Tracking outbound funnel performance [TEMPLATE]

Unleashing the power of simple metrics as you scale your XDR team

DEAR STAGE 2: We went from 1 to 6 BDRs over the last 2 months and I am trying to figure out the best way to track performance and ensure we’re working on the right things. We use HubSpot and I’ve set up some basic dashboards, but I’m just not confident in what I should be sharing with our senior leadership. ~BDR MANAGERS EVERYWHERE

DEAR BDR MANAGERS EVERYWHERE: The number one mistake I see when companies roll out new dashboards and KPIs is getting lost in the weeds. If you measure everything, you end up with a lot of noise and it’s very difficult to determine what is important in decision making. 

Whether you have 1 BDR or 100 BDRs, the challenge is the same — you are constantly evaluating 1) performance of individuals to figure out where to coach (or make a change) and 2) performance of the team to determine if you are working on the highest impact segments and with the most effective strategies. 

I recommend teams take the time to pull out of the CRM and detailed dashboards. Instead, define a very simple funnel that you can look at period over period AND in relation to the goals you laid out. We’ve created a template for you to get started here — these are just examples and you might find your business requires different details such as # of dials, # of connects, average deal size, etc…. While simplistic, this zoomed out view often helps crystalize your view of the team:

I’m going to keep this short this week…

Evaluating Individual Performance

This is a call back to one of my favorite books on hiring, Who, that lays out a simple and effective way to interview sales candidates. The same framework can be applied to analyzing TOFU data. Ultimately you are looking at 3 things for each individual - peers, past and plan.

1. Peers: How is this individual performing relative to his/her peers in the role?

2. Past: How is this individual performing over time? What is the trendline?

3. Plan: How is this individual performing relative to the goal/quota?

It’s often hard to get all 3, if any, of these things in a dashboard. By creating this summary view you can quickly evaluate an individual on all 3 vectors and decide where to dig in. You will also have the ability to diagnose what is changing over time. For example, if someone is working the same number of contacts but conversion to meeting is dropping off, you would want to dig into account quality and contact info accuracy. Whereas if the connect rate is consistent, but the conversion to meeting is improving, you might want to listen to those calls to determine what others on the team can learn from the individual’s phone skills. 

Look for both the patterns and changes over time to help coach each member of your team. 

Evaluating your segments

Depending on how your team is organized, you might want to slice this same data set a different way. Rather than just looking at individual performance, cut it by segment. Examples include:

• # of employees

• Geography

• Industry

• Inbound v. outbound

• Campaigns

• Data sources

This is incredibly important for startups who are still refining their ICP. You can mask a lot of great learnings by only looking at the totals. An aggregate view is great for the board, but as you aim to optimize your team’s performance you need to look for arbitrage opportunities. If there is a clear segment that is outperforming, you can make the argument to align more resources there. 

It can feel like a lot of work to pull this data together the first time, but I find that once you have the reports set up, it’s generally a quick analysis — in fact, a few pivot tables can get you to the output pretty quickly. You can define with your broader leadership team who needs to see this and on what interviews, but I would recommend doing it at least monthly (and weekly for high volume/transactional businesses) to ensure you are seeing the trends develop. 

Until next week!