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For Modern Go-To-Market revenue teams - more isn’t always better. The most sophisticated teams today utilize a myriad of KPI signals to track performance and drive outcomes.
When it comes to measuring performance, most revenue leaders gravitate toward metrics with a higher number (Deals Won, Pipeline Dollars, Opportunities Created this Week).
But - so much nuance about the effectiveness of our sales, support, and sales development reps is actually communicated by metrics where the lower the score, the better the performance!
A few quick examples: Time in Opportunity Stage, Support Ticket Response Time, Open Requests by Account.
Which leads me to my announcement:
Today, I’m proud to announce Ambition is launching a major improvement to our robust Metric Scoring engine - what we lovingly have been calling Lower-Is-Better.
The enhancement of our Scorecard and reporting insights with Lower-Is-Better metrics has been completely customer driven, led by revenue leaders at some of the most innovative, effective GTM teams in the world.
I love sharing the credit between our team and the customers we’ve partnered with to deliver Lower-Is- Better Scorecards.
By now I’m guessing you’re asking, this has to be simple, right?
The answer is not really!
Accurately measuring, forecasting, and communicating performance is critical for sales and service leaders who are leading and developing their teams. Getting the reporting insights right means reps have a higher likelihood of success!
The good news is now you can manage, motivate, and coach your people with Lower-Is-Better metrics in Ambition.
In my time both leading product at SalesLoft and already over the past few months leading product at Ambition, I’ve connected with so many sales and support leaders asking the same question - how do I use all this sales activity and CRM data to drive outcomes?
You can leave all the hard math, the data integration, and the artificial intelligence to us!
Ambition’s sales management platform is the ideal system of record for performance insights and turning those insights into coaching actions.
Ambition Scorecards will now support the concept of Lower-Is-Better natively in our product UI and our analytics engine. We believe it's critical to allow managers and enablement leaders to generate insights and deliver both recognition and accountability with the metrics that matter most - whether those metrics are when more-is-better, or when lower-is-better.
So what is an example of Lower is Better)?
I’m not a sales leader, but I’ve certainly spent a lot of time with them.
Here is a question I’ve heard a lot:
“How do I focus my team on the velocity we’re closing deals?”
A common field we see on Opportunities in Salesforce is “Days to Close”? (i.e. how many days did it take to “win” this opportunity)
It doesn’t take an expert to understand that in this case, fewer days is better than more days. Or said differently, the faster deals close, the better.
Another example and area we get really excited about serving our customers more deeply: Support.
Post-Covid as many of our customers Support people and Customer Success teams have gone fully remote - we hear more challenges around managing, coaching, and keeping these folks on track and motivated.
Every Support team I’ve ever worked with tracks Tickets created, and on they keep track of “Time to Resolution” per Ticket.
Once again - less is more here, right? No one wants to incentivize their support team to keep tickets open longer? We want them closed and we want our customers happy!
Alright, one more example: a lot of our customers have segmented teams in their Go-To-Market org (including demand generation/ sales development who pass qualified leads to the sales team).
An important to track the effectiveness of an SDR team is how many of their Meetings Set convert to Opportunities or end up converting to Won Deals. (we all want that!)
We see many Demand Gen leaders spend a lot of time running manual math to figure out the “Disqualification Rate” of the Meetings Set on an individual SDR basis.
Makes sense, right? If you have a rep who has a high rate of disqualifications, that is a huge coaching opportunity!
The Big Vision:
We believe these qualitative insights - powering accountability on Ambition Scorecards and being amplified from our performance platform - will lead to a better customer experience and more effective GTM team.
Ambition is the industry leader in sales coaching and gamification for enterprise sales teams today.
Our founders say it every week, we believe there is even more value to create for our customers, revenue leaders, and individual contributors.
Companies are facing a series new, evolving challenges: managing a distributed workforce, creating employee experience, and maximizing employee performance with feedback and accountability.
We are investing in and rapidly innovating our one-of-a-kind Sales Management Platform, to deliver an ecosystem of encouragement, performance accountability, and powerful insights system tied to employee Coaching.
Summary:
Lower-Is-Better metrics deliver more robust performance scoring and intelligence for Sales and Support leaders to utilize. Managers are tasked with delivering results to the business - and with Lower-Is-Better metrics in Ambition - Go-To-Market teams have clearer visibility and operational insights to Coach and Recognize their people.
I’m so proud of the team and thrilled to share our Lower-Is-Better news.
First of all, to our existing customers who’ve been eagerly waiting to leverage Ambition Scorecards and Coaching for Support and CSM teams - thank you for working with our team to continue expanding Ambition’s impact in your orgs.
And to all the Revenue and GTM leaders who are ready to explore how to leverage the future of performance management to maximize your people, wherever they’re working from right now.
Butler
