OKR and KPI, OK?
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You think you’re in the business of revenue.
That’s what it says on your LinkedIn profile, right? Head of Revenue Operations.
You’ve got the dashboards to prove it. A screen full of glowing numbers, twitching in real time. CAC, LTV, MQL, SQL, ARR.
It’s an alphabet soup of accountability.
Every morning, you look at those numbers and you feel… what? In control? Maybe. But if you’re being honest with yourself, deep down in the place where the anxiety about the next board meeting lives, you feel a nagging sense of disconnect.
You see the Sales VP celebrating a record quarter, blowing out the bookings number. High fives all around. But you also see the Customer Success dashboard bleeding red a quarter later, with churn spiking among those same "record" accounts. You see the CMO presenting a beautiful hockey-stick graph of "Marketing Qualified Leads," while your best Sales Development Reps are quietly telling you the leads are garbage, a waste of their time.
Every department is hitting its numbers. Every KPI is green. And yet, somehow, the whole enterprise feels like it’s running in place, burning fuel and making a lot of noise but not actually getting anywhere special.
The problem isn’t your data. You’re literally drowning in data. The problem is that your data has no soul. Your metrics are a loose collection of facts, not a story. They’re a list of stats on the back of a baseball card, not the game plan that wins the World Series. You’re tracking the speed of every pitch, but you have no idea if you’re even throwing strikes.
What if I told you there’s a different game to be played?
A way to rig the system, not with cheats or shortcuts, but with something far more radical: clarity. A system that connects the frantic, coffee-fueled work of a 24-year-old SDR to the existential dread of the CEO staring at the runway. It’s a story about turning a feudal kingdom of siloed departments into a unified, goal-obsessed machine. It’s the story of two acronyms you think you know and may even ignore because you’ve heard them so often: KPI and OKR.
The secret is the powerful way they’re meant to work together.
The Glorious, Broken Kingdom of the KPI
Let’s be clear. Key Performance Indicators aren’t the enemy. They’re essential. A KPI is a gauge on the dashboard of your car. Oil pressure. Engine temperature. Fuel level. You’d be a fool to drive without them.
These metrics tell you about the health of your machine, the business-as-usual hum of the engine.
In most companies, especially those that have found a little bit of success, these KPIs become the coin of the realm. They’re how power is measured, how bonuses are paid, how careers are made. The CRO has his sacred scroll: Monthly Recurring Revenue. The Head of Sales is judged by one thing and one thing only: quota attainment. The CMO lives and dies by the MQL count.
Let’s imagine a company. We’ll call it RevIntel. They sell a slick piece of revenue intelligence software to VC-funded technology companies. A tough, savvy market. Before they got smart, RevIntel was a classic KPI kingdom.
The sales floor was a gladiatorial arena. The only thing that mattered was closing deals. Any deals. They were incentivized to sell to anyone with a pulse and a purchase order, so they’d bring in small, scrappy startups who weren’t a great fit, offering steep discounts to get the ink dry before the quarter closed. Their core KPI, the fabled New Bookings, looked fantastic. The VP of Sales was a hero.
Meanwhile, in the marketing department, the team was celebrating a new record for MQLs. Again. They’d run a broad campaign on a flashy new social media platform, and the leads were pouring in. Their Cost per Lead KPI was at an all-time low. Another hero.
And then there was the Customer Success team. They were seen as the company’s janitors. Their job was to clean up the messes. They were dealing with the bad-fit customers the sales team had signed, customers who needed immense hand-holding and were chewing up support resources. They were trying to retain clients who were never going to succeed with the product in the first place. Their KPIs were things like NPS and Churn Rate, and they were perpetually in the red. They weren’t heroes.
They were seen as a cost center, the bearers of bad news.
See the flaw in the system? Everyone was optimizing for their own island. They were hitting their individual KPIs, but those KPIs were working against each other. High bookings led to high churn. A low cost per lead led to low-quality leads, which wasted sales resources and drove up the actual cost of acquiring a customer. The company was a collection of high-performing limbs attached to a torso that was slowly going broke. They were winning every battle and losing the war.
A Crazy Idea from Silicon Valley
The whole mess rests on a flawed premise: that measuring activity is the same as measuring progress.
It’s not.
The idea that would eventually fix this came, as these things often do, from the paranoid, brilliant mind of Andy Grove at Intel. It was later perfected at Google, a company that had to invent the future on a regular basis. It was called the OKR. Objectives and Key Results.
It’s in the Mt. Rushmore of Corporate Jargon.
It sounds like more corporate jargon, another framework to be ignored in a forgotten PowerPoint deck. But it’s not. It’s a fundamentally different way of thinking.
The Objective is the destination you plug into your GPS. It’s the answer to the question, “Where the hell are we going?” It’s qualitative, inspirational, and a little bit scary. It’s not "Increase sales by 10%." That’s boring. It’s "Dominate the East Coast enterprise market by 10%" It’s "Make our product so sticky that customers can’t imagine their lives without it."
Your objectives should be transformational but attainable with sufficient planning, diligent execution and equal doses of resilience and consistency.
The Key Results are the cold, hard, undeniable proof that you’re actually moving toward that destination. They are the mile markers on the highway. They must be measurable. There’s no fuzzy language allowed. You either did it or you didn’t. For the objective "Dominate the East Coast enterprise market," your key results wouldn’t be "Make more sales calls." They would be: "Increase new enterprise ARR from the East Coast from $3.7M to $5.1M this quarter with pipeline sourced from new earned media campaigns + in-person events and meetings." Or "Land first meetings with 10 new logos from the Fortune 500 list." Or "Reduce the sales cycle for enterprise deals from 90 to 75 days."
Here’s the magic trick, the conceptual leap that most companies miss: your KPIs are the gauges, but your OKRs are the journey.
Your KPIs tell you your engine temperature is normal.
Business as usual.
But you set an OKR when you want to fundamentally change your performance. When you want to drive faster, more efficiently, or to a place you’ve never been. A great Key Result is often just a KPI with a rocket strapped to its back. Your KPI might be "Customer Churn is 2%." An OKR might be to "Achieve a negative churn rate by increasing expansion revenue," with a key result of "Increase upsell ARR from 5% to 15% of new bookings."
You don’t need an OKR for everything. I’ve seen people try that. Doesn’t work so well.
You don’t set an OKR to “Make sure the lights stay on.” That’s what KPIs and operational dashboards are for. You set an OKR to build a skyscraper.
At RevIntel, the change began when they hired a new Head of RevOps. Let’s call her Sarah.
Sarah had come from a company that ran on this philosophy. She looked at the siloed departments, the conflicting incentives, the vanity metrics, and she didn’t see a bunch of individual problems. She saw one, single, systemic flaw. She saw a kingdom of fools, all diligently polishing their own little corner of a sinking ship. And she decided to introduce a little bit of structured anarchy.
The Grand Unified Theory of Revenue Operations
Sarah’s first move wasn’t to build a new dashboard.
It was to get the leadership team in a room and force them to answer the most basic question: What is the most important thing we need to accomplish this year?
It was a painful process. But after hours of argument, they landed on a single, company-wide Objective for the year: “Transition from a startup selling a tool to a market leader selling an indispensable platform.”
It was ambitious. It was inspiring. And it was vague. Which was fine. The Key Results would provide the teeth. They settled on three, non-negotiable, company-wide KRs:
Increase Annual Recurring Revenue from $20M to $35M.
Achieve Net Revenue Retention of 120%. (Meaning they’d grow by 20% just from their existing customers, a sign of true indispensability).
Reduce blended Customer Acquisition Cost from $12,000 to $9,000. (Meaning they had to get smarter and more efficient, not just bigger).
These three numbers became the constitution.
Everything, and everyone, would now be measured against them. This was the North Star. Sarah’s job, as the Head of RevOps, was to be the keeper of this system, the translator who could connect this high-level strategy to the daily grind.
This is how she did it, department by department.
This is the playbook.
From Gladiators to Architects
The Sales VP was used to a simple world: hit the bookings number.
Sarah showed him how his world connected to the new constitution. The sales department’s Objective wasn’t just to sell more; it was to “Spearhead the company’s growth by acquiring high-value, long-term partners.”
Suddenly, the game changed. Their Key Results became:
KR1: Generate $15M in New ARR. (Directly feeding the company ARR goal).
KR2: Increase the Average Deal Size for new customers by 30%. (This wasn’t a vanity metric; bigger, more strategic customers were less likely to churn and more likely to expand, directly impacting the company’s NRR and LTV).
KR3: Ensure 85% of new customers meet the ‘Ideal Customer Profile’ criteria. (This was a direct shot at the old problem. It made Sales accountable for churn before it happened, which in turn helped the company’s CAC and NRR goals).
The individual Account Executive’s KPIs (like their personal quota) didn’t go away.
But now they were nested inside these KRs.
An AE who hit 150% of their quota by signing a dozen tiny, bad-fit deals was no longer a hero. The hero was the one who hit 100% of their quota with three perfect-fit, high-LTV customers. The compensation plan was re-engineered to reward not just the booking, but the quality of the booking.
From Lead Factory to Pipeline Engine
Next, Sarah went to the CMO. No more celebrating a million MQLs. Marketing’s new Objective was to “Build a predictable pipeline of our future best customers.”
Their Key Results were:
KR1: Source $40M in sales-qualified pipeline. (Not just leads, but pipeline—a metric that Sales agreed with and that directly supported their KRs).
KR2: Reduce marketing’s share of CAC by 25%. (Forcing them to focus on efficient channels, not just spraying and praying).
KR3: Increase the MQL-to-SQL conversion rate from 10% to 18%. (The ultimate bullshit detector. It measured whether the leads they were generating were actually any good).
Now, a content marketer’s individual KPI, like number white paper downloads, had a direct line of sight to the company’s goals. They weren’t just trying to get downloads. They were trying to get downloads from people inside their Ideal Customer Profile, because that’s what would move the MQL-to-SQL needle, which would lower CAC, which would help the company hit its North Star KR. A golden thread now connected a blog post to the company’s valuation.
From Janitors to Growth Engine
This was the biggest shift.
Customer Success was no longer the cleanup crew. Their new Objective was powerful: “Turn our customer base into our single biggest source of growth.”
Their Key Results were a revelation:
KR1: Increase Net Revenue Retention (NRR) from 105% to 120%. (They now owned a core company KR. They were a revenue center).
KR2: Generate $5M in expansion and upsell ARR. (This gave them a tangible sales target, aligning them with the sales team).
KR3: Decrease time-to-first-value for new customers by 50%. (A leading indicator for retention and expansion. The faster a customer got value, the stickier they became).
The individual Onboarding Specialist’s KPI of customer satisfaction with onboarding was no longer a soft metric. It was a critical leading indicator for the department's ability to hit its NRR target. They weren't just making customers happy; they were locking in future revenue.
The New Dashboard, The Real Game
Take a step back and look at what was built. It’s a beautiful, intricate machine of cause and effect. It’s a system of belief.
The CMO is now incentivized to give the CRO higher-quality leads, because her success depends on it. The CRO is now incentivized to bring in better-fit customers, because his success is tied to the NRR that the Chief Customer Officer owns.
This is the grand unification theory of Revenue Operations. Your job is not to be the keeper of the spreadsheets. Your job is to be the architect of this system. You’re the one who can see the whole field, who can connect the dots and weave the golden thread.
The next time you look at your dashboard, don’t just ask if the numbers are green. Ask a better question. Ask, “What story is this data telling me?” Are you looking at a disconnected collection of stats, or are you looking at a unified narrative of progress towards a single, audacious goal?
That’s what separates the companies that merely operate from the ones that dominate.
It’s not about having more data.
It’s about having more clarity. It's about ensuring every single person, from the intern to the CEO, can answer the simple question: “How does my work today help us win?” When you get that right, you’re no longer just tracking the game. You’re changing it.
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I started this in November 2023 because revenue technology and revenue operations methodologies started evolving so rapidly I needed a focal point to coalesce ideas, outline revenue system blueprints, discuss go-to-market strategy amplified by operational alignment and logistical support, and all topics related to revenue operations.
Mastering Revenue Operations is a central hub for the intersection of strategy, technology and revenue operations. Our audience includes Fortune 500 Executives, RevOps Leaders, Venture Capitalists and Entrepreneurs.