The Metrics That Matter with Global Tech Leaders

Ross Lauder and John Quigley opened our conversation on the Global Tech Leaders' Podcast by asking how I ended up running revenue, and the honest answer is that I never planned to. I went to college thinking I'd become an attorney, interned in the Clinton White House scheduling office, and realized law wasn't my calling. A master's degree studying how groups form online led to a sales job as employee number 26 at Vignette, which went on to one of the largest tech IPOs of its time. I've been chasing that kind of growth story ever since, at OpenText, LexisNexis, and, when we recorded this, as CRO of Motus.

We spent time on how buying has changed. When I started selling in the late '90s, you walked in with a blank sheet of paper and asked about needs. Today buyers show up informed, and on a 30-minute Zoom call you have to deliver value right away or you won't get a second meeting. Our data at said it took about 17 touches to move someone from not knowing us to taking a sales call, which is why I run sales and marketing as one "smarketing" organization instead of arguing over whose lead it was. Clear stages and clear handoffs, from market intelligence to BDRs to sellers, sales engineers, and account management, are what let you pay everyone fairly for their part of the cycle.

The heart of the episode was the metrics that matter. First, the annual plan has to start from past performance: what the people actually in the seats closed last year, at what deal size and conversion rate, not a growth number a board wants. Second, attrition and tenure, because a plan that assumes zero turnover is fiction, especially in a year when some industries were seeing 45 to 50 percent. Third, giving every seller a visible path to quota, so a $1.2 million number becomes a set of deals they can picture. Fourth, the activity funnel behind each closed deal: three opportunities, five discovery meetings, and the touches that create them. Fifth, return on spend, tracking marketing dollars all the way to closed business rather than stopping at pipeline. We also talked about how Clari's forecasting helped me call the quarter within $100,000 by its second week.

When they asked about my superpower, I told them it's building repeatable processes that anyone can plug into and succeed with. Someone who ran sales at IBM once pointed out that there aren't 3,000 A players in Chicago, yet those seats still have to be filled. A clear process, with metrics to inspect it, is how the B and C players win too.