Revenue is the scoreboard

I'm sure that some of the teams that I've managed will object to this statement - because, often what I've asked about, what I've coached on: has been the actions that the teams take to achieve the desired results - but in the end: It is the revenue that we deliver that we are all measured on.

Sales is almost unique across the enterprise where the actual results that we deliver can be measured, it makes this career choice at once the most rewarding and one of the most challenging that you can choose to take on. The interesting thing is: It's not just the sales team that is responsible for the sales results - It really is the whole company that has influence:

• Product Management / Ownership has to understand the market needs well enough to define products that have a value proposition in the market and understand it well enough to communicate this proposition and ideal customer profile to the sales team.
• Product Engineering has to design a product that actually hits these definitions.
• Production / Operations has to be able to produce the products that the Engineering team has designed and deliver the quality that the market expects.
• The Sales Ops/Customer experience teams have to make your company easy to do business with so that the purchase experience doesn't turn off customers and potential customers.
• Marketing has to be able to identify the correct target customers and deliver the message and value proposition in a way that delivers sufficient pipeline for the company to meet their goals
• ... and the market has to offer all of this sufficient opportunity.

So, yes I recognize that Sales is really the entire company's responsibility - In many ways it's the reason the company and all of the other functions exist: After all what is the use of Developing, producing, and supporting a product that isn't purchased?

Bottom line - while metrics and KPI's can be useful to tell us how things are progressing, eventually the revenue must come in! So, by all means, track the call rates, the deal stages, the close rates, and every other sales metric that you think is important - but Never lose sight of the one that really matters: Is our revenue growing?