How to Prioritize and Improve your Presales KPIs
Presaler Leader: “How do I improve all my presales KPIs?”
Me: “When you assemble furniture… how do you tighten all the bolts?”
Presales Leader: “I do each one little by little to avoid imbalances.”
Me: “Exactly.”
The world of presales KPIs continues to grow and evolve. There are:
Revenue Achievement KPIs: technical win rate, deal win rate, revenue per sales engineer.
Efficiency KPIs: evaluation duration, utilization rate, activity counts, activity times, post-sales transition time, ROI per sales engineer.
Revenue Contribution KPIs: opportunity/deal time, attach rate, support rate.
Cross-Functional Contribution KPIs: product gap identification, marketing activity time, post-sales preparedness.
The KPI list keeps getting longer.
It gets harder to prioritize them.
Harder to balance efforts to optimize them.
CHALLENGE # 1: How do we PRIORITIZE presales KPIs?
Part 1: Your corporate objectives dictate your presales KPIs.
If your CEO talks about accelerating revenue growth… then Revenue Achievement KPIs move to the top of your list.
If your CFO says headcount budgets are frozen… then Efficiency KPIs move up the list.
Part 2: Presales leaders need to think like business leaders… and that means PROFITABILITY.
Think about the ‘profitability’ of your presales team.
PROFITABILITY has two drivers: REVENUE and COST.
You make revenue go up by being EFFECTIVE technical sellers, so prioritize effectiveness KPIs.
You do not want costs to go do down, because you do not want layoffs, so your goal is to maintain costs.
You maintain costs (even within a growing business) by being EFFICIENT technical sellers, so prioritize efficiency KPIs.
CHALLENGE # 2: How do we BALANCE our efforts to maximize all our KPIs?
Let’s go back to assembling furniture.
If you have 10 bolts to tighten and you fully tighten each bolt one at a time before touching the next one…
Either everything is so skewed that you can’t fit the last bolts into the holes…
Or your furniture is warped, unbalanced, and on the verge of breaking due to stress.
What do the instructions say?
Lightly tighten each bolt until all of them are secure. Then slowly tighten them again. And again, until all the bolts are fully tightened.
Your furniture looks like the picture and won't fall over or fall apart!
The 10 bolts… are your KPIs.
Don’t end up warped, unbalanced, and stressed!
Get all your KPIs to a basic level of performance. Then slowly optimize each one a little bit. Then slowly optimize them a little bit more.
Eventually you've maximized all your KPIs, and your presales performance is balanced and exceptional.
Need help prioritizing KPIs for your company? Talk to one of our presales experts about about how Homerun can help. Click here to get started!
