Pre-sales teams are often measured by the amount of "activity" that they have. Let's stop this 🙅🏻♂️ Activity doesn't equal success. - It could be busy work. - It could be the wrong types of activities. - It doesn't guarantee revenue. Anyone working in pre-sales should track their personal management metrics. What does this look like? - What is your demo > poc/pov conversion rate? - What is your demo > closed won conversion rate? - What is your poc/pov > closed on conversion rate? - What is your % to quota attainment? - For deals you've closed, what is the customer retention rate? These metrics are strong indicators of your likelihood of success both as an individual, and when rolled up, as a team. It will help you spot what's working and what isn't. If you are in pre-sales, do you track these yourself today or are you only reporting on "activity"? #sales #presales #b2bsales #cybersecurity #leadership
I strongly agree with the first part, but I wouldn’t choose your proposed KPI neither. Based on your KPI I can have an extremely wrong ratio of conversion after demo if my pipeline is incorrect right? So someone could have terrible results because he can’t control who he is talking too. Most SE don’t have strong control over pipelines, MQL, SQL, etc… Some examples of my favourites KPI for SEs are: - Relationship with Account Manager: based on feedback received by the account team - Impact on revenue: How did you impact the revenue generated but the extended team? This can be the result of your demo but also the help offered to one of your colleagues. - Impact on the product: How did you impact the roadmap? Number of customer feedback shared internally, feedback from the product team, …
Adam Freeman
1mo
I’d offer the opinion that tracking is extremely useful when you’re scaling a team and looking for gains across a growing organisation. Simply track by tasks is pointless (to an extent) as the time to uphold doesn’t give payback in statistics. Where it does get interesting is when you track type of activity and you can therefore assess and coach effectiveness of outcome linked to the input of effort.
Pam Dunn
1mo
This post all day!!! "Activity doesn't equal success"! A little louder for folks in the back!
Diana Cappello
1mo
Now that we have Vivun we will be reporting more. One stat I am interested in is Stage 2>3 conversion rate. Because that tells me they liked the demo enough to enter a buying process.
Jim Breton
1mo
Great post, Damian! Would add: - What are the activities generating the most answers and/or actions from prospects? Knowing a certain touchpoint, email or resource generates motions on the buyer's side is pure gold IMO
Jeff Meyers
2w
I would love to see it change, but activity is the only language that the people that employ pre-sales care about. There are exceptions, but this is the norm. Until that changes, we would just be rearranging deck chairs.
Paul Harris
1mo
Outcomes > hours. Not all activities are equal in their effort to output ratio and whilst “looking busy” or “feeling busy” can make you feel productive- if you’re not moving the dial meaningfully then why are you working on that activity? I remember when I made this shift as an IC and my success rate increased, but I worked fewer hours. It’s not something that happens overnight; but the first step is to take back control of your time and calendar. Be discerning. Be intentional. Everything else will come after.
Bill Balnave
3w
I agree Damian Tommasino that solutions teams should measure the value they bring to the business. I think that the metrics you suggest measure that. But inherent in those metrics is understanding what activity it took to deliver er that value. So I think you need both couple with an operational review cadence where you adjust how you deliver your value to see if you can improve.
Josh King
1mo
100% don't want to be tracking busy work. 👌 I do like tracking # of demos per opp to be able to see avg # for Closed Won. Even better if you can segment that by other variables (customer size, partner, region, etc). It gives you some good insight into both personal and team effectiveness. I was on top of most of the metrics you suggested, but I really like the Closed Won customer retention rate! It makes a ton of sense to track this against both AEs and SCs, but seems like retention is treated as a separate thing at many orgs. Of course there's a lot that goes into retention above and beyond the sales cycle, but that's certainly where the value prop and fit are established to set the customer up for success.
Director of Solutions Engineering
1moCouldn’t agree more. As others have said, activities aren’t created equal, don’t take equal time, aren’t actioned equally and don’t have equal outcomes. Whatever you’re looking to measure your SE’s on I’m a big believer in not running them more than 70% utilised on customer facing work (assuming it was all valuable anyway) – the remainder spent on training, learning, teaching others (20%) and the rest on just thinking, having time to ponder a solution, doodle out a theory etc (10%). On the measures front, I’d add one further one – if you’re running a model where not every deal has to go through an SE then: ‘what is the conversion rate when SEs are engaged, to when they’re not?’ – super good metric when asking for additional headcount against workload and justifying enablement of the Sales teams.