Name: Revenue in plain sight: What 1,400 revenue leaders say is really hurting growth
Uploaded: 2025-08-20T17:17:57.154Z
Duration: 1 h 8 s
Description: Revenue in plain sight: What 1,400 revenue leaders say is really hurting growth

Transcript for "Revenue in plain sight: What 1,400 revenue leaders say is really hurting growth": Well, hello, and welcome, everybody. We're really glad that you're here with us today. A big thanks to the RevOps Alliance for helping pull this session together and continuing to create space for conversations like this. But today, we're gonna talk about growth and not just how to get more of it, which is, of course, what we all want, but also why so many companies are struggling to capture the growth that's right in front of them. And I'll tell you, it's often not for lack of strategy or lack of ambition. There are a lot of other factors at play. So we just wrapped up one of the biggest market studies in the SPM space and and we asked over 1,400 revenue and operations and executive leaders what was holding back growth in their organizations. And we expected the the usual things to pop there. Things like AI disruption and budget pressures and economic headwinds. And, of course, we we heard those things, but surprisingly, it wasn't the main headline. What we started to see in the data was that leaders perceive the biggest threat to growth aren't just the things happening outside of our business, but it's what's happening inside. Strategy that looks great on paper, but gets stuck in the execution. Teams that are pulling in different directions, metrics that aren't really capturing or telling the story of what's going on. All the insights that you're gonna hear today are grounded in our 2025 market spotlight. We'll tell you how to get full access to that report at the end of the session if you haven't seen that already. But today, we wanna talk about what do these insights mean for your strategy and for your day to day. So to help us with that, I'm gonna bring in our panel of experts to to help us start to explore it. And I'm gonna let each of them introduce themselves, but join me in welcoming Zach Faithful from Deloitte, James Roth from ZoomInfo. Gentlemen, thank you so much for being here. Why don't you, introduce yourself, maybe a little bit about your role and, maybe an interesting fact about your journey leading sales organization. So, Zach, why don't you get us started today? Yeah. Thank you. So my name is Zach Faithful. I'm the leader in Deloitte sales planning and performance management practice. Yeah. And I think interesting fact about my journey, I actually started off in FP and A, and had a number of interlocks and interactions with sales organization, you know, going through planning and budgeting. And it just kind of hooked me and it was very fascinating. And, I've been doing that for the last fifteen years now, supporting organizations around go to market planning and sales execution. Awesome. Well, thanks. We're glad you're here, Zach. Now James. Yeah. Thanks, Curtis. Happy to be here. James Roth. I'm the CRO at ZoomInfo. You know, the CRO role at ZoomInfo encompasses all things go to market. So sales, rev ops, partnerships, account management, CX, onboarding, support, data solutions, all the above. And I guess a fun fact on my sales journey, I certainly did not start in FP and A. I was actually a professional musician in Los Angeles. Oh, yeah. And I picked up sales as a side hustle trying to, you know, pay the bills that being a street performer, a studio musician couldn't by day. And so that's what ultimately got me into the sales profession. And then I realized very quickly that it's hard to be both, skeleton by day and I wanna be, you know, rock star by night. And so I I cut the long hair and moved back to the East Coast and started officially, in the the sales role as my number one thing. Well, I imagine, folks on the call right now are now googling James Roth rock star to see if we can find out more about your background in history. But we'll have we'll get the band together another time. But, really glad to have both of you here. Thanks for the time and for joining us. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Curtis Schroeder. I lead the research and insight function at Vericent. My main job in the organization is to help revenue leaders use data, use research to better understand the world that we operate in and and to think differently about how to design smarter go to market strategies as a result. So that's that's my day to day, and I'm really excited to get to to have this conversation with these two really smart guys joining us. Now, for all of us in the the conversation today who we trust the conversation is gonna be interesting, we hope it'll be compelling to you as an audience member, but we also wanna make sure to give you a chance to share your voice as well. So if you've got questions, if you've got thoughts on what we're talking about, feel free to drop those in the chat. We'll we'll take a few minutes towards the end of our conversation to circle around, or we'll follow-up with you directly after for sure. So feel free to join the conversation and then be a part of what we're talking about as well. Alright, guys. Let's get into it. So for our first topic today, I wanna start with one of the loudest signals that was in the data in our report. It's something that we kind of call this this big name, the the commercial effectiveness paradox. But let me start to break that down just a little bit. So we asked leaders, what do you think, will be your biggest threat to growth this year? And and I'm not sure about you, but when you think about that, when I think about that, I expected to see economic uncertainty and tariffs and budget concerns and the evolution in customer expectations topping the list. But in the data, it kinda flipped that expectation for me a little bit. 44 of revenue leaders told us that gaps in their talent was what they perceived to be the top threat. And we had a bunch of interviews, about three dozen interviews that accompanied our data to help us understand a little bit more about what was going on. And we found out that when we say talent gaps, it's not just about hiring or or training, certainly not less than that, but it's about this broader idea of commercial effectiveness. Do our sellers have the right tools? Do they have the right structures, the right internal support to help them perform? So these are kind of the gaps around talent that leaders see as the biggest threat. But if talent was the number one concern, I guess we'd also expect leaders that would be pouring resources into solving for that. But again, that's where things started to get even more interesting. Because when we asked them how they actually plan to drive growth and lift attainment, we started to see a very different story. If you look across the the bottom of the chart on the right, you'll see that all the potential growth priorities that we ask those same leaders to prioritize. And the overwhelming majority pointed to what we might think of as external moves. Things like, new market entry, new product or service lines, deeper account penetration, all all good things, but things that happen outside of the organization. And only about 20% or one in five of the leaders that we surveyed actually mentioned sales team effectiveness or or the talent gap area as a key lever for growth. So on one hand, talent gaps are the biggest perceived risk. On the other hand, leaders seem to be focused more on the the flashier, the bigger external moves when they're thinking about where they're investing to drive growth. So that's what we're calling the the commercial effectiveness paradox that the number one threat is commercial excellence, but it's largely underfunded compared to other potential growth investments that companies are making. But let's start talking about what this looks like inside organizations like yours and how you can start thinking about and fixing it. So, Zach, let's let's start with you here. I'm sure you've seen this pattern play out in a lot of organizations where, internal friction or that that talent aspect is is clearly slowing things down, but maybe folks aren't making it a priority to fix. Why do you think that is? Yeah. I mean, I think, oftentimes, there's, you know, short term pressures to to grow the business, which I think leads to looking at growing pipeline and getting quick wins. And, you know, obviously, that kinda takes priority over some of the more of these fundamental operational focus areas. I think there's also a lack of visibility, many times in, you know, the areas in the handoffs from the revenue operations life cycle between marketing sales, sales and finance. You know, it's not data driven, so there's, you know, unawareness around, you know, where to focus. You know? And then lastly, I'd say, I think the there is this perceived complexity that some of these, you know, operational transformations can can take and and have on the business, like, overhauling your enablement and the change management impact on that, as well as looking where you're investing in tech stack improvement improvements to support, you know, improve seller effectiveness. And and that tends to you know, try to take a back seat, you know, over seller productivity and driving immediate growth. So I think those are kind of the three high level areas that I would, you know, say you have seen most often. Mhmm. But I think with that, you know, I think there are a lot of organizations that are breaking that cycle. Yeah. What tell us more about that. Yeah. Absolutely. So, yeah, I think it starts though with a bit of kind of tops down executive sponsorship and having a very clear go to market strategy. I think we you know, I've seen, you know, many times sales organizations that look at seller effectiveness as a strategic lever to drive growth and not just an enabling function. I mean, that's the most important piece. And then, you know, secondly, and this kinda ties back to the visibility challenge that I mentioned is a lot of organizations are not data driven first, you know, operation support functions. So they are not leveraging analytics. They're not looking at various KPIs around their pipeline. They're not looking at their coverage strategy gaps. They're not looking at, kind of, their quota attainment distributions or where they have white space or penetrations in different accounts. And not having that kind of day data driven first approach, you know, leads to, you know, unawareness, which means, you know, you can't solve that problem or be agile to fixing that with a continuous feedback loop. So I'd I'd say that, you know, tops down, collaboration from leadership, using a strategic lever and instituting KPIs to drive and measure your business, are where, you know, these organizations starting to, you know, write that write that problem. Yeah. And a lot of oh, some of our data too spoke to leaders that that recognize this kind of of challenge leads to revenue, like, lack of revenue or loss of revenue. Right? So I think when you when you have KPIs that can help measure it and help us figure out how to fix it, but also we know that these are things that are truly attached to growing revenue, then we can actually see those those KPIs kinda connect connect dots as well when as we start to Absolutely. And let me turn it to James now. James, from the the seat of the CRO, how do you balance the pressure to to launch the next big thing that that your leadership cares about, your boards care about, the the street care about with the need to fix what's slowing down your team internally? How do you kind of balance that piece out? Yeah. It's a it's a great question. I would I would double down on on what Zach said. I think oftentimes, the anecdotal kicks in. There's not enough sort of foundational data research. You might see an attrition problem. You might see reps leaving after twelve to fourteen months. Certain things happen in a comp plan, and you might get a sales leader that's making noise about it. But if the if the executive team is too disconnected from that, it just feels like no salespeople are gonna leave. It is what it is. And this is a much bigger and more exciting thing. And so I think, you know, to the to the previous point, if you really think about, you know, the decade leading up to 2022, you had this amazing bull market run and it was, how do we get into new territories? How do we go make an acquisition? Let's get something else that we can go sell because people are gonna buy it. In an instant, you know, midway through '22, it kinda flipped on its head and it was like, how do we do more with less, you know, stop spending, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut. And through both of those, I think they led to this paradox, which is we're not gonna go invest in this thing that's right in front of our face. And I think, you know, in the yes, of course, we need to go launch big new things. You've got this AI boom. We've gotta stay as the curve on competition. So it's not necessarily a trade off between one or the other, but like a big new thing, a product release, a new market, or an acquisition, those should be, you know, they happen infrequently. Something like this needs to be always on. And I think from a metric standpoint, when you see that reps, once they hit their twelve months, they're two and a half times more productive than reps without that tenure. Or if the internally promoted reps are four times more effective than external hires, you know, if you can start to kinda monetize those milestones to make them more important in some cases than hitting certain ACV thresholds of the new product, you know, the I think the the size and the impact of those things is largely not recognized because people don't put the time into either tracking them or or kinda sizing the monster. And so, you know, at a at a high level, I think it's you're gonna have big exciting releases. You have to as a company. Right? And so it's not necessarily we're not gonna release this product until we fix this. The fixing this has to be always on. You're constantly tweaking comp plans. You're constantly looking at attrition. You're constantly looking at the data of when people leave, where do they go, why do they go there, and then what is the impact on lowering that attrition or increasing that tenure. I think you can get much more significant buy in at the board level or at the c suite level when you can actually size that impact to say, we have a GTM org of 1,700 people. And at this threshold of, you know, tenure at this threshold of internal promotes versus external hires, speed to ramp, all of those things do come with very material, you know, dollar impacts. And I think a lot of times people overlook them. That's really good. I love that thought, on kind of making it always on. It almost feels like how building it into the operating rhythms of your business. And so maybe you could talk a little bit about how do you build that rhythm and how how do you lead that change to to fix the dragon and and kind of make that more of an institutionalized practice rather than a a one time one and done type of activity. Yeah. I I think, again, echoing Zach, I think making sure that that data is available and it's constantly looked at is probably the most important thing. So we've got a weekly and a monthly report, not only on, you know, repetition, why they left, voluntary, involuntary, performance related. And I think the ability to look at that and make that a metric that matters because, again, if you just look, I'm sure we're not unique. If you look at the curve from zero to four months, you know, four to seven months, seven to twelve months, twelve to twenty four months, the productivity is so unbelievably different. But hit those certain thresholds that it has become one of the most important things that we track. And I think that in conjunction with the internal promote versus the external hire, you know, an external hire, yes, you're gonna need them if you're moving into the enterprise and you're traditionally an SMB company or vice versa. There's always gonna be a need for external hires, but the internal promotes, not only in leadership but also in ICs, are unequivocally more productive faster if they're moving into a role. And so, again, to the operating rhythm, I think it's understanding those metrics that matter, and then it's putting them into a dashboard, making it a part of the weekly readout, you know, rewarding those teams or those segments or those BUs that have the lowest attrition, the highest internal promotes, and then, you know, again, really digging into the areas that don't. And it's it's one thing to track it and then it's another thing to find out, okay, in the attrition reports, if 40% of them are are calling out compensation or lack of career development or, you know, management, whatever it may be, you know, you find what that data is telling you and then you go act accordingly. I don't think there's a one size fits all answer, but it's just a constant tweaking of that go to market machine, if you will, of, okay, these SDRs, they're on demo one complete. That's all of their target. Now, that's really not it. Maybe we go to good fit show rate, maybe we go to conversion, maybe we go to demos complete and ACB targets. And I think it's constantly testing those kinda quarter over quarter, half over half with the buy in from the team so that they feel like they're being heard. And so it's not just continuing to just change their comp plan because I know the consistency of a comp plan is really important, but I think it is just a constant AB testing machine against the data that you are looking at on a regular basis to find out what moves the needle for either attrition or internal promotions, etcetera. Yeah. I I love all of that, James. And I think in general, we have more data available to us now than probably at any other point in time, and I imagine a lot of organizations are struggling to figure out what to do with that data and how to surface new KPIs or identify the ones that matter. And so we'll talk a little bit more about that later as it relates to performance, but, I love what you're surfacing here about being willing to to maybe challenge the norms of what we measure, what we track, and how we action on what we're seeing and and and exploring kind of how we use data more to our advantage to build that into the operating rhythms. I love that piece of it. Zach, maybe you can wrap us up in this section. What what's a piece of advice that you'd give to a revenue leader who's suspecting the problem isn't the strategy, but it is some of the internal mechanisms that's hurting their execution? How would how would you advise them in this way? Yeah. I mean, I think it it's a lot of echoing what James said. I think, you know, realistically, you know, there there's an aspect of there's a lot of data available. There's also an aspect of aligning on what data is important. But aligning on what data is important, I think, requires a little bit of an organization around, you know, a small kind of cross functional, you know, SWAT team to assess, and and align on those KPIs. How do you measure? How do you look at, you know, having this continuous feedback loop and then an action plan to execute against that feedback loop. I think everything we're saying here is kinda going back to, you know, finding and aligning on the right data points that, you know, are the right levers to manage the business that have the highest impact, not only on performance, but also on kind of enablement and repetition and reputainment, etcetera. But it gives you that agility. So I think it's, you know, establish a small cross functional team and maybe call it a center of excellence that's aligned to your revenue operations and give that have the right ceremonies in place and the right cadences, as James mentioned, with various weekly, monthly touch points to assess, improve, be agile, and execute. Love that. The cross functional piece is super important. I'm sure we'll talk more about that. But, let's hold there on this topic. I know there's so much more we want to get to today. And so I I wanna shift this now to to a given in most sales organizations, but, really, the one of the biggest and most important levers that salespeople, administrators, and strategy leaders use to drive behavior. Of course, I'm talking about incentives here and compensation. And so I wanna tell a little bit about how the world of incentives and motivation is evolving. So in our survey, we asked revenue leaders, we asked salespeople as well, how well their current plans actually reflect the various aspects of the incentive world that drive performance. So on the the basics, the things like base pay, pay mix, there seem to be pretty good alignment there. But as you start to get into some of the other areas, it becomes a bit of a disconnect between leaders and sellers. And so if you look at things like purpose and mission, over a third of leaders think their plan or or their their incentive environment reflects that, but only 18% of sellers agree. Career development, the the focus on customer outcomes after the sale itself, recognition and visibility. There there's gaps there too. But the biggest one we saw here, the biggest gap was in this idea of simplicity. 67% of leaders think that their plan is clear, that it's it's predictable, but only 33% or or one in three sellers say the same. And so I think the gaps here matter. I I think we all agree that compensation isn't just about paying people. It's the a signal about what the company values. And when that signal's off, the the behavior it drives could be off as well. Now we also taught asked sellers in the survey about what they wish their plans reflected more clearly. And three things here quickly rose to the top, and no surprise based on even some of the areas of of lack of perception in the the last question, but purpose and mission, recognition and visibility, career development, all those things very quickly rose to the top. And and importantly, these aren't always things that will map one to one to a comp plan. Right? But there are things in our compensation or incentives or motivation environments that we can build into our Salesforce more intentionally. Clearly, they're important to the Salesforce. But we also looked at the generational differences across those preferences. And and maybe this is, I'm assuming these are your experiences as well, but, we can see here how different aspects of incentives actually change based on your generational cohort. And as your career progresses as well and what you might need or desire or expect at different stages of your your career, what's striking to me here is that these aren't all necessarily, what you might think of like indulgent tasks. Right? But it does give us, even more insight into the idea that seller motivation's evolving. And that there's a need for flexibility, and there's a need to shift our thinking in in how we build this into our organizations. That we have sellers who wanna be connected to the mission. They wanna be seen and recognized for their full contribution in their organization. They wanna develop and grow their careers. They want their customers to be successful. They wanna feel supported in their growth. But I think it's really important to know before I flip this over to the team to start talking about this practically that that what we see here isn't about just giving sellers whatever they want. Right? The the goal here as leaders is to find that overlap between what's driving our people and how that motivation is changing, what's really serving our customers best and helping them get the outcomes that are are important to their business, and then what helps us grow our business. And we can find that intersection. There's some magic there. Right? So with that, let me bring in Zach and James to talk about how they're rethinking incentives to do exactly that, to find that intersection, for what's good for everybody and what helps us make a difference. So, James, in this time, let's let's start it with you. What's one thing that you've learned or you've seen or experienced about what motivates your sales organization? How's that influenced how you structure and think about incentives? Yeah. I mean, this is a this is a big one. I think just at a very high level being at this many years, I think what I've learned over the years is that and you articulated it well just from a generational standpoint. But even within generational, not all folks are motivated by the same things. And you might give somebody a significant 25% raise. They don't care. What they want is job security. They want recognition. They wanna do interesting work, whatever it may be. And I think too often, firms look at it as a one size fits all. Everybody cares about money. They want this, you know, quick hit bonus, whatever it may be. And while money is important, it's one piece of a, you know, call it five legged stool. And that's work life balance, job security, you know, compensation, promotion, ambition, career development, learning growth, all of those things. And so I would say that's the biggest learning lesson. I remember first getting into leadership just being like all these people are like me, you know. I get promoted and they wanna make a lot of money. And then you start to realize over time that's not the case. And then I think the second piece more at like a holistic org level. I think the worst thing that you can do is, you know, basically come out with your initiative. Say, we wanna be customer centric. We wanna go improve net retention. And then you keep all of the fundamental go to market incentives aligned to where they were before. And us, very specifically, you know, back to that ZURP high growth era, we had basically turned all of the dials to a high velocity, high transactional, as many customers as possible. Everybody's buying. And then, you know, when the market got a little bit harder in '22 and '23, you know, there was like, hey, let's be more customer centric. Let's make customers love us. Let's do and but no. But nothing changed. And so when I when I took the role, one of the first things we did is, like, we're gonna say these things. We have to tune the dials to say, okay, our new business was like a factory assembly line. One of the things that I heard most from our customers, like, I like my new business rep. And then once I signed the deal, I never saw them again. And then I had this great onboarding implementation training person for ninety days, then I never saw them again. Then I had a CSM show up for, like, three months, couple times, then I never saw them again, then an AM showed up asking me to do the renewal. And so, you know, we were saying customer centricity, we were saying, hey, let's go drive net retention because of x y and z. But if you don't change the underlying comp components, if you don't change the underlying goals and and targets, then you get that thousand yard stare or eye roll that you hate to get in leadership because they're okay. You're saying these things, but my comp plan and all the recognition is still predicated on me closing deals incredibly fast onto the next, onto the next, onto the next. And so, you know, we changed several things internally where, you know, you can easily keep somebody engaged, a new business rep. You keep them on the hook for, you know, whether it's growth or upsell or even, churn or downsell. You know, you can extend that time horizon where they either make more money if the deal grows. Even if you still have a CSM AM that's managing that, you know, we basically started to give them an extended time horizon. If you sell a great deal with great propensity to grow, I want them to have some upside on it. And the same thing with CSMs, they were on activity metrics, which is probably the worst metric you can have if you're and so it's kind of like you had CSMs with huge account loads and activity metrics, and we wondered why all they were doing was reactive firefighting versus being a true partner to the customer. So we completely changed their incentives, and we aligned them to the AMs. AMs. I'm sure anybody listening, yeah, the AM versus the CSM, it's always one or the other's fault. You know, aligning accountability and making those those targets and those incentives very clear. You can't go preach what you wanna do as a company if those incentives and motivations aren't aligned. That's really good. And I think I think that's a huge to to identify that disconnect and to see that we know how sellers behave and how they're gonna be paid and how they're gonna be incentive is going to drive their behavior. And so when there's a disconnect from our strategy down into the the comp. Like, it's it's going we're going to see the effect of that in in the activity that they engage in or they don't. So when I think about that from a strategic perspective, it makes a lot of sense. Can you can you talk a little bit about the practical evolving or maybe, like you mentioned, even the strategy of the organization's evolving. How do you involve incentives in a practical way to reflect what you like you mentioned, the the value that sellers create and not just the deal close? Like, what does that mean in practice? How did that how you get that flexibility and agility in your organization? Yeah. I mean, listen, changing comp plan, you know, 80 miles an hour with the wheels, you gotta change out. It's it's hard, and so it requires quite a bit of planning. You gotta do it at the half, you know, depending on when your cycle starts over. But I think, ultimately, you start with the end in mind to say, okay, what what do I want the new business reps caring about? What do I want the SDRs caring about? Like, what is an ideal customer journey if a new business rep that, you know, answers the phone two months later after the deal closes? If you have a CSM working in conjunction with the AM, you know, and again, just a real time example, our AMs were primarily compensated on upsell, and the CSMs were primarily compensated on activity. So if you think about where you want them, we put the CSMs on renewal rate, and then you put the, AM on overall net retention because they still have a growth component, but we really wanted to drive the retention component. And so even in a shift like that, if you're a frontline AM and your comp plan, your recognition, how to get to president's club, all of those things are aligned to just upsell, What are you gonna go spend your time doing? You're gonna call Curtis. Hey. You wanna buy anything more? Nope. Alright. I'm gonna call Zach. You wanna buy anything more? No. Versus once they're aligned to an overall net retention target that includes growth, that includes renewal rate, that includes, you know, stopping down sell and churn and things like that in order to get to Presidents Club, in order to get to your accelerators, you know, changing that fundamentally changes how they go to market and then making sure that the resources behind them are doing the same things and they're in concert with one another. Back to the SDRs on, you know, demo one's complete versus, hey, if you wanna move up market, now you need demo twos, now you need an AC component. Like, each of those are dials that you can turn, and it doesn't need to be the huge comp plan change that gets rolled out at sales kickoff that everybody's afraid of, you can start to tweak some of those either via a quarterly spiff to see if it works, to see if it drives the right incentive. If you say, alright, we're moving up market. So when we're looking at d ones, we're also looking at d twos now because we wanna spread across the sphere of influence and d twos become more important. It's not about one opportunity equals get paid. You can then take a spiff or you can take a quarterly, you know, kind of like a fun incentive to say, okay, is driving d twos, does that increase win rate? Does that increase ASP? Does that increase kinda moving up market? Or are they just gonna go call the same guy a bunch of times and jack up their d two number and maybe it was a bad idea? And so we do that all the time in terms of, like, before we go implement and change out a whole compensation structure, we will kinda inform what our good ideas, maybe bad ideas through these quarterly spiffs or even, like, a monthly incentive to see if it drives the right behavior, and then see if that right behavior then drives the outcomes that we're looking for. That's good. It's really smart. Zach, I wanna wanna get you in on this too. A lot of companies say that they care about post sale impact, but even what James is talking about, like, you still have that disconnect where maybe your plan still reward only the bookings. And so in a world where that handoff that James mess mentioned between customer success or account managers are are truly handling things post sale, we still want those teams focused on value to the customer overall, not just getting the deal closed. So what what are some simple changes or some ideas that you've seen work to help shift that focus a bit? Yeah. I mean, look, I think James hit the nail on the head, on that. I mean, I think, you know, it it starts with a bit of testing. I think it also starts with your plan and and and then kinda how does that intersect with your actual go to market strategy and your purpose and mission as a company, and the design around your compensation plan. I think there's always going to be elements of the plan that are revenue or bookings focused. But, you know, looking at instituting post sale metrics, I know James mentioned things around customer retention and, you know, talking about renewal focus, you know, specifically within SaaS businesses, expansion metrics. You know, I've I've seen organizations, you know, institute things around customer satisfaction scores. But I thought, you know, James, what you mentioned around, you know, instituting it through spiff, testing, kind of also kinda goes back to the point we were making around having data driven insights and decisions, before you kinda overhaul and then kind of be reactionary to it. So I I I think it's a bit of, you know, evaluating your design, making sure it's aligned to your your strategy. You know, James mentioned, you know, that's you you kinda do what you're saying you're gonna do through your your design and your execution of that design. You know, have an aspect of post sale metrics as a part of your plan, you know, so that you have the right factor across the different sales role architecture that you have, you know, and instituting that through testing and, you know, evaluation and, you know, supported by fact. So I I think those are some areas, again, kind of echoing what James mentioned. But also just touching on the the aspect of career development, you know, I've seen a lot of organizations doing a lot of internal or external recognition programs. As of late, there's, you know, a number of, you know, opportunities where they're giving their sales their sales leaders and sales reps, you know, opportunities to get involved in special programs, that, you know, provide leadership exposure, which, you know, I think goes back to some of the nonmonetary related, you know, aspects of, you know, growth within, you know, the sales organization and the importance of driving performance. But those are some of the areas that I'd say, you know, I think are, you know, areas where, you know, organizations can shift that focus. That's good. And there's there's so much here we could dive into. But I guess at the core, like I said earlier, the the goal isn't to make sellers just feel good in their job. We we certainly want that. But we wanna help them do good work and and good work that's, good for the customer, it's good for the company, it's good for their own growth. And we know that the right incentive plan, whether it's things that are directly tied to our compensation, that's directing behavior, or it's kind of feeding into, their purpose and their mission, their career growth, all those different, areas, the the five legged stool that James talked about earlier, that a good incentive plan, a good kind of commission structure, a good organizational mindset around this can unlock all of that. So we we could spend a whole session on on this topic for sure. But, for our last topic, I wanna turn now to how we measure performance. We talked about KPIs a lot, but but are there some aspects of our KPIs that that actually might be hurting us or or telling a different story than we want? So when I think about sales organizations, and I imagine this is is true in your companies as well, that quota is often the the default scorecard for performance. It's it's familiar, it's very visible, allows us to kinda track along the way. And on the surface, it's it's fairly simple. If you you hit the number, you win. But when we started to look a little bit closer and talk with revenue leaders about this, we it became even more obvious that quota can be a mask for the health of what's going on beneath the surface. So just because you hit your quota doesn't mean that you got there in a way that's repeatable. It doesn't mean you got the best performance from across your team. It doesn't necessarily mean it's working well for your sellers either. So, from our data, the study starts to tell a little bit of a different story about the perceptions of quota and what we might be doing a little bit different about that. And and it's in truth that might be a little bit uncomfortable too. So let me start with some seller perceptions on quota. So we found that, only 16% of sellers believe their quota is equitable compared to their peers. So we we know that reps talk to each other. They're they're looking and they're they're talking and they're listening across their colleagues. In fact, here, I think 69, 70% here fully disagree that they've got an equitable quota. That's something that might just be normal salesperson behavior, but I think there there could be some truth in there in terms of of what we make visible. On top of that, only 20% of sales reps say that their quota accurately reflects the potential in their territory. So to some extent, they believe there's not enough meat on the bone in their territory to actually hit their number. They don't, feel empowered to be able to hit it with the the resources that they have or the accounts that they have. And then finally, this is one that I know has hit home in my career that just 13% of salespeople actually understand how their quota was eaten set. So let's let that land on us for just a moment. And when we think about a metric like quota and how it's so central to how we think about judging performance, but our our sellers might actually perceive it as unfair and disempowering and unclear, that can create some friction. Right, wrong, indifferent, true true or not in practice, but, it is a perception that we see here. I wouldn't say that this means quota is wrong. Right? But it does mean that we're putting a lot of pressure on a single KPI to kinda carry load. And so what I I think here, one of my perspectives that we'll get your thoughts on here in a second, is that there's a call for better data to inform what what is the art and the science of quota setting. I think there's a need for better transparency to sellers. If we're smarter in how we're setting quotas and we're defining territories, but we're not communicating that well to our sellers, like, we we can alleviate some of that by just giving some better transparency. But it does all these things together are something that we should be considering in the weight that we put on quota. But that that's the seller point of view. For leaders, I wanna kinda take a step back. We need a more complete view of performance and something that's not just what happened in the rear view mirror, but but giving us more insight into how it happened and where we might have risk moving forward. So in our interviews, another consistent theme emerged that that leaders know that quota alone isn't enough, but there have to be better metrics for managing the health of our business. One idea that that came up again and again and I've been exploring it was looking at the idea of median attainment rather than just attainment as a whole. Because when you look at total attainment or you look at at averages, the your strong performers can really mask and and you carry the weight for the weak ones and you miss early signs of breakdown or maybe you're you miss the ability to to look at where there's risk on on the whole, but also even at the individual level, even for a manager that might be looking across their team. Right? And a metric like meeting attainment might in looking at the distribution of your team relative to the meeting can maybe show a little bit more about how your typical rep is performing, not just the outliers. So that that's one. Another concept I've been playing with a little bit is this idea of developing some sort of quota to territory equity ratio. But really, that sounds fancy, but it's really just a directional KPI that that compares the quota target to what we have defined as the actual market potential of a rep's territory. We've we've got more data than ever to inform our decisions and and even how we're defining territory. I know a lot of organizations are moving how they're thinking about territories to become smarter on the potential of the territory. But bringing that to the forefront, actually looking at the ratio of of potential to target could be a step towards helping set reps up to succeed in identifying where maybe we're asking for too much without enough, support in the accounts or, maybe not asking quite enough, and we can kind of up that based on what we're giving them. So neither of these are perfect. I'll just say that that as we get started, and we go into a lot more depth in the report if if folks wanna dive in. But I do wanna hear from from Zach and from James on what they're seeing and how they're approaching quotas and performance measurement differently. So, Zach, let me start with you. Quota is really good. It shows us what happened, but it doesn't really tell us why often. So what other metrics, what other signals might you recommend leaders look at to start to get more of the full picture of performance? Yeah. I mean, agreed. I think, you know, quota is definitely a lagging indicator. I think other signals and what I've seen in sales leaders leverage are, you know, things around, you know, pipeline quality and coverage. I think looking at, you know, not just the size of the pipeline, but the quality of the pipeline at different stages and and having some element of a, you know, quality score, you know, to evaluate, you know, where you've got opportunity and at what stages within, you know, the deal cycle. You know, I see a lot of organizations, you know, leveraging things on weighted pipeline or conversion rates of on pipeline, you know, and and different kind of quota coverage ratios. I think this goes back to your point, Curtis, around, you know, opportunity against, you know, the the quota that's being set or even average deal size. Some other, you know, signals are around, you know, ramp productivity or rep ramp productivity. You know, how quickly does it take a a sales rep to to ramp into their compensation plan to be fully, you know, productive in the marketplace? I think that kinda helps signal if there's process gaps in your enablement of your sellers, which obviously leads to revenue loss, and potential repetition if they feel like they have an inability to meet their target. And I I think the last one I'd I'd highlight and and is becoming increasingly more important is just profitability and, you know, kind of deal quality itself. So maybe hitting your targets, but you're hitting your targets of low margin deals, and I don't think that's a long term, you know, path to growth. That's good. Let me let me turn it to James. James, you wanna tell us a little bit more about how do you how do you make sure your performance metrics are helping your teams rather than masking deeper issues? What are what are the kinds of things that you're looking at? Yeah. I mean, I think on the just to echo Zach, on the quota side and, hopefully, this isn't contrarian. I feel like looking at quota attainment as a KPI, it doesn't even make its way into our finance pack or board pack or anything else like that because I feel like, you know, you have autonomy to set the quota to whatever you want. You could set artificially low quota and then you could have a 100% attainments, but you could miss the number by a country mile. Like Yep. I don't think it really tells you anything aside from how well you set the quota. So, you know, I think what we focus significantly more on in terms of the actual health of the business is you look at, you know, again, ASP, month over month, sequentially, year over year. You look at, you know, sales cycles, you look at pipeline, you look at all of the the real metrics that matter to say the business is getting better or it isn't. I think quota is a is really just like a quota's a benchmark really for the salespeople. And I think it's an incredibly I guess, don't get me wrong, it's an incredibly important thing because it is the benchmark that the sales people hold themselves to. But from a company level, you know, I I 2023, you change quotas halfway through because, you know, the market landscape shifts so dramatically, it doesn't mean that the company just did way better in the back half. You just lowered the target so you didn't have a complete mass exodus of people, you know, running a quotas that were set to 2021. Yep. In the middle of 2023 and, you know, this tech route. And so, you know, I think from a a quota setting standpoint, it's incredibly important. And I think, you know, to Zach's point, there's a ton of data. And I think the transparency around how you set that quota from an equitability standpoint, you know, going down memory lane. I remember back to when I was not to date myself, but, you know, starting when you had sales territories, you actually went out into the field into your territory. I remember everybody in the DC office was like, oh, if only I was in New York City. Be so much easier if I had New York City. And then the New York City guys are like, oh, I'm trying to get into these buildings that have airport security just to get into the building. If only I was in Atlanta, they just let people walk right in the front door. You're always gonna have that, you know, somebody's got it easier. You know, and even from a from a vertical standpoint, you know, you can go back and you can look quarter over quarter. You can look at manufacturing. You can look at transportation logistics. You can look at software. And if you're setting quotas for your reps that are in the software vertical, and you're in the middle of 2023, and you see what's happening to the software vertical in that period of time, you can basically set quotas to that. And so I think it's a combination of, you know, basically first and third party data to say, what are the firmographic attributes that would say that, you know, and this is not a shameless ZoomInfo plug, by the way. But what are those firmographic attributes that would say, you know, here's my total addressable market, here's the in market, here's the sales addressable market, here's the propensity to grow, here's the signal density, here's the title density, you know, we get to that level of granularity with our reps. Yep. Basically, so okay, you've got a territory of 40 accounts. These 20 are showing signs from a utilization again, first party utilization health score metrics. We needed to get to, like, a 90% renewal rate on these. And then these 15, you've got high sales FTEs, you've got a chief data officer, you've, you know, all of these different signals that are important to us that any org can train to what's important to them. And you can say, these are your 15 accounts that we want a 130, 140% of retention on, blend it against these. And so we get to that level of granularity. Zach made the comment earlier on the kinda SWAT team. We've got a great strategy and analytics team. The amount of data that we use to inform our quotas, especially in the account management side where it's probably the hardest. So that, like, are we always gonna get it right that those 15 are definitely gonna grow? Maybe, maybe not, but I guarantee 13 of them should have. And then you make up for it in that one that we said is in poor health. Well, they just pick up a new CRO, new CFO, and they go all in on ZoomInfo. So again, I think there's always gonna be a perceived lack of equitability. Yep. You know, we there was an account last year, I can't name the name, but it basically spent 30 k with us for six years. New rep gets on it. Now it's a $9,000,000 customer. And everyone's like, if only I had that one. It's like, well, a bunch of people did. And they just didn't do a great job with it. And so I think it's balancing the noise of the traditional salespeople are super competitive. Somebody's always got it easier. But also the the reality of not all territories are created the same. So what level of transparency and what kind of movable targets do we have to say this is your quota based on these inputs? And, you know, again, it is never an exact science, but I think to your point with the amount of data that's available, it can be a lot more exact than it used to be. Well, and to and to your point, the the idea that we'll we'll never solve for fairness exclusively. There will always be somebody that's just in in our nature to to to hedge, to justify, or whatever. But to me, what I hear in this is the sense of empowerment. If I can use more data as a as an organization, as a support organization, as an operations organization to inform the strategy that we're we're making, the quotas that we set, the the way that we inform how and where reps should should engage, like, that's really smart. That should feel empowering. But when that's communicated well to a rep and they feel like, wow, look at all the thought that went into this. Look at all the ammunition that I have at my fingertips. Look at look at how I can be more confident in where I focus here versus there, and that's where the potential should be and that's where the growth should happen. And and when you can prioritize your daily work and feel like I'm I have some sense of control over where I'm gonna see the outcomes, that that feels incredibly empowering to me. And so to me, that's the kind of area where data can inform but also help us establish better KPIs about where we are able to move the needle and where we should focus and priority prioritize our time, which in turn is going to affect quota targets. It's gonna it's gonna affect our revenue affect our revenue targets and all those things downstream, but it gives us more empowerment in the the interim. So gosh. This is so good. I love love chatting through all these things and appreciate your your guys' perspectives. But with that, we're we're getting closer to the end of our conversation. I wanna pause for just a moment and and get to a few of the questions that we've been hearing in the chat. We've gotten behind the scenes. So we we know these are real challenges that revenue leaders, rev ops leaders, enablement leaders, you're all wrestling this. So I wanna hear, Jillian, your take on a few things that we've heard. The first one I see here, James, I'll I'll throw this to you. A lot of teams are struggling with territory and quota fairness. I know you you just talked a little bit about this. But how do you balance what the business needs with what feels fair to the field? Yeah. It's a great question. I mean, I I remember the old days where you would have a board target, a finance target, a street target, then you had basically the roll up of all the reps and there was like a huge amount of buffer in between those. I've been at orgs that basically said we wanna grow 22%, and so go build quotas that get us to 22%. You know, I think, ultimately, yes. Like, there are business needs. There's actually public companies. You have guidance. You have consensus. You have next year's consensus. Like, you've gotta have, an eye on that. And so it's not the most important thing, but it's a very important thing. But I think taking into account a lot of what we just talked about. Yep. You've got the sort of sequential. We've got ASPs moving up in these particular verticals, so let's go place our bet there. I think the biggest mistake that people make is they just assign that quota, and then basically check-in in a quarter to see how it's going. I think it's where you're going to place bets or, you know, like for us in particular, like, we've been our SMB business got really, really big, and now we're trying to move more up market. We've got it to now 72% of our business is up market, 28% is down market. Inevitably, there's gonna be a resource shift. And I think back to our earlier conversation, the worst thing you could do is just say, alright, go up market. We'll hire a couple of big wigs from Salesforce, and now we're up market because we hired a bunch of really expensive people. It is, like, what bets are we gonna place if we know that we've gotta get to five, eight, 10% growth in 2026? If we know that that's what we have to go do, fine. You better start planning ahead of time to say, alright. These are where we're gonna place our bets based on this data, this data, this data, and then we're gonna resource accordingly. And if we're gonna pull certain things out from a quota standpoint of call it our SMB, then we have to go take some of those resources, find a way to do it more efficiently so that we can go. Because I I think the worst thing you do is show up to the head of enterprise and say, enterprise needs to be big. You've got the biggest quota, and your life has not changed since last week. Yep. And so it's it's balancing where the company needs to be, where you're gonna make your bets. Having those bets be informed on more than just an anecdotal feeling and a lot of data supporting it, product market fit, what the customers are telling you, where you're seeing the most success, where you've got those trend lines in your favor, from a renewal rate, from a growth, from an upsell, cross sell, etcetera, and then investing in that area across the entire go to market machine. You know, I think that's that's about as close as you can get. And to the fairness point, I think we touched on that, to some degree. And I think making sure that they know exactly why it was set. And I think from a recognition standpoint, you know, if you go and say your quota or your target's gonna be 10% higher than it was just a quarter ago, here are the resources you're getting, here's the investment that you're getting, but you're also now officially the most important person in the company. So if you need more, you should be loud about it. And I think most people will rise to that occasion if they know that, a, I'm being invested in, b, this is now like, we used to be this SMB machine, that was the crown jewel. Now we're gonna go be an enterprise machine. This is an unbelievable opportunity for me to build my career back to the incentives and the motivations. You know, I think all of those things kick into it because not it's not always gonna be fair. And I think every leader, when they first get their first look at quota, they're gonna say, Curtis, too high. And I think that's just a training that sales leaders go through. No one's ever Yep. Say thank you. This is a great quota because then it's gonna go up 10%. And so I think it's balancing that. But if it is, in fact, a bet, this is the bet. These are the investments. These are the resources. And by the way, if you hit this thing, you will be crowned king or queen. Yep. Kinda loop all of those things in together while you're building out, you know, whatever it may be. But just to echo the final point, getting those based on the data, first party, second party, third party data to make sure that you're making the right bets and investing in the right areas is a thing that's oftentimes forgotten. You get the interlock at the board level. They say, we think we should be here. Let's go do it. If it's not informed, you can end up with a really bad situation. Awesome. Yeah. And all all those areas are connected. The comp, the strategy, the design, the execution, those piece that are there's high highly interrelated. So that that's really important. Zach, someone asked about improving alignment between sales and rev ops without a full org overhaul. You talked about the concept of center of excellence earlier and kind of the the spot team in that way. What's what's a small move that can unlock better collaboration as teams think about evolving alignment inside their organization? Yeah. I mean, I think there's one that's a bit more tactical. I mean, I I've seen many organizations that let's say you do have the data, first party, second party, third party, but then that data proliferates into different types of reporting, you know, capabilities, different sort of operational reports between rev ops and sales and finance and so forth. And everyone's looking at a different version of the same dataset. So I think one just very tactical, doesn't require a bunch of over overhaul of the organization, is centralizing to a single source of truth, and it's in a single source of operational reports, to drive decisions on. I think I think that is the, like, key that I've seen where organizations are working as a well oiled machine, and it drives better alignment because, you know, you have an aspect that's driving a a KPI that you find as critical to measure your business being evaluated by a revenue operations leader that's also being looked at, and it's the same number that's being reviewed by your sales leaders. That's the same numbers that are being, you know, passed on to finance and so on. You know, it supports better collaboration. It helps better drive better decision making and keep alignment. That's really good. Well, I wish I wish we had more time to get into all these great questions, but, keep them coming. We will, respond to more and follow-up from the session, but, appreciate all that have have contributed. But, wanna close now with with one last thought from our our guests today to bring it all together. We've covered a lot, outdated KPIs, the evolution of incentives, misalignment. The reality is no team's gonna solve all these things at once. So, to make it practical, I wanna hear from both of you. If somebody wanna take, one step based on what we've talked about today, Where would you help them prioritize? Where would you have them begin? Zach, why don't you start us off here your your thirty to the forty five second thoughts on, where folks might begin in taking advice for getting started? Yeah. I mean, I I think you gotta start small. I think you you don't need to look at, you know, driving a significant overhaul, everything at once. Right? I think you maybe start with a metric, like, start with the process, maybe even start with just establishing the center of excellence that we talked about. If you don't have a one already in place. Or if you do have one in place, look at, you know, evaluating your cadence on how you're managing and evaluating, you know, the measurement of the business over time. I think you and then from there, you you just continue to build on that. You know, you wanna start with small intentional steps in the area that you focus or pick. Maybe it's one metric. Maybe you wanna introduce kind of more of the post sale metrics into your comp design. Maybe you want to introduce elements of, like, we talked about around more career development, and leadership opportunities, you know, and laid that foundation for bigger transformation later that, you know, to help drive the performance of your business. Great. James, same question to you. What what advice would you give to to prioritize first? Yeah. I think, doubling down on Zach's, the centralizing the data, you know, if you think of a CMO, a CRO, rev ops, like, everybody has conflicting priorities. I always joke, like, what are you gonna get fired for? If that data is, you know, marketing's looking at data this way and then CRO's looking at data this way, whatever it may be, people are gonna have conflicting priorities and they're ultimately gonna try to save their skin or get a gold star. And so I think having that single source of truth with a team that is unbiased to basically be that overarching. And so that's that would be number one. And then a ten second number two for I would say rev ops, sales leadership. The closer you can get to the front lines in all of these, hearing what the customers are saying, I think having that blend, sometimes people go too close to the front lines and they forget about all the data and all the analytics. And then sometimes people spend so much time in the data analytics, they forget about the front lines. And I think having that centralized data source of truth to have that team that is doing that, and then being on the front lines. If you're in rev ops, go spend a day with an SDR, spend a day with an AE, see what they're doing, see what they're saying, see what they're talking about. I think blending those two things together, excellence in data, excellence in that source of truth, what's really happening, and then being close to the front lines, I I think that's probably what I I couldn't recommend that more. Oh, what a great place to to end with both of those recommendations. Super smart, super practical, and brings it into, a light that we can all take action on. So thank you, to you both, to Zach and to James. Really, really great discussion, and and to all you all as well, our participants today. We invite you to connect with us on LinkedIn, to continue the conversation by reaching out to us directly, by bringing some of this data into your own organizations, maybe to start to help to influence change yourselves. And we certainly invite you to download the 2025 market spotlight where you can go much deeper on all the topics and advice on solutions that we talked about today. You can scan the QR code on the screen here. You can head to our website. We'll make sure that you get a copy. But we hope you took something away that's actionable, that's practical, that's insightful from our time together. We really look forward to chatting more. Again, big thanks to Zach and to James for joining. Thanks to the RevOps Alliance for hosting us and bringing this all together. Have a great day.