone is aware of the company’s objectives and how their role contributes to those goals, they are more likely to feel motivated and invested in their work.
Now that you realise the benefits of setting clear goals and KPIs for your GTM teams, there are important actions you must take to be successful.
Guiding principles for setting targets and KPIs
1. Ensure strategy alignment:
Your company’s overall strategy provides the context for setting and achieving your revenue goals. Every company is different, so it’s important to tailor your GTM approach to fit your unique business. However, all companies must clearly understand their overall strategy to set the right targets and KPIs.
2. Set SMART goals:
The SMART goal-setting strategy is a great way to ensure that targets are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. By following this strategy, teams can work together more effectively to hit their quotas and drive revenue.
3. Constantly assess:
As a company grows and changes, so too must its goals. What might have been a good target last quarter may no longer be relevant or attainable. That’s why it’s important to constantly review objectives and key results and update them as needed.
Now that you have some guiding principles to set up your RevOps, it’s time to switch gears and think about how you will measure your progress.
Ways to measure progress toward company goals
A company’s revenue operations team ensures that its sales, marketing, and customer success teams work together to hit their targets. To do this, they need to track data points that are directly related to the targets and KPIs.
Teams can use data to monitor their progress in a few different ways. First, they can look at their sales pipeline and track the number of deals in each stage. This will give them a good idea of how close they are to their quotas.
Second, they can look at their customer data to see how many customers they have acquired and retained. This will help them track their outcomes. Finally, they can look at their revenue numbers to see if they are on track to reach their targets.
Other possible data sources include the number of leads generated, conversion rates, website traffic, and social media engagement. These are gold mines of information that will help the RevOps team determine if they are hitting the targets they want to hit.
Once revenue operations have all the data, they need to be able to interpret it to identify what’s working, where there are gaps, and how to improve. Data interpretation can be challenging, but it’s a key part of the RevOps team’s job.
The team needs to identify patterns and understand why those patterns exist and what can be done about them. With this analysis, the team can start to see where there are performance gaps and can then work with the team leaders to come up with a plan to close those gaps.
This adjusted plan might involve setting new targets, identifying training and enablement needs or changing how the teams work together. Whatever the solution, the revenue operations team must stay involved to ensure it is implemented properly.
The final step for the team is to communicate their findings to the rest of the company, often using a dashboard to inform employees of the company’s progress toward meeting targets and KPIs.
Putting it all together
Revenue operations are a function that aligns GTM teams around common targets and KPIs to optimise performance. The key to success lies in setting clear OKRs, measuring data against those objectives, and using that data to inform decision-making around quota and outcomes.
By aligning the entire organisation around a shared goal of driving revenue growth, organisations can more effectively optimise their performance and achieve their desired results.
Are you looking for help in setting targets and KPIs for your company? Ellivate can help you tailor your operations and take your business to the next level. Contact Ellivate today for next-level efficiency.
