How do you recommend socializing KPIs (before the work starts and when it's done)?

I think it's good to try and tell stories with data. What is the KPI actually telling us about our business? Develop a recurring insights cadence within your company. Think of it like a quarterly newsetter from Revenue Ops describing how the teams just performed. Spend some time to make it look good with the data visualzed in charts and the details provided in the appendix. After you produce it a few times, you'll start to get traction and the KPIs will become a part of your leadership team's vocabulary.

I see 4 key steps as part of an effective KPI-setting process:

1. Align on the right KPIs. Employees need to understand why certain metric matters. Connecting any KPI to key business outcomes is crucial.
2. Socialize the method and numbers. Some KPIs are complex to be calculated and can be perceived as a black box. The more your employees understand how KPIs are calculated and how their efforts influence KPIs, the more effective this process will be. Also, explaining how targets are set and the philosophy behind them is key.
3. Track and publish KPIs. Make KPIs widely available through dashboards, newsletters, team meetings and 1:1s. Discuss trends and insights.
4. Use KPIs to make your business better. Take learnings from KPIs and propose changes to the business based on them. Hold individuals and teams accountable for underperformance. Celebrate overperformance.

I love this question because it gets beyond the nerdy numbers part of our job and gets to arguably the more difficult part--LEADERSHIP! Sales Strategist are trusted business partners to our sales leaders. We have a duty to advise them on their business, even if that means telling them they are missing the mark. But how do you tell them they are "missing the mark" if you have no idea what the mark even is! Depending on the size of your company, many of the KPIs will likely come from your higher echelon, while smaller companies are more likely to have autonomy over their targets. No matter who is setting the targets, you AND your sales leader need to be on the same page BEFORE you hold anyone accountable, otherwise you are moving the goal post on them and that can be frustrating for the sales leaders and breakdown trust. I believe in open and honest communication. If I am holding a salesperson to a standard, that standard will be openly advertised on multiple platforms (i.e. in person meetings, slack, email) and the source of our tracking (dashboard, report, google sheet) will also be shared so how they are tracking against the KPI is never a surprise.