Integrate Sales Metrics and Coaching for a Data-Driven Organization with Peter Kazanjy

Sometimes people kind of get like wrapped around the axle like oh, it's an art. It's an art, et cetera. You can't measure my style here. You actually can, right?

Yes you can. Absolutely.

You can. Yeah. There's quality metrics, right. Oftentimes people kind of just like more volume, more volume, more volume, more activity, etc. But what you want to make sure like the success in sales is, is all about a high quantity of high quality selling behavior.

What are some of those key metrics that an org should be tracking at a team org and individual basis?

Yeah, for sure. I mean it's, it's funny that you're. I actually have these like metrics driver like cheat sheets sitting next to my, sitting next to me on my, on my desk here. We actually, we just like give them out to people. I forget that you can actually find them on, on Atrium's website. You can just like grab them on there. But yeah, I mean I think the. So like we can start with, we can start with the SCR team first. I mean I think the first thing first there's is there's varying levels of maturity. And so if you're not very mature right now, the important thing is to not overthink it and instead just kind of start right? So use an SDR organization as an example. Probably the most simplistic things that you would want to be paying attention to, there would be raw activity levels, call volume, email volume. There's things like that in addition to that you would want to be paying attention to unique number of accounts that are being interacted with, right? Unique number of contacts. Because this is where you know, people can kind of get, can get tripped up is by you know, doing tons and tons of activity not across enough, you know, at bats, right? Not enough accounts. And then the, then so like. And those are kind of be like table stakes and of course your outputs, right? Like you know, opportunity creation or meeting creation or whatever it is that you are kind of kpiing on there. Then one of the non obvious things that people really get kind of tripped up on is not sufficiently paying attention to net new accounts interacted with or net new contacts interacted with, right? And so because oftentimes what can happen is SDRs can. It's like stale accounts, right? They can have their couple hundred or their couple hundred accounts that they're going after and they can just be like, it's kind of like flogging a dead horse. And so what you want to make sure is that there's ongoing inflow that's going on there. So, like, new accounts that are being interacted with, new contacts that are being interacted with. So those are all like quantity metrics right there. And then I think you were kind of mentioning earlier, oftentimes people kind of get like, wrapped around the axle, like, oh, it's an art, it's an art, et cetera. You can't measure my style here. You actually can, right?

Absolutely.

Yeah. There's quality metrics, right? And so oftentimes people kind of just like, more volume, more volume, more volume, more activity, et cetera. But what you want to make sure, like, the success in sales is all about a high quantity of high quality selling behavior. And so there's also a number of metrics that are really important in order for characterizing the level of quality of the behavior in question. So again, going back to SDRs, those would be things like email reply rate, right? And that's like a good echo. It's like, it's not actually like, measuring the quality directly, but it's like an echo of the qualities. Because if somebody has an email reply rate problem, that could probably mean. That can mean a variety of things. It can mean that they're not selecting good contacts, right. They're targeting bad people. It can mean that, you know, their, their subject lines are poor because they're not getting opens. It can mean that their messaging is poor because they're not eliciting responses. It can mean a variety of things, but it would indicate that there's something off. So that would be an example of a quality metric. And there's others as well. Like the ratio between opportunities created and the number of accounts that are interacted with is somebody just, like, spraying and praying and not getting anything to boil. Right? Like, is your batting average low? And then the last kind of quality metric that I really like is the number of activities that somebody that is required by an SDR in order to create an opportunity. Right. So it's a measure of, again, of efficiency. And some of those, like, some of those are more simplistic, and some of them are more complicated. You know, one of the things that we really like here at Atrium, like, this is why, you know, we've invested so much time and energy and making it take, like, three minutes to turn on an Atrium account and have access to, like, over a hundred KPIs that are really impactful for SDRs and, and for account executives. Because a lot of times people are like, man, I really want to do those things. But, like, that sounds like a lot of work. And also like my rev ops team is like totally underwater and like they keep telling me that they're going to give me these things but they never get around. So that's on the SDR side, on the AE side. I mean it's kind of like a similar situation, right? Where again the kind of raw volume that you would want to be paying attention to there and this is kind of like contingent on sales motion. But is the AE equivalent of the SDR's email or calling is the meeting, right? Like the fundamental unit of like selling behavior by an account executive is a customer facing meeting. So starting with that, making sure that you're having like you're measuring the number of meetings that are happening, measuring the number of opportunities that are in pipe for a given, like how loaded they are. Because oftentimes what people do is they pay attention to the pipeline. Like the amount of pipeline that folks have, that's important. But like the number of ops that are like on their plate, are they too high, are they too low? Usually people will say that they're too low, but they can be too high as well. And then it's a similar. And then measures around like are people working those ops, right? Number of touches on ops on a, you know, on a weekly basis or a monthly basis or what have you. And then then like those are all the like really, really, really basic ones. And then you kind of have like the similar thing around inflow, right? So are people having new ops that are flowing into their pipe? Kind of like the equivalent of engaging with new accounts. Are people having new ops that are coming into their pipe or are they having like stagnation there? And then on the, on the quality front, like obviously win rate is the most important kind of like metric there, but then you can kind of get more granular there and say hey, are people engaging? Like are they sufficiently multi threading in their accounts, right? Like how many contacts are they engaging on a per account basis? That obviously is also important for SDRs. What are the conversion rates between stages, right? Especially like once you have like north of five account executives who are doing the same sales motion, then you start having like enough data or enough sample where you can start like comparing people and can say oh, okay, like this guy right here, he's got like a problematic conversion rate out of proposal as compared to everybody else. Like he's way lower man. He's probably like not respecting, he's probably like not respecting exit criteria there. And he's getting things into, you know, he's putting things in a proposal, but way prematurely, which of course is going to, like, screw up your forecasts and all sorts of other stuff there. Right? So those are kind of like the more sophisticated measures there. By engendering more opportunities to have these coaching behaviors. One, like, you have more at bats and then it starts kind of. It's just in the water. Like, oh, that's what we do here. We get coached. Like, you know, it's okay. It's like, it's not because I'm a bad human being and I'm like, dumb or something that like, you know, Pete or Sean or Molina or whoever is like, you know, giving you some coaching feedback on your email or overheard your call or what have you. And then the other thing too is that when we see particularly good examples, both like, opportunities for coaching and also, like good exemplars, we make sure to like, broadcast it very quickly. Like, hey, guys, this is a great example of this right here, right? Oh, hey, everybody. See how there was this boo boo right here. Like, this is the right way of doing it. And what ends up, it's just kind of like the same way that a coach would be like, hey, everybody, come, like, you know, come in, right? Like, watch this right here. And so if you do that on a recurring basis, it goes from being like, oh, no, here's this. Like, you know, I'm taking the cat to the vet versus just kind of like, okay, cool. This is what we do constantly on the data side, it's like a kind of a similar situation where you just want to, like, infuse it. And so this is one of the things that we do, our customers do quite a bit with Atrium is you just want to make sure that, like, these metrics are getting in front of people. Right. Like, the OG version of this is like, you know, the TVs with the dashboards that everyone, like, ignores and whatever. Like, the more modern version of that is like, making sure that that's like getting into people's slack, getting into people's inboxes, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. Like, maybe they look at like every other one or every third one or whatever. But what it does is it sets this tone of like, yeah, like, that's what we do here, right? Like, we, like, we are data driven and we have these coaching conversations. Like, those are the actions to kind of like change the culture, to make it such that it just becomes like it's just in the water and then, like, good things happen. Yeah.

No, and I, I love that. I'll throw one. Just like bonus tip on there, y'.

All.

We taught sales math in onboarding. I love it because it's one thing to know what the numbers are. We actually so it was actually in onboarding, we not only covered the metrics, what they meant and what impacted them, but I would give assignments based off these numbers. Peter ae how many opportunities do you need based off these numbers? Peter ae what would your ACV have to come up to in order for you to hit your goal based on these numbers? Peter sdr how many dials? We actually ran math exercises in onboarding because I think people oftentimes get intimidated by the numbers like they see them. Like, I can tell you that your close rate 16%. But if you don't understand what that means, you're like, all right, whatever. So we ran math in the onboarding to make sure they understood how the metrics impacted each other.