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Customer Acquisition KPIs for Growth and How to Measure them Effectively

Posted on Jun 21, 2020 | 22 min

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About the speaker

Lior Degani is the VP of Business & Sales Operations at SimilarWeb.

Lior is a budding entrepreneur that truly understands the end-to-end revenue cycle, and has applied his knowledge at SimilarWeb for the past 5+ years. SimilarWeb’s mission is to, “empower you with the insights you need to win your market. SimilarWeb gives you global multi-device market intelligence to understand, track and grow your digital market share.” Aside from addressing the main subject of this podcast title, Lior also goes on to reveal the ingredients necessary to deliver and internally market an end-to-end transformational project.

Optimizing Full Funnel Performance

• Lior’s sales operations team has 3 functions:
  • Growth which optimizes full-funnel performance, leveraging data and processes
  • Sales operations which manages day-to-day sales workflows, supporting the quote-to-cash process, and CRM administration
  • Go to market enablement which is all the knowledge and tools needed to succeed in the sales role, maximizing sales rep yield, and the ability to scale the organization
• Making the sales machine scalable and efficient is a primary KPI for SimilarWeb.
• Three years ago, their priority was new business sales. Getting leads faster and getting better leads, qualified leads, and building a lead routing mechanism were key.
• Then, their focus was automation and demand generation. Now, their top-of-funnel machine works very well and their salespeople are getting great leads and great meetings.
• Today, they are optimizing their inbound flow and looking into how they can make sure that they sell more and expand sales with larger deals. Land and expand and net retention are their business model.
• There’s a balance between sales velocity, selling quickly, and landing the perfect client, which may require longer discovery.

2020 Customer Acquisition Focus

• SimilarWeb’s focus in 2020 was logo position in addition to revenue and how they can make sure they land more logos per rep or per team or overall in the market.
• For brand acquisition, their revenue growth starts with data analysis based on what’s possible and working with the Go to Market team to understand what happens in the sales motion.
• Operationally they try to find a KPI, a granular KPI, or a couple of KPIs that are the drivers. They looked at the behavior of a rep’s pipeline from three angles.
• They looked at three KPIs:
  • the age of the deal – the win rates for older deals is almost non-existent. They determined when the win rate drops and now make sure the majority of their new pipeline are below a specific age threshold.
  • the volume of the sales pipeline, volume of logos how many deals reps work at a given moment. With a high-volume pipeline, win rates will drop and they won’t be able to nurture those opportunities because of time limitations.
  • pipeline health, which is more relevant for enterprise than SMBs. What are the indicators that a deal is likely to close and close in the quarter?
• The behaviors that indicate pipeline health include frequency of touchpoints such as open rate of emails and calls received, and movement between the opportunity stages, and the age of the account.
• The initial results have been positive. The project is ongoing, but the number of people hitting the logo KPIs is significantly better than last year. The win rates are exactly as they planned for. Combining time, pipeline health and velocity type of logo growth has been very impressive.

Project Insights

• The ability to launch projects, driving adoption, utilization, and actually impacting the main objective of the project is a challenge for all operations teams.
• There are three things that are critical for increasing success rates of projects:
• The first one will be, that every KPI that you are trying to optimize must have a target. And everything that’s important you measure is against targets, not necessarily against what it used to be a year ago, a quarter ago.
• The second one is to be very, very granular. For example, SMB and enterprise have different measures, look at them separately.
• Third is to work closely with the Go-to-Market team, which are your customers. They are in the field and working they know much better about the opportunities and the reps than the operations team.

Follow Lior on LinkedIn

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