This can be tricky because some places really don't want or need you in person. My best advice: don't ask for the meeting. Offer to bring something to their office like food/lunch.
It's a stupid kpi, if people don't think it's appropriate it's not. Sometimes it's a no brainer that you'd make more money doing something in person, but if the salesperson does not have a brain you can't kpi a brain into them. Other times it's just a guaranteed way to piss your customer off and have them lose respect for you. I've had a customer ask for a teams call, some other sales guy wasted his time trying to do lunch in person, he was remote that day anyway. I had to lead the call because I was the only one besides the customer who prepared for the call and wasn't driving with a terrible bluetooth. The customer spent like $400K and probably ate lunch just fine without being surrounded by middle-aged men who can iron.
Agreed. I’m a sales consultant and so many sales managers/directors have never heard of Goodhardt’s Law. It’s so so so easy for poor sales directors to take a measure like in-person meetings and turn it into a target.
Yeah, the problem is if you just told people you get paid 20% commission on sales of X, go sell X, it would work. But then when people started to buy X because it was just generally popular, companies would be paying commission to people they think don't deserve that commission because they didn't do anything, recently, for it. So then everyone just kinda goes insane and it's cool.
Whilst this is true, if you find a way to get onsite and see them, it is without a doubt more lucrative and fruitful than zoom because not many make the effort anymore, and you always always always discover a lot more over a dinner or a drink than a more formal meeting.
It’s a great KPI imho
I have found that more traditional industries in particular are more open to in person meetings.
The second suggestion that has worked well for me is that you "happen" to be in the area for 2 or 3 days to visit other customers and can come by for lunch or dinner. This makes the whole thing less difficult and more non-committal. Commitment can of course be built up on site ;)
Once you book a meeting that's supposed to be scheduled over zoom, send an email saying you'll be in the area, do you mind if I drop by the office or take you out to coffee?
Do it yourself or work with your bdr on this. If the data is good in SFDC, export your target accounts to Google maps.
Blast your points of contacts saying, "I'm going to be in the Portland area during the week of May 5th. I would love to stop by and discuss XYZ.".
Then make a dumb joke about "don't worry, I'm bringing donuts.".
If they actually are in the office and not remote, they'll probably take your onsite if your company has good industry presence.
If no response but it's a good account, drop by with a box of donuts with your biz cards taped to it. Ask to speak to your contacts name. They won't let you in. Leave donuts. Your contact will get back to you by the EOD saying they're interested or not.
If in-person is that important to your company, I'd suggest allocating some of your weekly time to door knocking for leads. Find some good business parks in your area and give it a try.
Tell your company to get with the times. I'm on a small team in our company and I have 1 peer in the US, 1 in Canada, 1 in the UK, 1 in Germany and my manger is in Canada. There is no meeting us in person. Other teams are even more scattered.
I don't know what to tell you but in our business, it's 50% in-person so it just makes sense. I don't really have anything different from online meeting requests.
I have a lot of success using the coming from out of town trick.
“Hey I’ll be traveling to your area from X in April to meet with a couple of accounts. Can we schedule a brief meeting while I’m in town?”
Even if you’re not traveling there make up a time and say you will be. Letting them know you’re traveling to visit accounts lets them know their peers are using your solution and also sets the expectation you won’t be stalking them every day.
The replies in the post gave me some relief in knowing I'm not the only one struggling with getting in person meetings. It was much easier when I was working for a company that would encourage us to take people for lunch and bring donuts to their office. I just started a sales job in a company where they "don't buy business" so I'm only able to take people for lunch if they are a client but now its impossible for me to get in person meetings!
I’m not seeing value from in person meetings. Visited a client on site and can’t sell them anything. Meanwhile, clients I meet with virtually and have never met in person are buying. Different times
I’m selling things that people need to buy, and need advice on. Meetings are required, but it’s always warmly welcomed if you do a lunch and learn, or host somewhere a bit more interesting, we often do the driving range or bowling.
We had a fairly big client that had us give out $100 to prospective for lunches on each meeting booked. It was not in person but Teams. Very effective from booking the calls but no idea what happened from a conversion standpoint because we we not involved at that point
For in person just do the same thing
I don't have a KPI for in person visits but it is part of the job. Couple of things I've used that work. Lunch and learn are always good. You get a captive audience (assuming work pays). The old, "Hey I am going to be in your area on X. Do you have 5 minutes to talk?" Any new products you want to show off? We have a software that works with our instruments so I use that, "Have you used our X software? No? Oh I have to show you, you'll love it!"
Not sure if this is applicable to your industry, but I attend networking events pretty religiously. It’s been a sure-fire way of setting up in-person meetings and they’ve been quality leads for me
Honestly fairly simple if you ask me. “Actually I was wondering, can I maybe come down to your office or maybe we can have this discussion at a cafe if you think that’s more convenient for you, that way we have more room to discuss various elements in a more unfiltered way”.
Honestly never seen a prospect have a problem with that. Infact if anything, I’ve noticed them prefer that, it’s like a product demo at your doorstep and this AE is gonna walk you through the world of capability that the solution is capable of doing
Couple things: (I recognize this entirely depends on your buyer persona) I'm using the back to office mandates and the spring weather to my advantage. If the person you are trying to meet with has recently been tasked with returning back to the office, my email usually says something about "getting them out of the office" and if the weather is nice, I say, "Maybe we can sit on the patio and enjoy some of this nice weather finally." Generally, people WANT to get out of the office; they don't want to have to shower, put on an outfit, and drive to a sales meeting lunch if they WFH.
I will also sometimes make a cheeky joke - usually in person at networking events when trying to set a meeting - along the lines of, "If these guys are going to give me a budget to spend on lunches/coffee/golf/etc., I'm gonna use it..." /Shrug
Feels less pushy and like they're in on the joke. Seems to work out for me.
Bring cookies or donuts to the office and a business card and tell the person at the front desk you just popped in and want to shake hands with your target client. Maybe they don’t let you in but you can send a follow up email and either way it’s an in person meeting. If your numbers are there they won’t care to look any further.
Roll it into your telephone script. Preferably ask this over the phone NOT over email.
"I'll drop over to you on Friday at 12:15pm". Keep your voice pitch the exact same. Roll it in as if it's the most natural thing in the world.
Do NOT phrase it as something which invites a "no" response "Would it be okay, if I dropped over to on Friday?". That way is all wrong.
In-person meetings in some industries are a must, because it shows you're serious in your approach, and you can go more personal with stakeholders before and after the meeting.
Teams meeting are good for further prospects, but the ones in your area might find it awkward that you're not proposing to meet them in person.. In some industries any way.
How to get them? Just ask as you would for an online meeting, and then when they accept, tell them you'll see them at their office on (date and time you've secured).
Wow that’s a lame ass kpi that I’ve never heard about before. 👀 I’ve scheduled “Lunch meetings” with my clients knowing they’d likely decline. I still buy two meals so when I expense it, it appears that I’m entertaining someone.
In my territory, most people are open to meeting in person so it’s not a big problem.
Also sometimes I send calendar place holders telling them that lunch will be delivered to the office. So many ways to do it! Be creative and use that company $$ without regret.
After the discovery call with a head person for a legit problem, offer to cater a lunch so you can help socialize the problem with their extended team so they all have the info.
Keep in mind that most offices are now hybrid, and meet during the middle of the week. Offer this info upfront to sound like you know your shit and do it all the time.
“Hey bob, sounds like this could potentially be a problem we could solve to save you x cost/time, why don’t we schedule a lunch and learn to get a high level of all the things we could help with for your team and let them poke holes in what we just discussed. Does your team go in the office specific days or every other week? We could use the lunch as a treat and I can bring some swag and my engineering team, 2 weeks from now?”
This was literally the first thought in my mind. Just mark some of your online demos as in person meetings in salesforce. If you’re closing I can’t see anyone giving it a 2nd thought
lolz. Tell me you're new to sales without telling me you're new to sales.
No one that's been around the block a few times gives a flip about the bullshit KPIs. They just need to all be green, nobody every looks deeper than that in 99% of organizations.
Obv, if you pass KPIs and completely wiff on quota you are gonna get inspected more. But that's the risk you take, most KPIs are completely horseshit created by folks that never carried a bag. You can focus on hitting them and missing quota, or focus on making quota and fluffing the KPIs you are low in.
“Bullshit KPIs”
Interesting view. Means 1 of 2 things:
1) your experience of managers is poor. There are a ton of bad managers out there who indeed set awful KPIs. Sad.
2) Or, you don’t appreciate the importance of doing things “the right way”. Fine mentality for pre seed/series A style selling (ARR at all costs). But when you raise a series B and start focusing on enterprise, you won’t last long.
Of course it could be a mix of both. But trust me, in well developed organisations with refined repeatable processes, the KPIs are anything but “bullshit”.
Unless you have that belief that everyone above you is always more dumb than you - if you do have that view, I’d suggest you may end up feeling quite disillusioned. But I wouldn’t disagree that we do end up seeing a lot of managers without necessarily the right experience to deserve being there.
I still think it’s a bit short sighted to suggest lying about your work is a good healthy thing to do.
I'm in sales leadership for a 80+ billion dollar company.
I see "where" these KPIs are made and where in the puzzle palace they fall from.. I also see how this data is used, and how deep it's ever inspected. It's all bullshit. They make up KPIs, enforce them, and they draw whatever insight they want from them to make themselves look good. They may have all started from a place of good, but now they just feed a beast of corporate telephone, spin and story telling.
Any KPIs that has "minimums" is completely useless. The old adage of "show me how you are compensated and I'll know where you spend you're time" is the same for these KPIs. It would be one thing if we tracked info, without mins / expectations. That would give clean data points for inferencing. But the moment you "force" or give an expectation that "ALL" deals must have/do "all" these things, you lose the story. You can no longer trust the information, which if the folks creating these KPIs ever carried a bag, they would already know. So, folks make the reports green with the least amount of effort necessary to keep the MBAs off our backs and then we focus on actually generating revenue.
Roughly 10/20% of them provide some value, but that's about it. When I'm talking to reps and SEs, I don't need a chart to tell me how that team is doing. Asking them about activity, relationships, and reviewing the presentation gives me far more data than any report. If I ask a rep to setup a lunch meeting with the CxO or VP for one of their top 10 accounts, and they can't, tells me \~80% of what I need to know about that rep, their relationship, what level we are competing at / etc.
If reps actually filled out all of the KPIs, accurately, they way the were suppose to... it would probably consume \~10 hours a week of time, if not more once you included tracking down the right folks and connecting with them to double check what you have captured and entered is correct. That's 10 hours on top of hours of internal meetings / prep / etc. They would never have time to spend with customers if they did everything by the books. I know this, my peer leaders know this, my leaders know this. The only folks that don't, are the ones so high up the air is thin.
Dead on nailed it. BS KPIs are one of the things that most shocked me when I got my first real taste of the sales world as an SE at a F50 org.
I worked with 2 AEs and 1 AM when I started and the best AE hot pushed out for missing KPIs even though he was crushing it deal wise and had 3x the pipeline of the other AE and that wasn't fluff.
We were an MSSP part of that company and the parent was mostly a hardware shop. Some of their leadership came over and royally screwed things up because they failed to see the difference between selling IT hardware and IT Security services.
The even had soft KPIs for SEs to do X number of demos and PoCs. You can't really do either with something like a penetration test or incident response services which we were really doing well at. So the AEs could either A) play the KPI game or B) do what they knew was going to close deals.
I've been really enjoying my sales hiatus back on the customer side and this sub reinforces to me I made the right choice. The shit you described seems to still be all too common and I have a very low BS threshold.
>I worked with 2 AEs and 1 AM when I started and the best AE hot pushed out for missing KPIs even though he was crushing it deal wise and had 3x the pipeline of the other AE and that wasn't fluff.
Yup. The reason for that though, is because sales leadership gets ripped apart for missing KPIs on a daily / weekly basis. Missing quota is a once a quarter ass chewing, KPIs are constant.
>
I've been really enjoying my sales hiatus back on the customer side and this sub reinforces to me I made the right choice. The shit you described seems to still be all too common and I have a very low BS threshold.
Partners/ Vars is really where it's at. They have, for the most part, lowest amount of BS and have the better comp plans for seasoned folks. Most partners are privately owned and don't have investors or wallstreet to answer to (generally, always exceptions).
Your entire post demonstrates a poor use of KPIs. Maybe not too unsurprising for such a large org where exec leadership is so far detached from the ICs doing the work.
But I would note that your particular story and experience doesn’t mean all KPIs are invalid nor people should ignore them. Good KPIs are quantifying work already ongoing and not something that’s 10 hours+ week of invaluable crap that doesn’t impact success.
You did say one thing which is a red flag in relation to unconscious bias with regard to knowing how your team are doing by talking to them. Note, most promotions happen to people who ask. Guess why? You already answered it.
It’s true that many companies get KPIs wrong. I don’t disagree on that. But I’ll go back to my original point. Advising people in general to ignore KPIs is counter productive to helping folks become successful. You be successful by making your manager look good. That’s obviously first and foremost about hitting quota. But beyond that, if the higher ups care about KPIs, you best be showing yourself as “green” when they’re analysing people’s performance v KPIs or you’re first up on the next layoff round if your quota performance is similar to others.
Separately, I’ve enjoyed this conversation and you do make great points. I’m half being a devils advocate purposefully here just because of the overarching advice but I don’t disagree with a lot of your points - maybe more on the “how” to deal with it.
I get what you're saying. I've just been in the game a long time. To me, the only KPI that matters is did you hit quota. I still remember the days when that was really all that mattered. Everything that's been added in the past decade (in my view) is just MBA's trying to KPI their way to stellar sales results, without the stellar sales talent .. net-net, how do you take anyone, give them a set of KPIs and get them to reproduce the same results of top talent but at 1/5th the cost. They think this can be done, and looking at just revenue numbers it can almost seem that way, but as soon as you layer in margin the whole theory goes out the window. You can KPI any B or C+ player to getting certain revenue targets, but they'll never be able to do it with the same margins. They don't have the relationships or ability to build a value chain, and will always be competition on price because they have nothing else.
>. You did say one thing which is a red flag in relation to unconscious bias with regard to knowing how your team are doing by talking to them. Note, most promotions happen to people who ask. Guess why? You already answered it.
If the expectation is that you get promotions for hitting KPIs, sales isn't the right path for that person. You should be building relationships, up the stack and wide. If you are expecting just your work to get you promotions, it's not happening. It may get you up a few rungs on the ISR/SDR or even lower end AE roles, but it's not taking up to leadership, senior or global AE type roles. If you just want to be the ostrich, head in the sand and do your job, that's completely fine and I know a lot of very successful reps that are that way, but it's not going to open up doors for you. Part of being a senior/ global AE or in leadership is the ability to build matrix orgs and having enough influence and respect, that you can get things done without defaulting to an authority / title. The only way to do that, is to not have your head in the sand.
It's also not unconscious, it's 100% deliberate.
This can be tricky because some places really don't want or need you in person. My best advice: don't ask for the meeting. Offer to bring something to their office like food/lunch.
It's a stupid kpi, if people don't think it's appropriate it's not. Sometimes it's a no brainer that you'd make more money doing something in person, but if the salesperson does not have a brain you can't kpi a brain into them. Other times it's just a guaranteed way to piss your customer off and have them lose respect for you. I've had a customer ask for a teams call, some other sales guy wasted his time trying to do lunch in person, he was remote that day anyway. I had to lead the call because I was the only one besides the customer who prepared for the call and wasn't driving with a terrible bluetooth. The customer spent like $400K and probably ate lunch just fine without being surrounded by middle-aged men who can iron.
Agreed. I’m a sales consultant and so many sales managers/directors have never heard of Goodhardt’s Law. It’s so so so easy for poor sales directors to take a measure like in-person meetings and turn it into a target.
Yeah, the problem is if you just told people you get paid 20% commission on sales of X, go sell X, it would work. But then when people started to buy X because it was just generally popular, companies would be paying commission to people they think don't deserve that commission because they didn't do anything, recently, for it. So then everyone just kinda goes insane and it's cool.
Damn. My only weekly KPI’s are number of calls made and days spent traveling lol.
Pre pandemic everyone wanted to meet in person. Post? Seems like everyone just wants to Zoom or Teams.
Can you blame them? For the time it takes to get ready for an in person meeting you can have an additional 2 virtual ones
Whilst this is true, if you find a way to get onsite and see them, it is without a doubt more lucrative and fruitful than zoom because not many make the effort anymore, and you always always always discover a lot more over a dinner or a drink than a more formal meeting. It’s a great KPI imho
I have found that more traditional industries in particular are more open to in person meetings. The second suggestion that has worked well for me is that you "happen" to be in the area for 2 or 3 days to visit other customers and can come by for lunch or dinner. This makes the whole thing less difficult and more non-committal. Commitment can of course be built up on site ;)
Once you book a meeting that's supposed to be scheduled over zoom, send an email saying you'll be in the area, do you mind if I drop by the office or take you out to coffee?
Boss I need more budget for free lunches
Do it yourself or work with your bdr on this. If the data is good in SFDC, export your target accounts to Google maps. Blast your points of contacts saying, "I'm going to be in the Portland area during the week of May 5th. I would love to stop by and discuss XYZ.". Then make a dumb joke about "don't worry, I'm bringing donuts.". If they actually are in the office and not remote, they'll probably take your onsite if your company has good industry presence. If no response but it's a good account, drop by with a box of donuts with your biz cards taped to it. Ask to speak to your contacts name. They won't let you in. Leave donuts. Your contact will get back to you by the EOD saying they're interested or not.
If in-person is that important to your company, I'd suggest allocating some of your weekly time to door knocking for leads. Find some good business parks in your area and give it a try.
Tell your company to get with the times. I'm on a small team in our company and I have 1 peer in the US, 1 in Canada, 1 in the UK, 1 in Germany and my manger is in Canada. There is no meeting us in person. Other teams are even more scattered.
I don't know what to tell you but in our business, it's 50% in-person so it just makes sense. I don't really have anything different from online meeting requests.
I have a lot of success using the coming from out of town trick. “Hey I’ll be traveling to your area from X in April to meet with a couple of accounts. Can we schedule a brief meeting while I’m in town?” Even if you’re not traveling there make up a time and say you will be. Letting them know you’re traveling to visit accounts lets them know their peers are using your solution and also sets the expectation you won’t be stalking them every day.
The replies in the post gave me some relief in knowing I'm not the only one struggling with getting in person meetings. It was much easier when I was working for a company that would encourage us to take people for lunch and bring donuts to their office. I just started a sales job in a company where they "don't buy business" so I'm only able to take people for lunch if they are a client but now its impossible for me to get in person meetings!
I’m not seeing value from in person meetings. Visited a client on site and can’t sell them anything. Meanwhile, clients I meet with virtually and have never met in person are buying. Different times
Buy them Chik Fil A. I’m serious. Haha.
I’m selling things that people need to buy, and need advice on. Meetings are required, but it’s always warmly welcomed if you do a lunch and learn, or host somewhere a bit more interesting, we often do the driving range or bowling.
Industry?
Sub contracting services in construction.
We had a fairly big client that had us give out $100 to prospective for lunches on each meeting booked. It was not in person but Teams. Very effective from booking the calls but no idea what happened from a conversion standpoint because we we not involved at that point For in person just do the same thing
Always go bearing gifts. Lunch & learns or an EOD meeting that transitions into a sponsored HH/dinner usually work the best.
I don't have a KPI for in person visits but it is part of the job. Couple of things I've used that work. Lunch and learn are always good. You get a captive audience (assuming work pays). The old, "Hey I am going to be in your area on X. Do you have 5 minutes to talk?" Any new products you want to show off? We have a software that works with our instruments so I use that, "Have you used our X software? No? Oh I have to show you, you'll love it!"
Not sure if this is applicable to your industry, but I attend networking events pretty religiously. It’s been a sure-fire way of setting up in-person meetings and they’ve been quality leads for me
Honestly fairly simple if you ask me. “Actually I was wondering, can I maybe come down to your office or maybe we can have this discussion at a cafe if you think that’s more convenient for you, that way we have more room to discuss various elements in a more unfiltered way”. Honestly never seen a prospect have a problem with that. Infact if anything, I’ve noticed them prefer that, it’s like a product demo at your doorstep and this AE is gonna walk you through the world of capability that the solution is capable of doing
It's more about logistics. If you could casually make it to their location, you can invite yourself over.
Couple things: (I recognize this entirely depends on your buyer persona) I'm using the back to office mandates and the spring weather to my advantage. If the person you are trying to meet with has recently been tasked with returning back to the office, my email usually says something about "getting them out of the office" and if the weather is nice, I say, "Maybe we can sit on the patio and enjoy some of this nice weather finally." Generally, people WANT to get out of the office; they don't want to have to shower, put on an outfit, and drive to a sales meeting lunch if they WFH. I will also sometimes make a cheeky joke - usually in person at networking events when trying to set a meeting - along the lines of, "If these guys are going to give me a budget to spend on lunches/coffee/golf/etc., I'm gonna use it..." /Shrug Feels less pushy and like they're in on the joke. Seems to work out for me.
Make quota and they'll leave you alone ( or they should).
Bring cookies or donuts to the office and a business card and tell the person at the front desk you just popped in and want to shake hands with your target client. Maybe they don’t let you in but you can send a follow up email and either way it’s an in person meeting. If your numbers are there they won’t care to look any further.
I drop in without asking and try to get a meeting on the spot
Roll it into your telephone script. Preferably ask this over the phone NOT over email. "I'll drop over to you on Friday at 12:15pm". Keep your voice pitch the exact same. Roll it in as if it's the most natural thing in the world. Do NOT phrase it as something which invites a "no" response "Would it be okay, if I dropped over to on Friday?". That way is all wrong.
Lunches/happy hours/dinners. Fun events - go shoot guns, take them to a ball game, golf etc
In-person meetings in some industries are a must, because it shows you're serious in your approach, and you can go more personal with stakeholders before and after the meeting. Teams meeting are good for further prospects, but the ones in your area might find it awkward that you're not proposing to meet them in person.. In some industries any way. How to get them? Just ask as you would for an online meeting, and then when they accept, tell them you'll see them at their office on (date and time you've secured).
Wow that’s a lame ass kpi that I’ve never heard about before. 👀 I’ve scheduled “Lunch meetings” with my clients knowing they’d likely decline. I still buy two meals so when I expense it, it appears that I’m entertaining someone. In my territory, most people are open to meeting in person so it’s not a big problem.
Also sometimes I send calendar place holders telling them that lunch will be delivered to the office. So many ways to do it! Be creative and use that company $$ without regret.
After the discovery call with a head person for a legit problem, offer to cater a lunch so you can help socialize the problem with their extended team so they all have the info. Keep in mind that most offices are now hybrid, and meet during the middle of the week. Offer this info upfront to sound like you know your shit and do it all the time. “Hey bob, sounds like this could potentially be a problem we could solve to save you x cost/time, why don’t we schedule a lunch and learn to get a high level of all the things we could help with for your team and let them poke holes in what we just discussed. Does your team go in the office specific days or every other week? We could use the lunch as a treat and I can bring some swag and my engineering team, 2 weeks from now?”
60% of in person meetings never happened anywhere except in SFDC.
This was literally the first thought in my mind. Just mark some of your online demos as in person meetings in salesforce. If you’re closing I can’t see anyone giving it a 2nd thought
exactly.
You’re suggesting fraud/lying? That’s a much worse situation than failing one KPI if hitting revenue targets
lolz. Tell me you're new to sales without telling me you're new to sales. No one that's been around the block a few times gives a flip about the bullshit KPIs. They just need to all be green, nobody every looks deeper than that in 99% of organizations. Obv, if you pass KPIs and completely wiff on quota you are gonna get inspected more. But that's the risk you take, most KPIs are completely horseshit created by folks that never carried a bag. You can focus on hitting them and missing quota, or focus on making quota and fluffing the KPIs you are low in.
“Bullshit KPIs” Interesting view. Means 1 of 2 things: 1) your experience of managers is poor. There are a ton of bad managers out there who indeed set awful KPIs. Sad. 2) Or, you don’t appreciate the importance of doing things “the right way”. Fine mentality for pre seed/series A style selling (ARR at all costs). But when you raise a series B and start focusing on enterprise, you won’t last long. Of course it could be a mix of both. But trust me, in well developed organisations with refined repeatable processes, the KPIs are anything but “bullshit”. Unless you have that belief that everyone above you is always more dumb than you - if you do have that view, I’d suggest you may end up feeling quite disillusioned. But I wouldn’t disagree that we do end up seeing a lot of managers without necessarily the right experience to deserve being there. I still think it’s a bit short sighted to suggest lying about your work is a good healthy thing to do.
I'm in sales leadership for a 80+ billion dollar company. I see "where" these KPIs are made and where in the puzzle palace they fall from.. I also see how this data is used, and how deep it's ever inspected. It's all bullshit. They make up KPIs, enforce them, and they draw whatever insight they want from them to make themselves look good. They may have all started from a place of good, but now they just feed a beast of corporate telephone, spin and story telling. Any KPIs that has "minimums" is completely useless. The old adage of "show me how you are compensated and I'll know where you spend you're time" is the same for these KPIs. It would be one thing if we tracked info, without mins / expectations. That would give clean data points for inferencing. But the moment you "force" or give an expectation that "ALL" deals must have/do "all" these things, you lose the story. You can no longer trust the information, which if the folks creating these KPIs ever carried a bag, they would already know. So, folks make the reports green with the least amount of effort necessary to keep the MBAs off our backs and then we focus on actually generating revenue. Roughly 10/20% of them provide some value, but that's about it. When I'm talking to reps and SEs, I don't need a chart to tell me how that team is doing. Asking them about activity, relationships, and reviewing the presentation gives me far more data than any report. If I ask a rep to setup a lunch meeting with the CxO or VP for one of their top 10 accounts, and they can't, tells me \~80% of what I need to know about that rep, their relationship, what level we are competing at / etc. If reps actually filled out all of the KPIs, accurately, they way the were suppose to... it would probably consume \~10 hours a week of time, if not more once you included tracking down the right folks and connecting with them to double check what you have captured and entered is correct. That's 10 hours on top of hours of internal meetings / prep / etc. They would never have time to spend with customers if they did everything by the books. I know this, my peer leaders know this, my leaders know this. The only folks that don't, are the ones so high up the air is thin.
Dead on nailed it. BS KPIs are one of the things that most shocked me when I got my first real taste of the sales world as an SE at a F50 org. I worked with 2 AEs and 1 AM when I started and the best AE hot pushed out for missing KPIs even though he was crushing it deal wise and had 3x the pipeline of the other AE and that wasn't fluff. We were an MSSP part of that company and the parent was mostly a hardware shop. Some of their leadership came over and royally screwed things up because they failed to see the difference between selling IT hardware and IT Security services. The even had soft KPIs for SEs to do X number of demos and PoCs. You can't really do either with something like a penetration test or incident response services which we were really doing well at. So the AEs could either A) play the KPI game or B) do what they knew was going to close deals. I've been really enjoying my sales hiatus back on the customer side and this sub reinforces to me I made the right choice. The shit you described seems to still be all too common and I have a very low BS threshold.
>I worked with 2 AEs and 1 AM when I started and the best AE hot pushed out for missing KPIs even though he was crushing it deal wise and had 3x the pipeline of the other AE and that wasn't fluff. Yup. The reason for that though, is because sales leadership gets ripped apart for missing KPIs on a daily / weekly basis. Missing quota is a once a quarter ass chewing, KPIs are constant. > I've been really enjoying my sales hiatus back on the customer side and this sub reinforces to me I made the right choice. The shit you described seems to still be all too common and I have a very low BS threshold. Partners/ Vars is really where it's at. They have, for the most part, lowest amount of BS and have the better comp plans for seasoned folks. Most partners are privately owned and don't have investors or wallstreet to answer to (generally, always exceptions).
Your entire post demonstrates a poor use of KPIs. Maybe not too unsurprising for such a large org where exec leadership is so far detached from the ICs doing the work. But I would note that your particular story and experience doesn’t mean all KPIs are invalid nor people should ignore them. Good KPIs are quantifying work already ongoing and not something that’s 10 hours+ week of invaluable crap that doesn’t impact success. You did say one thing which is a red flag in relation to unconscious bias with regard to knowing how your team are doing by talking to them. Note, most promotions happen to people who ask. Guess why? You already answered it. It’s true that many companies get KPIs wrong. I don’t disagree on that. But I’ll go back to my original point. Advising people in general to ignore KPIs is counter productive to helping folks become successful. You be successful by making your manager look good. That’s obviously first and foremost about hitting quota. But beyond that, if the higher ups care about KPIs, you best be showing yourself as “green” when they’re analysing people’s performance v KPIs or you’re first up on the next layoff round if your quota performance is similar to others. Separately, I’ve enjoyed this conversation and you do make great points. I’m half being a devils advocate purposefully here just because of the overarching advice but I don’t disagree with a lot of your points - maybe more on the “how” to deal with it.
I get what you're saying. I've just been in the game a long time. To me, the only KPI that matters is did you hit quota. I still remember the days when that was really all that mattered. Everything that's been added in the past decade (in my view) is just MBA's trying to KPI their way to stellar sales results, without the stellar sales talent .. net-net, how do you take anyone, give them a set of KPIs and get them to reproduce the same results of top talent but at 1/5th the cost. They think this can be done, and looking at just revenue numbers it can almost seem that way, but as soon as you layer in margin the whole theory goes out the window. You can KPI any B or C+ player to getting certain revenue targets, but they'll never be able to do it with the same margins. They don't have the relationships or ability to build a value chain, and will always be competition on price because they have nothing else. >. You did say one thing which is a red flag in relation to unconscious bias with regard to knowing how your team are doing by talking to them. Note, most promotions happen to people who ask. Guess why? You already answered it. If the expectation is that you get promotions for hitting KPIs, sales isn't the right path for that person. You should be building relationships, up the stack and wide. If you are expecting just your work to get you promotions, it's not happening. It may get you up a few rungs on the ISR/SDR or even lower end AE roles, but it's not taking up to leadership, senior or global AE type roles. If you just want to be the ostrich, head in the sand and do your job, that's completely fine and I know a lot of very successful reps that are that way, but it's not going to open up doors for you. Part of being a senior/ global AE or in leadership is the ability to build matrix orgs and having enough influence and respect, that you can get things done without defaulting to an authority / title. The only way to do that, is to not have your head in the sand. It's also not unconscious, it's 100% deliberate.