It’s clear by now that revenue operations plays a critical role in organizational success. The statistics don’t lie… adding a RevOps function that aligns people, processes and technology across sales and marketing can result in 36% more revenue growth and up to 28% more profitability.
But as RevOps departments have become more robust year over year, they’ve struggled with one critical thing: developing and tracking their own KPIs.
You see, while RevOps supports departments that already have clearly defined KPIs– sales, marketing and customer service– RevOps has never really had any of their own metrics. And why would they? Their primary role is to support the goals and metrics of your GTM counterparts.
The problem with this logic comes down to one question: How do you know if your RevOps team is being as effective as it can be if you’re not measuring their specific efforts? The answer? You don’t.
In 2023, it’s time to level up your RevOps teams by implementing measurable metrics to track performance. Below, we’re covering the top KPIs Ops leaders should take into account.
What are RevOps KPIs and Why Do They Matter?
It’s funny… When you think about how to measure the success of your RevOps team, you may automatically think the only important metric is revenue. But you’d be wrong.
Sure – the metric “revenue” should be your team’s north star. But RevOps as a department is so much more than just determining where revenue comes from. They are responsible for the strategy development, tools enablement, and insights for your entire GTM team. This means that on any given day, your RevOps team might be focused on:
- Creating fields or modifying page layouts in your CRM
- Managing flows and other automations that simplify GTM processes
- Generating and analyzing reports for executive insights
- Managing support ticket resolution
- Playing couples therapist for sales and marketing
Each of these items could directly impact your overarching metric, revenue, if not managed with efficiency. This is where Revenue operations KPIs are critical. They measure the success of the numerous line items encompassing your team’s sprints.
4 Key KPIs RevOps Leaders Will Be Measured On In 2023
The types of KPIs you may want to measure will vary depending on your organization and the size of your RevOps team. But without a doubt, there are four KPIs that most organizations use to measure RevOps performance: Tickets resolved, AAR, projects completed and system uptime. Below, we’re telling you exactly how to measure for these KPIs, plus the good, bad and everything you need to know about each:
1. Tickets resolved
In an internal survey Sonar conducted last year, we found that on average, Ops teams handle 87 issues per year. And on average, each issue took about 6 hours to resolve.
Clearly, your team needs a structure to prioritize, process and complete this influx of additional support from internal teams. And that structure needs to have a “ticket is resolved” KPI for leadership to measure its success.
Here’s how to measure this metric:
Tickets resolved = (how many support tickets RevOps marked resolved) / (total number of tickets submitted from internal teams and customers)
Everything you need to know about measuring for tickets resolved:
→ The good: Measuring ticket resolution incentivizes internal support, resolving issues that could be blocking GTM team efficiency and bottleneck for sales. In turn, this speeds up resolution and enables your team to seamlessly do their jobs (which is why you need these Ops folks in the first place).
→ The bad: If the team is creating good processes and architecture up front, there will likely be fewer tickets. Measuring based on ticket resolution could be rewarding the wrong core behaviors, or sometimes – not showing the full scope of their work.
→ Things to consider: When measuring for tickets resolved, you’ll want to keep a few factors in mind that could indicate why a KPI is or isn’t met:
- The ratio of tickets between your Ops team and their internal customers.
- The process for ticket submission and resolution.
- The scope of tickets, as one ticket might be 20 hours of work but result in HUGE improvements to the selling process.
- Finding a means to track a sub-KPI “time to resolution” to ensure your RevOps teams are acting with urgency to get GTM teams back up and running.
2. Annual recurring revenue (ARR)
Because talking money is what RevOps does best… measuring ARR helps your organization predict its recurring revenue for the year. ARR is especially important for revenue operations leaders to measure because it provides a clear and predictable picture of your company’s future revenue streams.
Here’s how to measure this metric:
ARR = (Sum of subscription revenue for the year + recurring revenue from add-ons and upgrades)
Everything you need to know about measuring for ARR
→ The good: This metric is especially important so you can:
- Forecast future revenue
- Evaluate the growth of your company’s customer base over time.
- Understand the health of your business
- Track progress towards achieving revenue targets
- Make strategic decisions about resource allocation and investment
→ The bad: While your Ops team can certainly impact sales by creating and optimizing processes for efficiencies, they aren’t your closers, therefore most of this KPI is more strongly tied to sales.Ultimately, tying their metrics solely to ARR leaves too many variables outside of their control.
→ Things to consider: ARR definitions can vary from organization to organization. It’s important that your teams have the proper tools in place that keep them aligned on metadata definitions so that Salesforce reports can be pulled correctly and stakeholders are getting valid information.
2. Projects completed
Many of the most sophisticated Ops teams look to project completion as a way to measure Ops performance.
Teams that have a large backlog of projects and are able to accurately forecast the time, resources required and anticipated output of each of their tasks.
You will find that these teams are very regimented in their approach to taking on work, typically working in sprints to complete projects based on these requirements.
Here’s how to calculate it:
Projects completed = (Number of projects meeting the completion criteria) / (Total number of projects started)
Everything you need to know about measuring for projects completed
→ The good: Tracking the number of projects completed can help leadership:
- Understand RevOps capacity to take on new work
- Identify any bottlenecks that may be limiting its ability to generate revenue
- Measure the performance of individual employees or teams and make decisions about resource allocation
- Gain insight into the effectiveness of your GTM teams, as it can indicate the success of efforts to generate new business
→ The bad: Planned projects will always take priority. If your business leaders tend to pile on ad hoc requests and are regularly looking for immediate response, measuring on project completion may not be the right KPI for your team. Especially for smaller or less structured teams, too many distractions from leadership can completely derail success.
→ Things to consider: Back to support tickets, there is likely a balance between resolved and new projects completed. By only measuring based on project completion, support ticket resolution could get deprioritized
4. System uptime
Salesforce is the heartbeat of your organization… and if it’s down frequently, you’re going to have a snowball effect of other issues. Take our word for it… this is the exact issue that led to the development of Sonar. That’s why we can confidently say measuring your Salesforce systems uptime is crucial. For example, downtime can result in issues like:
- Customer-facing issues: Breaks can cause bottlenecks for sales and customer service activities
- Tracking issues: Downtime can hinder the entire RevOps process, making it hard for sales to access customer data, update lead opportunities, and track progress against sales targets
- Compliance issues: If you’re in a highly-regulated industry (like healthcare or financial services) a certain level of uptime must be met. And failure of those requirements can lead to some pretty hefty fines or penalties.
- Revenue issues: Lastly, disruptions that bottleneck sales and customer service activities can result in lost revenue and customer dissatisfaction.
Here’s how to measure it:
Systems uptime = (Total uptime in minutes – Downtime in minutes) / (Total uptime in minutes)
Everything you need to know about measuring for systems uptime
→ The good: Salesforce system uptime is a crucial metric, as it can help identify potential issues, improve customer satisfaction, and maintain compliance with regulatory requirements. It also ensures that the sales teams can access customer data, update lead and opportunity information, and track progress against sales targets.
→ The bad: A growing number of businesses are seeing this metric tied more to their business systems leaders and less to the RevOps teams. If your organization rarely (if ever) experiences downtime, this may be too much of a vanity metric and not something that RevOps is constantly seeking to improve upon.
→ Things to consider: Determine who should be measured on this metric based on the complexity of your integrated tech stack and the internal ownership structure of those systems.
Conclusion: Have the Right Tools to Track RevOps KPIs
RevOps KPIs are the next evolution of reporting for your leadership team to measure. Now that your department is becoming more robust, measuring its efficiency and performance will play a big role in finding future operational efficiencies.
The easiest way to track your RevOps teams KPIs is by integrating the right tools into Salesforce to monitor their changes, breaks, project completions, and more.
Sonar makes tracking RevOps KPIs simple:
- See each change made to your org on a monthly basis– which will directly tie into your KPIs.
- Help your teams know which fields are critical to uptime, reducing the risk of a serious break occurring.
- See possible errors in your Salesforce validation rules, so silent breakages never impact data integrity.
And more. Give it a test run and see the magic for yourself. Start your free trial of Sonar here.