Ep 1: Becoming a Data-Driven Revenue Leader

Paul Stansik: I’ve spent most of the last decade as a private equity operating partner, assessing, hiring, working alongside lots of CROs and CMOs. And the best ones I’ve worked with all share one quality, and I’ve come to think it’s the most important thing a revenue leader can have: they’re data-driven. It’s the single quality that makes you not only more effective, but more bankable.

So what do I mean by bankable? Being bankable isn’t just about getting results. Being bankable means the people who own your business can feel good about the long-term bet that they’re placing on your company’s growth. It means you can explain the results that you can create using structured, logical thinking, backed up with numbers that are easy to understand.

Basically, before you become bankable, you have to learn how to be data-driven. Now, being data-driven doesn’t mean you run your team from behind a spreadsheet, and it doesn’t require a personality transplant. Being data-driven means admitting that your five senses aren’t enough to pick up on the most important stuff inside your business.

When you’re running a team of sellers that touch hundreds or thousands of prospects and customers, there’s too much happening for you to see on your own. You have to use data to create the visibility that you need to both improve and explain your business. So let’s say you buy this data-driven thing. Where do you even start?

You start with what I call the Data Diet. A Data Diet is a short list of questions and metrics that help you focus in on the parts of your revenue motion that matter the most. The parts that, if you track them the right way, make it obvious what’s going on and where you should focus next. This is how I coach my revenue leaders to build their Data Diet.

Step one is a little counterintuitive. You need to start with questions, not with numbers. Before you pick a single metric, write down the four or five questions that you know your leadership team, your CEO, and your investors are going to ask you. Questions like, “Are we going to hit the quarterly bookings target?”

“How are we pacing versus last year? Which deals matter the most? Are we creating enough pipeline? How is the team performing?” These questions might seem really basic. You’re probably already asking and answering them every week. The problem is how they get answered now. Most teams out there are answering these questions with stories and anecdotes, not with data.

The trouble with a story is that you can’t sanity-check it. A rep with a good feeling about a deal sounds convincing in the room, but you can’t stress-test a feeling in a board meeting. So the discipline is to answer each question as honestly as you can. And honestly means simple numbers anyone can understand, a clear target that you’ve decided on up front so you know what winning looks like, and a shared definition of how each metric gets measured.

Skip that last part and you’ll spend your time arguing about whose numbers are right instead of what they’re telling you. Go get the data. For each question, pick one metric that answers it honestly and make it easy to pull. If a metric is hard to get or confusing to interpret, you will stop using it. Now, your RevOps team can be a big help here.

The key is doing the work to define the metric and creating a simple dashboard or report that makes the data easy to grab, easy to interpret, and, most importantly, easy to talk about. Make it recurring. Decide in advance when you’re going to sit down and talk about what the numbers say. I like to say data is only as good as the conversation it creates.

Now, as you’re deciding on those questions and metrics, I want you to think about the mix of metrics. The key here is picking the right combination of leading indicators, lagging indicators, and quality indicators. Basically, you want to make sure you’re sharing perspective on how you did, which is all about bookings or pipeline creation versus a target.

How you will do, which is about a clean, simple forecast and deal-by-deal breakdown. And how well you’re doing it, usually using some kind of conversion metric that tells you how well your sales process is actually working. Answer those three honestly against a target that you set in advance, and you’re going to be ahead of most revenue leaders out there.

So that’s your Data Diet. And that’s the foundation of becoming a data-driven revenue leader. In our next episode, we’ll talk about how you can feed this into a reporting rhythm that keeps you honest and surfaces the challenges and opportunities you need to focus on next to improve your revenue engine.

And later in our series, we’ll talk about the moments of truth that every revenue leader should spend extra time measuring, inspecting, and reinforcing with their team.