Using “Process KPIs” to Hit Goals (Hillary Carpio, Snowflake)

The metric: Process KPIs

Learn how Hillary Carpio (Sr. Dir. of ABM at Snowflake) uses “Process KPIs” to ensure her team can create sustainable, repeatable processes that help them hit their goals.

How They Moved The Needle

What are “Process KPIs”?

Basically, they’re KPIs set around the actions a team needs to take in order to hit their goal-oriented KPI. They’re meant to help your team build a scalable, repeatable system to successfully hit the goal-oriented KPIs they need to.

Hillary started thinking about process-related goals after reading Atomic Habits by James Clear. She cited an example:

If you want to start running, the first step is to build the habit of putting your running shoes by the door the night before.

She felt the same was true for hitting revenue goals or goal-oriented KPIs. She began asking of bigger projects or goals, “what is the first trigger or repeatable steps we need to launch this project or hit this goal? And are they happening?”

Over time, she’s learned that when a team failed to complete a project or hit a goal, it was often simply because they weren’t taking the right actions in a sustainable, repeatable way in order to hit their bigger goal.

For example, on a cross-functional project, it could be that two teams simply weren’t meeting frequently or consistently enough to move the needle on a project. Or a team wasn’t taking the right steps that would lead to the result they wanted to achieve.

So Hillary began setting process-oriented KPIs to ensure the right actions, which would drive the best results, would be taken in a consistent, sustainable way. To be clear, these process-oriented KPIs don’t replace your standard marketing KPIs, which are usually more results-driven. Instead, they help you understand what do you need to do, in order to move the needle on those goals.

To set them, start with the end goal you want. Usually, a completed project or growth goal. Next, reverse engineer the consistent habits, steps, or outputs the team needs to do in order to hit that goal. Finally, set a KPI for those steps/habits.

Let’s say your goal is to reduce churn. You look at your data and determine that the highest churn is among companies fitting a certain profile, and you learn that historically, when account reps met with a company 8 times in the onboarding phase, churn was dramatically lower.

So a potential Process KPI for account reps might be:

“Meet with each client 1x/month for 6 months” because that’s a small, sustainable step or habit that will lead to the bigger goal you want to achieve.

In general, Hillary believes that Process KPIs will help you:

1. Identify the right steps to take to hit a bigger goal
2. Provide a consistent, sustainable process to take those steps
3. Unifying multiple teams around a common goal
4. Set a starting goal when you lack historic data to forecast