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Cody
Can you guys believe it? We are one year in episode 52. Congratulations, guys. We should raise a glass to that, I guess.
Connor
Yeah. Cheers. Cheers.
Sean
Cheers.
Connor
We should have made this a drinking episode. Huge missed opportunity. We haven't. We haven't played that card yet.
Sean
The marketing operators get drunk and riff after hours. Yeah, after hours. I like that. Our subscriptions are about to go way up.
Connor
You know, I. I'll say if I can brag quickly. I'm 52 for 52. Yeah. Yeah, I'm like that. I wanna. I'm the Cal Ripken Jr. Of E commerce Marketing Podcast.
Sean
Wow, you are. That's. That's impressive.
Cody
Well, Sean said I'm the Jason of marketing ops, so I'm not doing as well. Hip surgery and a baby, so. Yeah.
Connor
Yeah, you're like Joel Embiid.
Sean
Does Jason have the lowest?
Cody
At least I'm not Ben Simmons. Don't put that on me.
Connor
Yeah, fair.
Sean
Is Jason's attendance rate the worst on the operators?
Connor
Yeah, I think it's pretty. I think it's pretty infrequent.
Sean
Okay. I didn't know that.
Cody
Been missing a few, but glad. Glad to be back. Glad to be here. Can't believe we did it. You guys have met in person. We. We still haven't. So we're gonna have to make that happen before we get, you know, too many episodes down into this before I.
Connor
I think we should resolve before we finish the second year of podcasting. We hang out at least once.
Cody
Oh, I'd be so. If we didn't before then.
Jared
We'll make it happen.
Cody
Awesome. Well, I can. People are still listening, so honestly, you know, shout out to the listeners, probably the four listeners that we have still.
Connor
Let's do it.
Cody
We made it. Thank you guys for all your support. But yeah, no, excited. Excited to chat. We got a good one Today. We're going to talk about KPIs. Fun, fun topic, but obviously it gets really important as you grow in scale. So key performance indicators, how we set goals for our teams, how we hold our team accountable and just communicate, you know, the vision, what meetings we have. The only thing worse than meeting is talking about meetings. So very excited to talk about that, but obviously it's important. Really, really just kind of want to know how you guys are running your orgs and your teams to make sure things are tracking properly and, you know, holding people accountable and what kind of reporting you guys do. So super excited to get into it. But before we do, want to thank our sponsors. Motion Prescient Rich panel after Cell and North.
Connor
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Cody
All right, let's get into it. Have some questions for you. Like I think we've talked a little bit about it but very curious just like how you guys communicate goals to your team team and your organization. So before we even go to like KPIs or OKRs, like what do you guys communicate publicly like, like to your whole team? Do you, do you share everything? Are you guys like open book? Do you share just revenue contribution margin? Let's start with Connor McDonald at Ridge.
Connor
Totally. Yeah. We are extremely transparent and that is from like our internal reporting which we could get into with more detail. But like basically everybody has access to it. You have financial project, we're tracking revenue over different periods of time. We're reporting on contribution margin for the most part and everybody has access to it. So anybody at any point can be like hey, month to day Ridge is growing or they're shrinking, they're spending way more money, whatever. Like all of that is like very accessible. We also run a weekly business review every Thursday where we talk about the previous week results year over year two projections also touch on week to date. Literally every single person in the company is on that call. Onshore staff, overseas staff, that's probably like 80 or 90 people. So that's just to say how, how kind of transparent we are with some of those numbers.
Cody
So do you go down a contribution margin or you go down to like EBITDA for every.
Connor
We don't go down to. So what I just described is like always on reporting weekly or, or on a day to day basis in terms of like we call it our growth dashboard that houses all of our spend and revenue cogs data that will get down to contribution at different times of the year. Sean our CEO will do like, he'll do end of month reviews, he'll do end of quarter reviews. If he's feeling feisty, he'll do it at any point in time. And that'll get down to like, are we more or less profitable? Are we hitting our profit targets? Where are we or where are we from a cash flow perspective, we'll be really explicit about as well. That is not nearly as codified. Like, you don't, you don't. Not everybody has direct access to that information. But in terms of our executives or leaders in the company willing to share that down, absolutely. That happens, I think in a. I think we're relatively unique in that sense in that we're very transparent.
Cody
And is that an active choice? Is that something Sean did? Is that like from the founders? Is that just. You've always done it.
Connor
It's probably more like a characteristic of Sean's. Like, it's, it's easier to just have, like to just be transparent about those goals. It helps inform and set priorities. It helps people understand why we're making certain decisions, if we have to fire people or if we have to pause hiring or if we are hiring more, etc. It's like you understand both from like a top down and bottoms up perspective why we're doing a lot of the things that we are. Like, I honestly don't think there's too many downsides to it. It hasn't created any issues. So we found it to be effective in getting people bought in and motivated.
Cody
Yeah, for sure. We're, we're, we're similar, maybe slightly less transparent, I can imagine, but I prefer to be pretty transparent. So pretty much revenue, you know, against forecast, against budget, down to contribution margin. So that's what we share. So we don't share any of our fixed costs and obviously profit, but really down to contribution margin because, you know, you've got to share it with obviously the entire marketing team and you know, to be able to get their goals. And if they're going to have it, why not let everybody have it? So that's how we do it. But, but not, you know, sharing full profit. Funny story though, we had like a COO at one point and we had this like all hands and I think we got like, he gathered a lot of like anonymous survey data and stuff like that. And, and he was like, very transparent. Like the business was doing really well. And he's talking about like, he didn't say a number, was just like plenty of cash in the bank. He might even, I don't think he said a number. And then the next slide, he was reading off like the Anonymous survey results. And like somebody made a comment about like not being paid enough or whatever and it's just like looked bad, you know, to be like, hey, we have, we have this much cash in the bank. And I'm like, to do that, it was just like a really funny moment and I was just like, oh, totally cringe. Like, you can't do that. So I think you can definitely be. There's pros and cons of being transparent, but obviously it does help with a lot of things. Like, like you mentioned of just showing like, hey guys, this is where the business is at. Like, we're either we're in a really good spot and we're going to continue to push or we're not in a great spot. But I also think maybe you got to be careful about it. If you're in, if you're in a really good spot, you know, then. And showing a lot of cash, then people ask more.
Connor
That's a super, super good point. And because I was thinking like, yeah, what are the downsides of that? The downsides I guess would be if you are, if you are extremely profitable. But then also being, I don't know, not giving raises, not giving bonuses, things like that. We've always, I think, struck a nice balance. I think people largely realize that if we're hitting our goals, if we're succeeding, then like people get rewarded at the end of the day and that obviously helps the conversation. If we wanted to be more extractive about it, then we'd probably want to be a little less transparent. What I also say is like, you can temper the message whenever you want. Like I said, anybody can log in and see, oh, we're up 25% year over year or whatever. But are we like showing snapshots of our bank account? Like, probably not for both reasons. Like one, we might want, we might not want to be as transparent to say we're, we're less profitable or, or we're tight on cash or whatever. But also the flip side is we're extremely profitable because you, you run the risk of employees not realizing like, well, you have to buy a bunch of inventory. Like, the true cash to manage the business can be easily misunderstood. So we kind of eb and flow throughout the year as we see fit, I guess.
Cody
Oh yeah, for sure. Even, I mean, yeah, most are not going to understand the cash does not equal profit. But even like probably for junior employees and a lot of people, like revenue does not equal profit. And they're just going to say, hey, these, you know, nine figure businesses like why are you being so cheap on these things? Or why can't we get a raise? You're, you know, the business is making so much and they don't see obviously this percent is going to ads, this percent is going to cogs, this percent is going to shipping. So yeah, for sure.
Sean
Connor, what percent of people do you think are. So you said like anyone can log in, right and see your year over years. How many people do you think are maybe taking advantage of that and like be like wow, this is awesome. I am going to log in and actually you know, see how we're pacing in revenue and efficiency and margin, all all those things year over year. Do you think it's something that a lot of people at your org are, are actively using and doing or, or maybe not as much even though it is available?
Connor
I, I, I think the majority of employees get that information from our weekly business review and that is like the high notes of by, by market, by channel, by category, how's revenue trending? Where are we to go? And then it gets down like to the marketing team is, is in that data all the time. Right. Our planning team is in that data all the time. Understanding how we're pacing on a day to day basis. Leadership Sean's checking like all that data every single day. So if I were to put a percentage on it, who is logging into some of those dashboards, maybe half the company and then the other half are getting it exclusively through the weekly presentations.
Sean
Got it, Got it. Yeah, we're, we're like, I'd say we're, we're probably more, I'd say probably not as transparent as Ridge, but still very transparent. We, I basically think about it as if you have a role that's directly attached to revenue and efficiency. Like I want you to be able to see that data because you need to be able to make a connection between you know, if you're the affiliate lead and your core KPI is like growing affiliate revenue. You should be able to go and also look at our total revenue and be able to make some sort of connection between what you're doing and how that's contributing to like the top line revenue number. So everyone on the growth marketing team has access to that data. Where we, where we differ on our all team and we'll do this once a month where we have like literally everyone on this call and every you know, company leader that's like head or above is, is doing a report. So that's when I'll report on how we're pacing against Projections and how we're pacing year over year. We do not share the net numbers in that meeting. That is a meeting where we just share like hey, we're this, this percent to projection this percent year over year and all these different KPIs to get like a sense of how the business is performing. But you know, for the time being we've just decided that it's probably like too sensitive of information to share with like the entire company that, you know, we now have like 100, you know, I don't know how many people are in this meeting. Probably, you know, 60, 70. So that's kind of where we've like drawn the line so far. If you aren't really attached to revenue in your role directly, I mean everyone you could argue is attached to revenue, but directly you're not necessarily getting that transparency. If you're, you know, on growth and you're directly attached to it, you're, you're getting that, that level of data for sure.
Cody
Yeah, no, I, I, I think makes sense that every business is going to be a little different, pros and cons each. Okay, and so how do you guys, how do you guys think about, let's start with Hexcloud this time. How do you guys think about KPIs? I know you that because you've shared me some of yours but you guys are pretty in depth and involved. So how do you think about setting KPIs for your team? Do you have, you know, a framework you follow and let's just go from there.
Sean
Yeah. So, you know, we start the overall, I think I've talked about this a little bit on here, but the overall ideology is that, you know, we're, we're making everyone have key results that are attached to our overall objective here, which the, the most high level objective at least in terms of what, Obviously it's profit. But you know, we are optimizing towards a revenue and efficiency target that we know ultimately backs into a, a bottom line margin number. You know, we have this calculator where it's like you can plug in these revenue, these spend numbers and you have all your line items and it's like, all right, if we hit these targets, we will end at this goal EBITDA margins for the growth team. Like that's the, that's the highest point, right? Is like this revenue target, this efficiency target. And then basically thinking through like what are the, what is that version of a KPI for every channel lead that ladders into this highest level. So you know, everybody's Key results should ultimately ladder into mind. So if my key results are top line revenue and efficiency, the retention lead should have a key result that ladders into that. The, the acquisition lead should have a key result that, that ladders into that. So as an example, if you know the retention lead they will have a key result that is repeat revenue and revenue attached to email SMS like utm last click based and making sure that if they hit those targets it is going to like equal their, their component of that of the top line will they'll be, they'll be meeting their portion of that pie and then so that's kind of like an always on key result that they have. They're always, we're always trying to hit a certain repeat revenue target or a UTM based channel target and then we'll pepper in certain key results that are around a new initiative. So for example, we are, we are, we have an initiative this quarter where we think that we can improve our, our pop up and overall like welcome flow. They have a key result specifically around improving a KPI that is related to that project. So those will not always be on. Those are very dependent on the corner and what they're working on.
Cody
And you're just selecting that project per department and you're saying hey, we think this is a lever that we should be pulling or an opportunity and if we improve this the we should be closer to, to our overall goals. Is that right?
Sean
Yeah, exactly. So the same thing, it's like hey if we can, if we can improve this it's going to help contribute to these overall goals. And then on the, so that's the key result side and the initiative side is not quantitative, quantitative project focused and that is basically split into kind of two different approaches. A is you know, you should have some sort of like initiative set that is reflective of your always on evergreen work. Like if you're the retention lead you have the expectation to produce like a minimum amount of campaigns per quarter and like continue to run that flywheel. And then there's other initiatives that are new projects that we think we should do. Like you know, we, we think we should roll out better product use and care flows and that's not going to be always on. We're going to have that this quarter, we're going to launch it and then that's not going to show up in your next quarter. Now it might show up as a key result if we launch it and we're like we want to improve it. Maybe it's like hey, let's improve the Click rate on these or something. So that's how it could turn into like a quarter. You know, initiative two key result. But yeah we, it's. It's basically this like waterfall then right that everything kind of ladders into the. To the next thing into the next thing into this like highest point which is the overall goal of, of like the growth team for sure.
Cody
All right, I have have lots of questions. Maybe I'll. I'll bang out a few and we'll go to other. Connor, are they public? Like does your head of grow your your head is like head of advertising or director retention. Like do they know what somebody else on the grow teams come goals are or is it just you know they get theirs and you keep that privately?
Sean
No, it's all public. That's like you know, it's the whole exercise is equal parts accountability and prioritization but also equal, you know, just as much transparency. Like I want everyone to know what everyone else is prioritizing, what they're being held accountable to and I just think that's especially for a remote team, really valuable. So it all lives in the same spreadsheet and it's just organized by tabs for each, each person. So yeah, actually something we're trying to do a better job of this quarter by having like consistent formatting across everyone so people can like easily understand what is in each other person's tab.
Cody
Yeah, that makes sense.
Connor
Public.
Cody
Public feedback sucks. But public accountability is great. Public accountability is so powerful. If you just know you're gonna have to get up in there in a week and a month and report on your numbers. That's a very strong motivator.
Sean
Yeah. And we're starting to put all of our updates also in that spreadsheet. So that way it's like. And it's color coded basically based on where we are pacing towards this or have it completed. We need to like make a few adjustments to get this one done and then red is like no way we're going to hit this at, at our current whatever operating standard we need to make some changes. So I'm hoping that that also is a good. You know exactly what you said. Accountability in public. So North Beam just released this new attribution model called Clicks and Views Enhanced and I am really excited about it. I think it is really, really game changing for brands measuring the performance of view heavy channels like TikTok. So I want to explain first what is the difference between this new model of Attribution and North Beam's other models of attribution? North themes. Other models of attribution are probabilistic and they're probabilistic because they're doing machine learning to make their best guess about where purchases, where revenue is coming from. What's different about this clicks and enhanced views is that because they're working directly with the platform, it's now deterministic. They're actually able to connect a real impression to a real purchase. Which just means that ultimately this data is, is real data, it's not modeled data that has really serious implications. What it means is that now instead of only getting a 24 hour look on view based attribution, you now get just as long of windows that you're getting on clickspace. So now if you go into, if you go to clicks and views, you'll notice that no matter how long you extend the clickbase window in North Beam, that view based always stays at one day. When you now go into the clicks and enhance views, you'll notice that whatever time window you're selecting is for views and clicks. So now in TikTok you can actually measure a conversion 30, 60, 90 days from that impression. Which again is really important for brands that have a lot of top of funnel happening through videos and really important for brands that have longer consideration periods where that conversion often is not going to happen within that first 24 hours of seeing that video. I was just looking at this last night. I was simply selecting the same period of time and clicking back and forth between the 90 day click one day view and the new enhanced clicks and views window that has 90 day click 90 day view and the amount of attribution in ROAS increase and revenue increase that I saw was, was really, really insightful and I can't emphasize enough how important this is for channels that don't garner a click as much as a Facebook or Instagram ad or Google Ad and are a lot more video view heavy like TikTok. So right now the clicks and views enhanced only covers TikTok and it's still in beta. But this attribution model is rolling out to other platforms very soon. If you want to check out the incredible results of the TikTok beta and just information on it in general, check out North Beam's landing page at northbeam IO clicks, Dash and Dash views enhanced.
Connor
I have a question for both of you guys because one of the things I struggle with is the best example is like retention KPIs, you said returning customer revenue that's downstream of so many things. So it's like, is that, is that KPI like you can set, okay, you've got financial projections. Hey, we want to grow 10% year over year maybe. We think that will largely come from returning customers. So we expect that to be up 20%. It's like awesome. But as soon as you start underperforming those projections, you're acquiring fewer customers. It becomes increasingly difficult, almost impossible to actually hit the returning revenue dollar target that you were given. So do you guys, when you reforecast, are you then resetting those KPIs or are, do you set them like more relative to the state of the business so it ends up being more of a moving target that's better in line with like what's feasible?
Sean
Yeah, well, first off, you called something out that is important to address. It's, it's definitely not perfect. Like repeat revenue is driven by so many things. It's very much driven by email, sms, but it's also driven by like product development and it's driven by organic social. So it's not entirely in control of the, of the retention marketer and the retention team. But you know, we're trying to assign the KPI to the, to the channel that we think has at least in large part the largest contribution to that KPI. So it's like, it's not perfect but it's like, you know, kind of default to the person that has the most control over it. But yes, if we get, if we're mid quarter and we're like, wow, we're way over, over our projections, like we should do a reforecast here and try to, you know, shoot higher like yeah, we, then you have to go in and like reset all of those because the whole goal is that like 1 plus 1 equals like 2.2 when you add up the acquisition lead and the retention leads to equal to overall revenue pie. So yeah, it's, that's annoying when that happens, but it's just kind of part of the process.
Cody
Yeah, I've, I've thought a lot about this because you going through this exercise right now and kind of redoing how we're doing KPIs and everything and it's very hard to hold, you know, individuals accountable to something that so many people are responsible for. But like, so you could just give retention, you know, ga last click email and SMS performance. But that's also like not really as indicative of business performance, you know. And really what I want to do is show a lift in re, you know, retention rate, repeat customer revenue, things like that. So, but it's, it's Respon. It's. It's. You know, they're not the only one who really can impact it.
Jared
They.
Cody
They can have a huge impact, but it's all those other factors. But I've been thinking about it with, like, compensation structures for, like, football players, right? Like, say, Quan Barkley probably got something right for having a certain number of yards or a certain number of carries. And like, obviously there's a lot of people that, you know that play a factor in there. If his offensive line is terrible, he's not going to get it, you know, and Obviously that's why QBs and running backs take care of their offensive line if they have a good year. But, like, they still have to set it right. And he can't be like, at the end of the year, like, oh, my. My line was terrible, so I didn't hit it, but you guys should still pay me. Like, at the end of the day, you're. You're a performer and you kind of hit it or you don't. And so I still think you have to. Even though there's going to be other people as more of like, a note for myself, because I hesitated to give these goals for that reason, I still think you have to give it to them. As a. As a KPI, know that maybe they did everything in their power and it wasn't hit because another person, like, maybe then you have to kind of consider that a wash or something. But, yeah, I think you have to. I think you have to do something. What. What do you guys do at Rich?
Connor
Well, actually, before I answer, we had an executive who was on the team last year who had a great, great phrase that he would say. But he, he'd say, like, don't let others let you fail or something like that. But like, that general sense of like, okay, I've been given the KPI. I'm Saquon Barkley. I'm supposed to run for 100 yards. This is terrible example. It should be an E Commerce example. But, like, if I'm given the goal, obviously people are critical in. In me achieving that goal. And it would be unfair to me to say at the end of it, I didn't hit my goal, but it was because of some, like, external factor. And, and really what you're creating is like, I guess like a network of accountability where it's like, I've got this goal, so now I'm gonna make sure this person's helping me achieve that goal, just creating more cohesion there. So I hear that and I agree, and I think there's certain people in the organization that should get hard to achieve clearly quantifiable goals if they're getting paid the big bucks. Yeah, 100%.
Cody
Yeah.
Connor
And a lot of the goals that I set for the team though end up feeling more relative and like I, I think the, the retention is a, is a good example where we just had this conversation recently about welcome series revenue and it was like welcome series revenue in aggregate for this period of time that we were looking at was down year over year. And I said, hey look, we were running this test in our pop up, we were collecting fewer emails. I'm like welcome series revenue is going to be down. We're like not going to hit this. If this were a KPI, if the, if the, if the true dollar amount was our KPI, then like there's just no way we hit it here. Our, our real KPI should be once we've captured an email, what is the value per email? And that is something that we can continue to improve on. But then I, I've been thinking about this a bit. Even that's not a true KPI, I can't give them one number for the year. It's almost like we just have to set ourselves on the path of what are we measuring and how do we constantly improve against that. And that's largely how we talk about data at Ridge. And that's true of the retention team. That's true a lot of the paid social team when we're looking at like channel performance. It's true of partnerships like we are using comps to look at relative to performance performance and try to make sure we're tracking towards improvements or we also understand that performance relative to the entire business. I don't expect necessarily. Well, I was going to say I don't expect meta roas performance to get better while the business is flat, for instance. Or if that's the case, I at least have the context of hey, the business isn't growing. You get to the point of like, well what is the state of the e commerce industry? Right. Like we're all kind of downstream of that. So I try to keep those like that in mind when setting goals and just how we speak to data. But it ends up being far less quantifiable, difficult to hold someone like truly accountable for. So there's definitely downsides of it, but that's largely how we think about it.
Cody
And are you giving like, like Connor kind of does some initiatives and some, some outcomes. Are you doing the same thing? Like do you have any total all your goals data. So you have some that are like just initiative and, and somebody could hit their KPI if they just launched a certain series of flows or something like that. If that's what you guys decided.
Connor
Totally. It's a. I liked Connor's kind of framing of it. We have the key results, ours are more relative. But that, that would be that bucket that's like super driven or performance driven or metrics driven, also tied back to like financial projections and what we're trying to do there. And then the second bucket, and I've talked about this quite a bit, is we have this cornerstone project this year, right? So we've got, we want to reinvigorate edc, we want to acquire more women customers, we want to acquire more tech customers, we want to scale travel. There's a couple more on top of that. So all the channel directors have ways that they contribute to that goal and some of those are, are truly quantifiable. Like there are financial goals tied to scaling travel and then some of them with, you know, acquiring more women customers is. Right now we're in like a research phase. How are we just speaking to more customers and how are we doing that via our retention team? We're sending out emails and surveys to collect data. Customer service team is doing that. So like those end up being softer kind of projects that are leveling up into these like business wide cornerstones. And that's a two, those are, those two buckets lead like 80% of the conversations that I have with the team.
Cody
All right, I'll share how we do it a little bit or doing it right now. And then a lot more questions to ask about KPIs. Yeah, I, I mean I totally agree with all that. I think the challenge I always have is, is kind of that push and pull of, you know, you can make them very objective, but then it's harder to hold one person accountable or you can make them a little bit softer, like, hey, like improvements in this thing or outcome based. But then there's a chance that it's maybe less objective or you know, less tied to a specific number or less like easier to hit but less impactful on the business, you know, and then I'm, I'm also trying to think and you know, I want to talk about kind of bonus and composite tied to it. But like less of these goals are less of like business as usual. Like I'm not going to tell my retention manager that they need to send four emails per week as their goal. Like that's just like the job, you know what I mean? Like, so I think some things can be outcome based. If it's new, like our senior director of Ops, like we're opening up a west coast warehouse, like that is a huge KPI and if we pull that off seamlessly, like that will be one of his main goals, checked off for the year. But that's also going to make us, you know, it's going to save us a dollar and a half per order on all of our west coast shipments. So, like, there's kind of some, you know, outcome inherently in there. But I'm not going to say, you know, maybe my retention person, like, if they stand up some new flows that we are confident in, that they're going to matter to the business and to the retention department, like that can be part of their KPI. But just like sending out, you know, four emails a week, like, I don't think that really is a core KPI, if that makes sense.
Jared
Yeah.
Cody
And I also, I always think like, balancing like output, like my probably favorite quote ever, I feel like the biggest tech bro ever is, you know, show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome. But it's like such a great quote because you will get, you know, the, it's almost like optimizing for something on meta. Like, you will get the behavior that you're optimizing for. You also will get the behavior that you incentivize. And so, you know, like a creative strategist, if you say, hey, I launch this many ads per week, like you can probably get that, but I think you need some checks and balances in there. And so, for example, creative strategists, it might be, hey, launch, you know, 40 concepts per week with a hit rate above this and then define what hit rate is for your business. And I'm not saying it's the best metric ever, but it's at least something that's relevant that kind of keeps the volume and quality in check.
Jared
Right.
Cody
You know, I think CRO is a hard one. Right. It's like everybody knows conversion rate is not the main metric. Um, but I'm not gonna say, hey, we're at, I'm just gonna make up a number. We're at 4% conversion rate. You gotta be at 5% by the end of the year. First of all, it's really hard to impact and probably, I think Connor, you mentioned, but like, if you're keeping that constant over time as you scale the business, like, that's actually probably an impressive feat. But secondly to that, like, yeah, it's, there are so many things. So there's a lot of outcome based things I've dabbled with. Like, so you know how like CRO agencies on Twitter will be like we found two extra million for this, this, you know, this business with CRO testing and they'll just like multiply like what the percent lift was by the number of orders or sessions. And I don't like that when CRO agencies do it. Like Shane's talked about this because it's just like, it's very, I don't know if subjective is the right word. Right. It kind of like washes out. But I, I, I also wonder if that like is a decent KPI for like a director of Ecom or a CRO person. Because you're like what else are we going to measure? And like some of it should be number of tests but you don't want to just incentivize that.
Sean
Right?
Cody
Some of it. So part of it will be number of tests and like, hey, we should have on any of our core Pages at least 80% of the time we should have a test running. Like to me that's just like a good, good principle to have, you know. So some of the number of tests for us. We're trying to like redesign our website but like iterate and do it. But like the end of the year, like I want our website looking totally different but I want to like test it and not just do it. So like that'll be a big KPI and we'll just look at the end of the year. You know, is our PDP completely different? Is our homepage different as our collections page? Different like any core pages? But also did we show like a significant lift by doing so? That's you know, another one that's like one of our website initiatives. Where was I going with this? But, but also yeah, I'm like, you know, you don't want to just get the volume of testing. Like is there like a certain, like how do you guys feel about that? Like revenue uplift from zero test. Do you think that's a decent metric or not?
Connor
Well, one thing I would say is I like yeah, we don't have any KPIs that are send four emails per week. Those are literally the KPI of just the input is kind of dumb. Like that is, that is the, the basic blocking and tackling of the job. As soon as you say or you with the performance creative strategy one which is another really hard channel to set KPIs for the hit rate is now the outcome there's some sort of outcome that is a KPI. I always joke we fell into a similar thing like maybe 18 months ago where we had KPIs around concepts delivered. We were delivering those concepts, we weren't getting the performance and we had to reset and say hey, like. And I thought this was funny at the time but like I was like the deliverable is success. And that's like incredibly hard to quantify because it's multiple people. But like we are not doing our jobs unless we are producing content that then performs on those channels. And a way more actionable way of putting that is like hit rate. We need to be producing concepts that spend x amount of dollars or become some percentage of of of dollars spent in the account. So I think that all makes sense. The last one, what Shane says about I think measuring like revenue lift or, or even better like profit lift or contribution margin lift via CRO is a great KPI. I think it's one of the best ones. Super clear. We, you just can't extrapolate out those results to say oh, I just made us a million dollars for the year. Because what Shane says is like really if you found those optimizations you should just all those cost savings, you should be investing in other channels that you.
Cody
Actually are without even thinking about it. You will because you and the growth team is just going to be optimizing to AM and the AM better and they're like hey, we should spend more.
Connor
And revenue's higher because of it. But it's not necessarily like some direct downstream effect of the CRO test. So that's my take. But yeah, I, I love everything you just described. I think that was really good part of the.
Cody
Another one of the challenge like so for retention. For me the challenge like I don't necessarily care about GA revenue so I don't know if I necessarily want to give it to give that as a KPI. I've done it before. I don't necessarily love that. Or like, or like even like we've done this before like email revenue from GA being a percentage of the business. Right? Because that's like the same thing as like repeat revenue being a percentage of the business. I could tank acquisition. Email revenue is going to go way up as a percentage of business. That's not great for the business, you know, so I'd rather have a dollar amount. So I go back and forth on like the like a channel revenue. I try to stay away from them more or less but like again the repeat total revenue is one that they will get. But that's, that's many other factors and then like I want to show a lift. Like I think, I think you know if a retention person is doing their job and doing an amazing job and like getting bonused off of that, like did the tests that you implemented in the life cycle stuff you do actually improve our core retention KPIs which is like retention rate LTV and stuff like that. The challenge with that is like those are just such hard numbers to move. Like you could be doing a great job setting up the stuff and those are not always easy to move. So that's, that's kind of one of the other factors as well.
Sean
I feel like I, I think the channel like you the retention example. I the reason I like having like the repeat order stuff. There's so much out of their control with that. There's a lot in their control and like you could like again you could argue that they have the most control over it but I like giving them a. You also have a very channel specific target that is all in your control. And all we said all of ours are set up in this like two from format where we're basically trying to get year over year comp. So it's like you know, grow right Email like source equals email revenue by 30%. Whatever it is. I like that stack because it's pretty clear if you know if let's say the goal is to Grow email revenue 30% and SMS revenue 50% based on UTM last click year over year. Great if they hit that but then they didn't hit the repeat revenue. It's a pretty good exercise in saying okay like you did your job with the channel you can control but we still didn't hit repeat revenue. So there's probably something else to unpack here that, that we need to go figure out. So it's kind of this like decision mate or not decision matrix but like analysis matrix. Like did you hit this one? Yes. Did you hit this one? No. Okay, like let's go figure out what happened in these other channels that also contribute to retention. I think the, the conversion rate one is like it's the one of the most like like conversion rate is like has. It's so hard to control and like to say all right E Comm manager or director of ECOM or had a website like you own conversion rate entirely and that's so, so misguided because if anything I would argue that like advertising spend and traffic volume has way bigger impact on conversion rate than you know, CRO test you're doing but like we, we give our CRO lead a, a volume like a deliverable based but then also a hit rate based. Like we're, we're basically saying you know, if we can stack together and I think Shane said this but if you can stack together a bunch of positive revenue per user tests like that is ultimately going to basically just offset the conversion rate drop that you're naturally going to see in your business over time as you, as you, as you scale. So that's what we give them is like hey, we want to have a, a certain hit rate and that hit rate is based on historical hit rate and us trying to improve that over time with the, with the agreed on baseline that we're not going to be doing any sort of like tests to do that. So we also outline like we, we outline some tests as initiatives that we definitely want to run and then we leave some slots open to like be more reactive. So that's how we set up the, the CROs KPIs. I, I love RPU as a. It's a pretty like a hit rate on. That's a pretty, pretty black and white one for a CRO lead I think.
Cody
To and from is is great. It's genius. It's so simple. Definitely stealing that. Yeah yeah. That's a very easy way to. Yeah yeah.
Sean
Cause if you're just like hey, your email revenue target is like to hit UTM source email at 10 million. It's like well relative to what you know that could be bad, that could be great. But unless you have that like what it's growing from and we, we, we personally do year over year since our business is so seasonal it just wouldn't make sense to have like a quarter over quarter target. But yeah like for the, all that to say like for the KPIs where they're owning one that's not all in their control. I think it's extra important to have one that like right below that that's directly in their control that is also contributing to the highest level one they have.
Cody
Yeah for sure.
Jared
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Cody
Do you guys ever feel like you have to balance individual KPIs with over overall company performance? Have you ever had a time where like a KPI was set that like the, the, the actions that that incentivized were probably not the best for the business? Like I haven't necessarily seen this because I've been, you know, we haven't done that many or I've been thoughtful about it but like, you know, you give somebody conversion rate as their KPI, right, they're going to do some things that are probably not what you want for the business. It's maybe not the best thing. Maybe you, you lower your free shipping threshold conversion rate is going to go up. Maybe you're making less profit per user or something like that. You know, have, have you seen anything like that happen?
Connor
I'll give, I'll give two examples. One, we launched personalization. This must have been like 2022. And honestly. And the person who like ran the program had a KPI of like a certain amount of personalized orders. And we launched it. And at first we launched it and it was like heavily, it was like extremely visible on the pdp. There were basically like two add to cart buttons. You'd add to cart and you had personalized. So we were driving a ton of people into this like personalized experience and we drove a ton of personalization orders but we found it had a massive negative impact on conversion rate. Right. So we have to deprioritize the personalized flow now so that it is a net positive on the business. So then we did that. Now all of a sudden we're not hitting this guy's KPI of, of the personalized orders. And I actually didn't realize what was going on at the time, but he was like, we'd get on, you know, calls every once in a while. He's like, look, we got to send emails, we got to send SMSs. He's like, we should be running ads for the personalized ads or for these personalized products. And I'm like, I mean we could, I don't think that's what's best for the business right now. Now all of a sudden your KPI is at odds with what I'm trying to do, which is hit our revenue target. So we obviously like just readjust it from there. That's the easiest thing. But like I think that happens quite often. The other one I'll keep shorter, but it's like someone on the, the planning or the merchandising team will have the KPI goal of getting inventory to be more efficient. So we'll have to move through items that were more over inventoried in. And sometimes you can per, you can very nicely align like marketing and like growth objectives with moving through excess inventory. And then there's other instances where hey, if we really want to move through this inventory, it will take time and attention away from more growth oriented opportunities. So that's also something you have to navigate where it's like, yeah, we can really try to sell these wallets that nobody wants, but we're making compromises elsewhere. And I think from my perspective, just having those conversations, candidly identifying when KPIs become at odds and Then just having those conversations candidly, it's typically pretty easy to like find a, some sort of compromise.
Sean
Yeah, the example I was going to give is similar to your last one where I, I'm seeing this as we're starting to think about our strategic business units within the context of our overall business target. So it's like all right, how you know, we have our total revenue, total efficiency target but now we also have a, a knives revenue target, an aprons revenue target, a mills revenue target and you know, a user generated content style ad for an apron is probably going to take just as much time to make as the same style of ad for cookware. But we might put 10x the, the spend behind it. So you know, same thing you're kind of thinking through like the opportunity cost here and then, and then as you get into the quarter and you're like hey, you know if, if we're under pacing on total business revenue and we're hitting knives, hitting mills, but we're, let's say we're under aprons, like you probably need to sacrifice the aprons target and go and hit your total business level target. So you're kind of always making those, those, those decisions in that context. I think you try to minimize those things. But like in that scenario like you have to have targets for all of your product categories. You have to have an overall target. So it's impossible for them not to at some point kind of come into contradiction with one another. But like I think you just always have to understand what's the most important KPI and be willing to you know, tip over that way if, if push comes to shove.
Connor
Yeah, sorry. What I was going to add there is the other interesting dimension of that is what is like the longer term vision for that KPI. Like, like we've talked about this before also but we often are over indexing or spending like yeah, we're over indexing in time and energy spent on new categories not because it's what's best for the business in that month or that quarter, but because we think travel, yes, carry ons are going to be a massive category two years from now. So, so that's another very important piece of like aligning the business is we are actively making a trade off. We're going to sell some amount fewer wallets today because we're spending time and energy selling carry ons. But we think the net outcome over 18 months is actually significantly higher if we make that investment in travel today.
Sean
Right.
Cody
Well and, and, and what I'm realizing as we're also trying to plan further out in the future is like most teams are going to be, you know, have KPIs for that'll be related to business performance this year. Like our product team is like, you know, they got to be the furthest out so they're working on stuff for next year and even the following year. And like really the work that they're doing this year is really going to be, you know, for the following year. So some, some of their goals are not even going to be. It's really like how are we measuring the inputs that they're having for next year's performance?
Connor
Totally.
Sean
Which is like a very different framing, very future facing. How do you handle, how do you handle a, a initiative that is cleanly on your team slash someone that reports into you, but it's, it's not an obvious revenue driving opportunity. So I think about this right now. The, what I'm thinking about is our product using care. We don't get great engagement on what we're currently doing. I think it's absolutely critical for us to have really good own media content that goes out post purchase that very clearly explains the best way to get value out of your product. So that is a key initiative. I'm never, you know, maybe at some point in time I do attach a, a key result to it. Like maybe it's again open rate or click rate or something. But you know that that's one of those ones where it's like, yes, this is very important to ensure customer satisfaction, but it's kind of the same situation as before where it's going to take as much time to build this out as it would to build out like a automation that's going to sell a bunch of products. So I still think we have to do both. But do you think about that the same way where it's like, I guess how, how are you guys thinking about that stuff? Because it's kind of tangentially related to what we were just talking about and like the opportunity cost of, of time and, and revenue and all that.
Connor
Do you have an answer, Cody?
Cody
Yeah, you know, I think about like what Jared said on the podcast. He's like sometimes you just have to do stuff because it's good marketing and you just believe it's good marketing. And I feel like some of that is similar. It's like, hey, I can't, I can't attach an ROI to this. But it's just a project that I believe in and my vision for the company aligns with this. So I think that's one aspect. Even we have a marketing operations team that they're our project management team. They might have the KPI to have. We'll do a creative brief or a handbook that will brief the whole team on it. Part of their KPI is to have one finalized and sent out, whatever it is, two months before every launch. You know what I mean? And I can't necessarily say there's a revenue component to that, but, yep, they're. And maybe, maybe I might get a to and from. Like, I might say, hey, we're currently at a month and I want you to get it to two months. And if you do that, like, that's considered the goal. So there is some level of improvement. It's not just doing their job, as we've discussed, But I think I just, like, have confidence that that'll be the right thing. But I think maybe just like being mindful of second and third order order consequences if you're doing, hey, if we are prioritizing this, what are we deprioritizing? Or if we're incentivizing this, what are we then, you know, potentially de. Incentivizing, you know, is. Am I saying to my customer service team that they need a limit, you know, tickets as their KPI and they'll get bonused if they hit that? And now they're arguing with my director of E. Comm to put a widget on the site. And now that's tanking conversion rate. Like, you. You don't want to have that happen, right?
Sean
Yep.
Connor
Yeah. For those listening, Cody just referenced Jared Brody, EVP of Nectar Mattress, episode 24, quick shout out. One of. One of our best episodes.
Sean
Wait, don't tell me I was. Don't tell me that was off the dome episode 24.
Connor
No, I got it pulled up here.
Cody
Thank you.
Jared
Thank you for the assistance.
Connor
You know, so we have a similar.
Cody
We have.
Connor
We have. I think we had a similar conversation internally recently. We launched this loyalty experience, which I'm excited about. We're getting a ton of people signed in on our site with that. We're doing light personalization. So I'm calling it a loyalty experience on a loyalty program. There's no points involved. There's no incentive. It's just like, how do we make being a customer of Ridge a better experience? Also something that's extremely difficult to measure. So we're spending this time and energy, and I think it's at a good place. And let's just imagine that it's like, fully done and we feel amazing about it. And this actually, no, before we get to that place I was telling my team like, hey, let's not over index on like really like fine tuning this thing. I was like, let's also pay attention to how we're, we're driving people to this experience. And that's what I think might be relevant for you guys. Connor is if you guys have, if you guys are going to spend the time and energy investing in the best in class like product education videos, are there channel strategies that can just drive more attention there you've created something you feel great about. Can customer experience link to it? Can there be more retention flows? Can there be a on site experience for signed in customers that are driving them to things like that is like a different sort of exercise. But if you're, if you're building like best in class experiences that aren't necessarily tied to driving incremental revenue, there's also a scenario of like how do you just get more juice from that squeeze?
Sean
Yeah, right.
Cody
I, I also think it's like, you know, just not even to your point, but just the entire like goal picking is kind of what our jobs are and what leadership is. And you know, we're kind of paid for, for saying hey, like these are the initiatives that we should be doing and our team should be doing to get the outcome. And there's a lot of responsibility in that because it's. No one's going to be perfect. And I've totally made many mistakes where I've picked a goal and said hey, I think this is what we should be doing. And then your team will go work on that because you're asking them to work on that and then they'll spend a lot of time and then you realize like, hey, this is not the thing we should be working on.
Connor
Right.
Cody
Like maybe it's not the loyalty program or maybe like we one year. And I think it was the right goal at the time, but our goal was to diversify off Meta. And so part of our KPI was hey, we shouldn't spend more than 70% of our budget on Meta. You know, but like that could have gone really wrong. It happened to be the right decision for us. But like you don't want to do that goal just for the sake of doing the goal. You want to diversify because it's the best thing for your business. But it's also very easy to just be, to, to, to have that actually, you know, end up harming your business. So I think that's just the, there was some like Critical thinking. I, I guess in there and, and we just like, you know, have to be mindful of it and not gonna be perfect. I've picked many goals where you know, it was the wrong thing and hopefully like now I just try to have no shame and be like, hey, I picked a bad goal. We're gonna change that. Ignore that one. I know we're two months into it, things have changed. Sorry about that. That's my bad.
Sean
I, we, we make it like a, this is like a three or four week process every, at the end of every quarter and like that's intentional because there's like just a lot of baked in thoughtfulness. It's like, you know, the team like the person comes up with their own draft targets. I'm bringing some to the table. We meet on it, we beat them up, they, they, they revise them, we, we chat again about it. So like we're usually chatting about these things like three, four times before we finalize them. So it's, I think it's really important to do that to make sure you're being like to your point, incredibly, incredibly thoughtful about how you're using your team's resources. I mean this is arguably the most important part of our jobs is putting up the direction and then making sure that we're not floating off the wrong way.
Jared
We have zero customer support ticket backlog right now, which is awesome. And it's all because we switched to Rich panel at the start of Q4. Q1 is usually when we're absolutely drowning in customer support tickets from Black Friday and holiday season, but right now we have none. So was it risky switching our tech stack right before peak season? Sure, but I couldn't be happier with the decision. Since switching to Rich panel, we've gone from overwhelmed to having an empty inbox which is the place we want to be. Here are three of my favorite things with Rich panel so far. Number one, if you know me, you know I love saving costs. So we save costs on the actual software by 50% right away. Much better deal. We also, I love it.
Cody
The features.
Jared
We have better features, better support. I see our team going back and forth with Rich panel. Even the CEO Amit is in there all the time giving our team support, building out new features for us. Immediate impact. The analytics are great as the, you know, the automations are amazing. The AI social media moderator as well, you name it. There's just been so many features that have, we've been able to add on to either reduce our tickets or increase our efficiency, which is the Name of the game. Second thing is we've actually had 1.26 million in revenue generated from our CX team in the last four months, literally turning CX from a cost center to a profit center. And third is getting early access to all their new features that are being released, like updated analytics, dashboard, a bunch of AI stuff, AI Social media manager, you name it. It's been super helpful for us. You probably have a backlog of meta ad comments if you're like one of the operators and spending heavily. And that's where I love the AI social media manager. You're able to set everything up, automate it. It's able to learn from your best agents, your best replies. People think it's a human. It's amazing and it's allowing us just to get back to everybody, offer a better customer experience, answer questions to get our ads performing better. So I love it. If you want to join the 2000 plus, 7, 8 and 9 figure brands that switch to rich panel to save money, save time and keep your customer service team happy, I highly recommend it. We switched at a really important time and they came through for us. So if you want to slash your customer support expenses by at least 30% overnight while reducing tickets, go to richpanel.comdemo to book a call and learn more. That's richpanel.comdemo.
Cody
Last question I have on, on KPIs, do you guys either officially or unofficially or not tying compensation to them?
Sean
I'd say depends on what you mean by unofficially or officially. I would say unofficially. Like, you know, basically the way, you know, we don't have like a very rigid bonus structure.
Cody
So official would be like, hey, this is our bonus plan. If you hit your KPIs or hit this percentage of KPIs, you'll be bonus this much. Like some companies will do that.
Sean
Oh right.
Cody
Like official, unofficial might be like, hey, you know, we'll rate you however our rating system is and we'll kind of use the KPIs to do that. And I guess not at all would be, you know, you have a completely separate system for bonusing and comp.
Sean
Yeah, I'd say, I'd say unofficial then, you know, we're, I'm, I'm using these. I encourage the team to use their hit rate with me as leverage when they're saying, hey, I think I deserve this bonus. And I am doing the same thing with leadership when I'm going and saying, hey, this person deserves this bonus. Which is also first and foremost like did we hit Our business targets? Yes. No.
Cody
Right.
Sean
And then, and then next, did this person hit their targets and did they pull their end of the bargain on contributing to the total business target? So unofficially leaning on them quite heavily. It's, you know, we. We're trying to get better at, like, having these formal recap decks. They're a little, like, messy right now, but I'm trying to get those more buttoned up. So when I get to the end of the quarter, the end of the year, it's like, here's the deck. It's. It's right here. Literally every single thing, initiative by initiative, key result by key result is outline what it was. If it's a key result, it's like the percent of the way we hit it. And then if it's a key initiative, it's, you know, most key initiatives have like, a deliverable associated. So it's like, here's the deliverable associated with that key initiative. It's pretty black and white, cut and dry. So trying to continue to get better at, like, having that be a good leverage. Use of piece of leverage for. For making these really easy decisions to say yay or nay on a certain bonus.
Cody
How about you guys?
Jared
Connor?
Connor
Also unofficial. Like, we have. We're doing reviews. We have the rating system, we have the KPIs. And those are like breadcrumbs that will lead to, hey, you got. We hit our business targets. You were 8 out of 10, therefore. And then that's like, relatively standard across the business because. Yeah, I mean, as you guys could tell, I have a lot of difficulties with the rigidity of certain KPIs. And like, I'd feel the same way about bonuses where it's just like, there's too many, too many interdependencies to say, like, I can tie this to a dollar value that we can do at the end of the year.
Cody
Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, it makes it very hard. We're going more official. We, again, we have had it complete opposite. We've had one end inspector where, like, people don't even necessarily have KPIs. And bonus is kind of just discretionary based on a rating. But. But what I found is that rating system is so subjective and different managers will have completely different, different expectations for people. And I think overall, we're just trying to increase the level of accountability and expectations. And I think it. It makes. We're trying to really. What I realized is, like, we had too small of a gap between our lower performers and our top performers in terms of their, you know, their bonus. And comp. And I don't, I don't think that's fair to, to anybody, but definitely not fair to top performers. So we're trying to kind of uncap it a little bit more and, and really be like a little bit more of a formula system where like, hey, if you hit this number of goals, you're eligible for this much. If you hit this much, you're, you know, if you hit all, let's say you have four KPI or five KPIs and you hit four out of five, maybe you're eligible for, you know what we considered in the past was a full bonus percent if you hit 5 out of 5. Like you're actually way, way above that because that's probably going to be very rare. People do, but like you're crushing it if you do that. Like you should totally be rewarded. You like probably open multiple new warehouses, you probably, you know, negotiated with suppliers and got these savings, like why not? Like you should be rewarded for that. But also, you know, if you hit two out of five goals, you're not, you know, you're not going to have the same amount. I think right now in a doing well, fast growing company, like it's kind of easy to not hit all your goals and kind of just, you know, do your, your core job, but not necessarily like improve aspects of your, of your role and it's, it makes it a lot harder in the past has made it a lot harder to go to those people and say like, hey, this is why you're not getting, you know, maybe the necessary bonus. It's because it was so subjective and I think I just want to arm the whole, all the managers with a little bit more of an objective way to be like, hey, you hit this one, you hit this one, you didn't hit these three. So you know, that's, that's you know, 40% so you're eligible for this amount of it and it's, it's a little bit more of like this is what I signed up for and not everyone's gonna like that. Like I expect that when we roll it out. Some people might not like it, but it's definitely just like the, what I think we need to do to kind of shift the culture in like the right direction for our next phase.
Connor
Totally. You know, you said one thing this, the subjectivity of the rating system. And I totally agree. I don't have all these details and I don't quite remember it, so I'm not going to be great at speaking to it. But we did A cool thing at the end of the year where we had manager reviews and then we had peer reviews. We had like multiple different types of reviews. And then, and then the, the managers obviously did all of their teams so that everybody got scores. And then you could see like certain managers were like really harsh with their scoring. Like their average would be like a 6.5. You see other managers were like really fluffy. Average was like 8.5 or whatever. So we would adjust for those differences. So we tried to standardize the, the scores as much as possible across the business and then use that to like create bands for bonuses. And I was like, that was by far the most scientific we've ever been about it. And frankly felt very fair. Not quite. I like what you described as well, but I thought it was just another interesting example of like how do you create some amount of standardization across teams, eliminate some amount of subjectivity in that sort of thing.
Cody
Yeah, yeah. And there's no like one way to do it. Like we were very far on one side of the spectrum. I imagine we're probably getting too far on the other side and we might have to claw it back a little bit. We'll see. But yeah, I think God, find what works for your, for your company and your culture. But yeah, trying to get it a little bit more standardized and, and kind of have these goals to be like, you hit them, you crush them.
Jared
Great job.
Cody
You should get rewarded. Anything else on KPIs you want to do before we. Maybe we don't have that much time left. Tackle some reporting.
Sean
I'm curious, I want to ask you, I want to ask you guys because we used to do. I'm curious your thoughts on this methodology. We used to do a very. It wasn't related to their key projects at all, but we used to have a very scientific way that we since got rid of because we were just like. It was kind of when we were in more unpredictable growth seasons, but basically it was year over year revenue differences. So growth in revenue. And then everyone had a multiplier on that. And the multiplier was kind of based on the amount that you're contributing and like value that you're providing towards that, that, that number. So as you would like get more senior, your multiplier was higher but basically everyone was attached to the company's total target then. And you know, it was like the more we beat it, the more you're going to make in bonus. It's just a matter of what that multiplier is. Do you guys, what do you think of that method, dude, I love.
Connor
I think that's extremely cool.
Sean
The problem was we reforecasted a few times and it's like now this like math doesn't really work that well.
Connor
If you have a down year, you have to charge your employees.
Sean
Exactly. Right? Yes.
Cody
Yeah, yeah. You owe us at the end of year.
Connor
Yeah, no, no, honestly, Obviously imperfect system. But like, that's the sort of like those, those relative metrics, like, I just think make a lot of sense to me. And you could also set it up where it's like you have a baseline. Like you have a baseline, you have a bottom on it. And then, and then depending on what growth is on top of it, then you have a multiplier. That would make total sense. You're getting everybody marching in the same direction. Goals are adjusting where it's like, yeah, I would hope I would get a larger bonus if we grew 60% versus 15%. And if that is just a multiple attached to the growth metrics, should probably be on contribution margin, something like that. But you get really cool with it.
Cody
Yeah, ours is similar. A little different in practice, but I think like it ends up being the same. So we're doing of your total eligible bonus, that's a percentage. So each level have a different percentage. Right. But if you're like a director, 70% will be related to your individual KPIs, 30 will be business performance. And so if the business hits 100 of its goals, that 30%, you get the full thing that you're eligible for. And then if you hit four out of five of your goals, you get whatever it is, 80%, 85%, you know, of that. So that, that's kind of how, how we're doing it. There is a little bit of rating, but, but it's based on those two.
Connor
And then, and then if the business was, you know, 110% of goal, are they getting 33%? Like, do they have the ability to kind of get additional bonuses if the business is surpassing its, its projections?
Cody
I'd say discretionary.
Connor
Yeah.
Cody
Like in the, in the past, you know, we, we've, we, we think we've been pretty generous and it's been, hey, the, the business had a great year. You know, a. We think you performed really well, but also the business did really well. And we try to communicate that because we, we've been pretty generous with our bonuses. But you know, we try to say, hey, like, we can't guarantee that the business is going to do this well every year. But yeah, so I think a lot of some of it is discretionary, even if it's not in writing.
Connor
Totally.
Cody
All right, reporting, what does reporting look like? We've touched on it a little bit. Let's go, let's go. Rich. To start, like what does reporting look like? How often do you do it? Who does it, what's the format of it? What, what can you share? Just kind of keep it short, brief because we don't have much time tactical so people can learn what they should implement in their businesses.
Connor
Yeah, I can keep it short and sweet here. We've got two main meetings actually it's not the, the two that I typically talk about. We do our marketing all hands where I report on the previous week's results and that is everything I mentioned earlier. Revenue, spend, contribution, margin, where we are relative to goal. We do that across categories, across markets. We're setting expectations for the week. If there's any like fires we need to put out, we handle it there. What also happens in that meeting is we have our, our paid social director, our director of retention and at times our senior E Comm manager reporting on some of their main metrics. And I say metrics and not KPIs because what we're looking at is what are the things that we're measuring and are we growing year over year? We aren't necessarily saying we are above or below our target, but we're on that kind of treadmill of trying to ensure we're seeing improvements. So that's kind of how we level set for the week. That happens every single week. And then I mentioned the weekly business review Thursdays where we do that with the entire organization. Our director of merchandising and director of planning are involved in that. So we could talk about inventory position so it becomes ops related, etc. So those are the two big reporting days. Monday, Thursday, we do that weekly. Like I said, Sean does the end of month and end of quarter results. But that's basically the high level overview.
Cody
So it sounds like one of them is marketing. It's like marketing leadership going over like growth numbers and the other is kind of like cross department leaders to share anything that's relevant between them.
Connor
Yes, basically.
Cody
Do you have finance in that as well?
Connor
Finance is in the weekly business review. Yeah.
Cody
Okay. And just, just leadership. Not like whole marketing team, just like. No.
Connor
Yeah, so. So you said leadership. No, marketing all hands. Is everybody on the, the marketing team. So we could discuss that.
Cody
How about the, the business review like between departments, weekly business reviews also in.
Connor
Front of the whole company. So if we need to have like a more strategic financial decision that will happen in like a smaller group. But the open discussion of where are we performing relative to projections and across all the dimensions we care about that happens in front of. That's the meeting that I mentioned earlier. That's like 80, 90 people overseas staff are in there too. Yeah.
Cody
Okay. You guys are pretty transparent. Then I found we, we used to do really the, the only one we do right. So we do a monthly all hands that's kind of just, you know, here's how we're doing year to date we, we talk about some of our like big rock goals or initiatives, store openings, new team members, HR stuff, you know, some, some performance which are revenue contribution margin, you know, like right now we had one today shared like where I think macro economy, you know, is at and what that means for us. But, but that that's monthly. And then we used to have a whole marketing team meeting and I changed that to marketing leads only. So anybody who's either a director or just like the head of their department, so if they're like senior manager of social, but they're like the most senior social person, they're in it. I just found it was. I could be more transparent, I could be more myself with just, you know, leadership versus like with everybody in it. I just didn't necessarily love. I didn't feel like we could be kind of as transparent about that. So that's, that's I guess our only current marketing one. And then we do a lot Async so people will share in that. They'll share. For me, the biggest thing from any director and this is any channel director and above is share their numbers against, against forecast. So I hate against week over week because that there's no accountability in there. If you're like, hey, you know, email revenue is down week over week. But we had a launch last week. It's like there's no accountability. So it's. How are we pacing against our forecast? So you know, we are x percent up, we're X percent down analysis. This is what's going well, this is what's not going well. And then action plan and support needed. Here's what I'm doing about it and here's you know, what support I need. So that's kind of what we do in, in the marketing, you know, leads meeting and then if I have right now I do them async but if I have like standups with people, that's kind of what they're sharing as well. And that's like to me like non negotiable a must. Like I don't want anybody sharing. First of all, if you're, I want everyone owning their numbers. Like it's, it's not a reflection on anybody that you're down. Like you're gonna have weeks that you're down. Not everybody's gonna hit every number every month. Right. That doesn't reflect poorly on any anybody. I think, I think that takes a strong leader to get. Hey, we're, we're below forecast. It's not great right now. Here's why I think but I, but I also want them to be like here's why and here's what I'm doing about it. So I don't want them to hide the numbers and I don't want them to just share the numbers and be like I hope it'll get better. And so to me that's like what's most important however you're doing the reporting is if it's async whole meeting, you know, small meeting, whole company. Like that's, that's what I look for.
Connor
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Cody
Sorry, we don't do that much channel level actually I just don't love playing attribution. Really the only channel level is retention. So we'll look at you know, ga last click email and sms. What we'll do is we'll, we'll get you know our monthly, weekly daily like blended business revenue. So we have you know your normal like revenue Amer mer new customer revenue repeat. So like all report on the total business. Director of growth will report on acquisition AME R spend CAC efficiency Director retention will report on repeat revenue. But then they'll also report on you know, email. We'll look at email and SMS GA combined. So we'll, we'll have a number and we'll look at year over year historical percents. So we might say hey, you know, in what month are we? March of 2023 and 2024 email and SMS combined were 18% of business. You know, the last three months we've been trailing at 20 maybe because we're getting above like let's just pick a number and say hey, our goal is 20% of business. If it's a 15 million dollar month, what's you know, 20% of that is kind of our, our target. So that's how we do it. And then we'll have a monthly and we'll just you know for like our, for our depends how granular you want to go for like total business revenue. Right. Like we're not going to just. We have a daily revenue target for that. Right. It's like different based on launches and stuff. I don't know if you need to do that for every channel. Right. Like for influencer we have you know like you don't need to do that. So it depends how you want to go to have pacing. You could just split it in four but so that's how. But we don't really look at like Facebook reported revenue. So that's not like one of our KPIs.
Connor
Totally. Okay, cool. Makes total sense. Very last, very in the weeds question. In the retention example, the person's reporting you have a weekly marketing leads meeting your director of retention saying hey last week we did a hundred thousand Dollars in email and SMS in GA. That's 18% of revenue. That's what it looks like. Or then I can compare it year over year. Where does that data live? Do they take that out of GA and put it in a spreadsheet? Is it a screenshot? Like, how are they speaking to it?
Cody
It's a great question. So in the meeting we have a deck. I'm happy to, happy to share. We just have a deck where we'll just have a slide, like minds up front, total business, you know, then Mike going to director, growth director, creative director of retention, stuff like that. So everyone will just put in their slide and we just have like a format or we'll have like somebody junior on the team, you know, input it. But we have most, most stuff is in spreadsheets and we use, you know, Da City for a warehouse. So it'll kind of automatically pipe in daily. Got it. You know, revenue versus actuals. And then sometimes like, like I, you know, I canceled my standups and we're just doing them. Async will only meet if like we need to. They're just sending me like a screenshot in slacks. Like I don't care about it being inadequate. Check as long as we got the data.
Connor
Got it. Cool.
Sean
You do that.
Connor
With their questions.
Cody
I plead the fifth weekly. For which one?
Sean
For that marketing leads where they're reporting on their channel.
Cody
Yeah, that's weekly. And a lot of that meeting is inspired by Connor as well. So we're stealing things from each other. But that's where when we have upcoming launches and stuff, we'll put this big fig jam board together where we'll look at all of our assets together, all of our strategies together. So that's the second half of that meeting. Meeting. So kind of cool how we're kind of combining some strategies. But yeah, that's weekly and then usually stand ups are weekly as well. It's a little duplicative where, like, you know, my director of retention on Monday during standup might share her pacing for the week and she's doing the same thing on Thursday for the meeting. But there's, there's, I think some value, like I can get more feedback or we can get a little bit more in the weeds. If it's individually versus in the broader meeting, it's a little bit more for visibility and like, I don't like giving feedback publicly. I'll ask questions like, hey, have you thought about this? Like, are we doing that? But also one of it is plan and support needed. So like our retention Person might, might be like hey to our, you know, lead designer, like just we have a bunch of briefs coming your way or our copywriters in the meeting. So some of that is to understand like where the priorities are and so the people can kind of know what's going to be, you know, supported. So some of it is just more of like a visibility thing as well. Well, right. What about you guys at hexcloud? What's your meeting structure looking like these days?
Sean
Yeah, you know we're you know we kind of have the, the three layers. We have our business like overall business health, the overall channel reporting and then the reporting against your key results and initiatives. So overall business and the reason I brought this up in the group chat is because we're actually in the process of not maybe it's like repositioning like how we do it and with who and when. So that's why I was asking like do you do that weekly? Because we're kind of noodling on whether or not we should have these like pretty in depth channel level reports for week over week and year over year every single week. I'm not sure yet, but at a minimum yeah, like total business health reporting happening weekly ad spend myrrh revenue against forecast year over year. And then we're you know, know other other metrics that aren't like the total business health but you know like first orders, repeat orders, Shopify, cac, stuff like that. So that's happening every single week with with some key members of growth, with finance, with our president as our overall overall business health check. We do the key result updates every other week in our one on one. So basically right in that spreadsheet updating like how are you pacing towards this? Like what percentage of the way are you there? And then in smaller groups throughout the week every single week. It's a mix of asynchronous and and have happening in like a small pod meeting is when the current channel updates are happening. But I don't think we're doing a good enough job of like bringing all the marketing channel leads together and having that happen with the, the affiliate hearing, the paid media lead hearing, the retention like that's the big pivot I think we need to make is because I think it's really important for everyone to know that. Whereas right now it's like like weekly updates on Facebook with you know year over year comp week over week comps and all sorts of other data. But it's just that paid media pod going really deep and like same Thing on retention. It's like the retention lead reviewing campaign performance with the retention team and the content team and some of our copywriters, they're trying to understand which content perform well, which is good and we need that. But I'm also thinking through like what's a good cadence for the marketing team to come together and, and have everyone else understand how the other channels are doing. So, so I think that's like what you guys do that I think is kind of probably where we need to pivot is figuring out the cadence for that. Maybe it's, maybe it's every other week to start to make it. Not too much. But we just went through this, this new reporting package for the first time this week and it was just like so much data that I just like don't know if it's that relevant on that granular of a, of a time horizon being one week but maybe two weeks, maybe once a month we do that. We're I think levels. I don't know if I may have maybe brought them up levels and their investor updates. They do such an awesome job in their investor updates and like their channel breakdowns in those if they're, they're public. If you go to the footer, it's super cool. If you go to the footer of their website you can see their investor updates and every single month they do a super in depth breakdown on every single growth marketing channel. What where the data is trending and then, and then like really going all the way through on what you want to see in like a data driven report. Like, like here's the data, here's why the we, we think the data is what it is and here's what we're planning to do about it to make it. It's. It's amazing. I think they're like one of the best in class at, at like just overalls Health. It's the continuous glucose monitor company.
Connor
Huh?
Cody
Oh wow. Yeah, man. Now this, this is awesome. This is super dope. This is monthly.
Sean
I think they do it monthly if I remember correctly. I'm pretty sure they're like labeled by the month and like the headline.
Cody
Yeah, dude, I'm, I'm pretty pro spacing things out and like pushing it. Like I remember when Harley was on, he was like we canceled all meetings. Like I'm kind of fan of that and like if you think stuff is not getting communicated like add it more often. Like we used to do monthly board meetings and like, like it was just one week of every month was just like spent on building the meetings. Like at a startup, you, you know, you can't do that. So now like we push it every two months and now it's every three and nothing really is falling through the cracks. You know, we can pick up the phone between if we need. So like I'm, I'm, I'm a fan at least because I'm, you know, pretty busy of like pushing things back as much as possible and just kind of seeing what you can do async between. But obviously it's going to depend on, on, you know, what you need and like other things I found like, like I feel like in a startup the weeks go so quickly. So if I had a standup on Monday, by Friday I was almost like, man, I have, like, it's been a while. Like I haven't heard any update on this. So I actually asked, started asking people for like status updates. I really wanted to just do like a what did you get done this week? So I kind of peppered that in there with a few other questions, but it's actually been really helpful. So it's just like status update, you know, update me on like what progress you made. So I gave a template, I forget what's in it, but essentially just, you know, what did you get done this week? Like do you need to, do we need to meet next week for standup? You know, what do you need for me? Like what do you need me to review and stuff like that? Because I started like blocking my review time. And one of the things we do in that that I find incredibly helpful, I got it from, from Kat Cole, who's CEO of Athletic Greens. And, and she kind of did like a lunch and learn with our team. She does something called made my week difficult. So in like one on ones or stand up, she'll ask people what made their week difficult. And I find it's just such like a great continuous iteration feedback tool. So people will be like, hey, I'm spending a lot of time waiting on data analysis or like this thing is broken or I don't have the resources here and I won't always act right away, but I'll get it and consolidate it. And if multiple people are saying, hey, creative requests are taking a while, I'll flag that to my head of marketing ops. And I'm like, hey, like, can you investigate this for me? And like, can you come up with some solutions? So I found that to be something that's like really helpful. So personally for me, like I'm, I'm doing a lot more Async. It might take people a little bit more time to fill it out, but like, Monday I'm getting a lot of, I'm getting kind of like the Async stand up stuff that there's one template for. And then Friday I'm getting like an end of the week reporting. And either they tell me if they need to meet or I say, hey, that's interesting, let's go look at it together. But instead of like. Because what I found is I was doing these, these standups with like five people on a Monday. So that's like, like, you know, three hours of my Monday was just in standups and like it was 30 minutes and it was on the calendar. So we were spending time doing it anyways, even though it could have been Async or something. And now it's like I have a time blocked every Monday and I might pick two of the people that are sending me their, their report and be like, hey, let's meet about that. I want to spend a few minutes. But you might not have to spend half an hour with them. You might be able to spend like 10 minutes. So that's at least something that I've, I've found to be helpful.
Sean
Oh, I see. So you're basically like cherry picking the thing from the asynchronous report that you're like, oh, that's the, that we actually should talk about because you can't handle it asynchronously. Whatever it is.
Cody
Just be like easier. But sometimes like, you know, director of retention might send me something. I'm like, great. Like, you're, you're, you're doing a great job. You're pushing things forward. Seems like you have everything you need. Like, yeah, great. Keep, keep it up.
Sean
That's awesome. Okay, cool.
Cody
So that, that's been really helpful for me. So I've been like blocking my time more. Well, I'll also have like open hours. So I took those like two hours from standups. What I found is instead of three, now it's two and it's open hours. So it's like first come, first serve. Like if we decide we need to meet, we have it there. But it's like, I'm not gonna block anything. I'm not gonna schedule anything else there. That's been really helpful. And I don't know how many, how much you guys are like reviewing things and like assets. I also started blocking two hours a week, like different times to get reviews. So if I need to like review homepage copy or review something or like A deck. Like, it'll get sent to my assistant and I'll just do it, like, during those hours. And I don't have to do as much context switching, so I'm able to, like, get a lot more done and just like, bang through some of those reviews in.
Sean
So you have, like, office hours, more or less. Then that's like, we're doing the Meet Async, and then you kind of office hours that you're like, hey, can you come to my office hours? And let's. Let's talk about this, like, one specific thing that was in your Async update.
Cody
Yeah, yeah, pretty much. Cause, like, some stuff I'm. I prefer to do Async. Some stuff. I feel like it's better in person, but then you just get straight to that, you know, so it's not for everybody. I think everybody's got to find, like, what works for them individually and then also for their team. But both. Both of those have been, like, really helpful for me. I have no idea if my team likes it or not. They might like the meetings more, but it's working for me. All right, well, that was fun. Thank you, guys.
Connor
All right, later, guys.
Cody
Another great episode in the books. That was episode 52, all about KPI's reporting and meetings. Thanks for listening. I hope we enjoyed this one. As always, thank you so much to our sponsors, Motion Pression, Rich Panel, After Sale and North Beam. Check them all out. And as always, please if you enjoyed this, share it with your friends, share it with your team and subscribe anywhere you listen on YouTube or wherever you at your podcast. See you guys next time.
Release Date: March 25, 2025
Hosts: Connor Rolain, Connor MacDonald, Cody Plofker
Guests: Sean (CEO), Jared
The episode kicks off with the hosts celebrating their milestone of reaching 52 episodes. Cody humorously acknowledges their modest listener base, stating, "We probably have four listeners that we have still." Despite the lighthearted banter, the focus swiftly shifts to the episode's main topic: Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), reporting structures, and meeting strategies to drive organizational results.
Connor MacDonald from Ridge emphasizes the importance of transparency within the organization. At [04:04], he shares:
“We are extremely transparent... everybody has access to it. You have financial projects, we're tracking revenue over different periods of time... literally every single person in the company is on that call.”
This level of openness includes access to financial projections, revenue tracking, and contribution margins. Ridge conducts a weekly business review every Thursday, where all employees, including onshore and overseas staff, discuss previous week's results, projections, and current financial health.
Cody echoes a similar sentiment at [06:37]:
“I prefer to be pretty transparent. So pretty much revenue, you know, against forecast, against budget, down to contribution margin.”
However, he notes the challenges of over-sharing, especially when sensitive topics like employee compensation come into play.
Sean from Hexcloud outlines their approach to setting KPIs, focusing on aligning individual key results with overarching business objectives. At [12:41], he explains:
“We're making everyone have key results that are attached to our overall objective... optimizing towards a revenue and efficiency target that... backs into a bottom line margin number.”
This cascading method ensures that each team member's goals contribute directly to the company's primary objectives. For instance, a retention lead might have key results tied to repeat revenue and channel-specific targets like email and SMS performance.
Cody and Connor discuss the balance between relative and absolute KPIs, highlighting the difficulty in assigning responsibility for outcomes influenced by multiple factors. Cody shares a football analogy:
“Like Quan Barkley probably got something right for having a certain number of yards or a certain number of carries.”
This underscores the complexity of attributing success solely to individual efforts when external factors play a significant role.
The conversation delves into real-world scenarios where KPIs may conflict with business goals. Cody recounts instances where:
Personalization Initiatives: Launching a personalized experience increased orders but negatively impacted conversion rates, forcing a reprioritization of initiatives.
Inventory Efficiency: Focusing on moving excess inventory sometimes diverted resources from growth-oriented opportunities, requiring adjustments to align with overall business targets.
Sean adds that having both quantitative and qualitative KPIs helps navigate these challenges. For example, while a retention team might aim for repeat revenue growth, they also track channel-specific metrics to ensure alignment with broader objectives.
Discussing the integration of KPIs with compensation structures, Sean indicates a predominantly unofficial approach:
“We don't have like a very rigid bonus structure... we are using these. I encourage the team to use their hit rate with me as leverage when they're saying, hey, I think I deserve this bonus.”
Cody contrasts this with his organization's move towards a more official and formula-based bonus system, where hitting specific KPI thresholds directly correlates with bonus eligibility. He explains:
“If you hit this number of goals, you're eligible for this much... if you hit four out of five, maybe you're eligible for 80%, 85%, you know, of that.”
This structured approach aims to reduce subjectivity and ensure fairness across the board, though it comes with its own set of challenges, such as managing expectations and handling exceptions.
Effective reporting is pivotal in tracking KPIs and ensuring accountability. Connor describes Ridge's reporting cadence:
Marketing All-Hands Meetings: Weekly gatherings where leadership reviews revenue, spend, contribution margins, and specific channel performances. This includes cross-departmental updates from paid social, retention, and e-commerce managers.
Weekly Business Reviews: Broader organizational meetings involving finance and merchandising directors to assess overall business health, including inventory positions and operational metrics.
Cody shares that his team conducts a monthly all-hands meeting focused on year-to-date performance, big initiatives, and overall business health. Additionally, they hold asynchronous reporting sessions where directors share their progress against forecasts, fostering accountability without the rigidity of constant meetings.
Sean mentions the ongoing evolution of their reporting strategies, inspired by other companies like Levels and Continuous Glucose Monitor, aiming to balance in-depth channel reports with broader business health updates.
The hosts discuss the intricate balance between individual performance metrics and overall company success. Connor provides insights into managing KPIs that may not directly influence revenue but are vital for long-term growth. For example, initiatives like enhancing the loyalty program focus on customer experience without immediate revenue impacts.
Cody emphasizes the importance of critical thinking in goal setting, ensuring that initiatives align with the company's vision and long-term objectives. He cautions against setting KPIs that may incentivize detrimental behaviors, such as:
“If we give someone a conversion rate as their KPI, they might lower the free shipping threshold to boost conversions, harming overall profit margins.”
Transparency: Sharing relevant financial and performance data fosters accountability and motivation but requires careful handling to avoid misunderstandings.
Alignment: KPIs should cascade from company-wide objectives to individual roles, ensuring every team member contributes to overarching goals.
Flexibility: Regularly reforecasting and adjusting KPIs in response to business performance ensures targets remain feasible and aligned with current realities.
Balanced Compensation: Combining official formula-based bonuses with unofficial recognition can create a fair and motivating compensation structure.
Efficient Reporting: Structuring meetings to provide necessary updates without becoming time-consuming is crucial. Asynchronous reporting coupled with strategic meetings can enhance efficiency.
Critical Goal Setting: Prioritize initiatives that align with long-term vision, and be prepared to adjust KPIs when they conflict with business performance.
Episode E052 of Marketing Operators offers a deep dive into the nuanced process of setting KPIs, structuring reports, and running meetings that drive business results. Through candid discussions and shared experiences, the hosts provide valuable insights into balancing transparency, accountability, and strategic alignment within marketing operations. Whether you're a seasoned marketer or just starting, the strategies discussed offer actionable takeaways to refine your approach to performance management.
Notable Quotes:
Connor MacDonald [04:04]:
“Everybody has access to it... literally every single person in the company is on that call.”
Cody Plofker [06:37]:
“I prefer to be pretty transparent. So pretty much revenue, you know, against forecast, against budget, down to contribution margin.”
Sean [12:41]:
“We're making everyone have key results that are attached to our overall objective... optimizing towards a revenue and efficiency target that... backs into a bottom line margin number.”
Cody [17:24]:
“Public accountability is so powerful. If you just know you're gonna have to get up in there in a week and a month and report on your numbers.”
Sean [27:05]:
“If you have a role that's directly attached to revenue and efficiency, like I want you to be able to see that data because you need to make a connection between what you're doing and how that's contributing to like the top line revenue number.”
For more insights and strategies on marketing operations, subscribe to the Marketing Operators podcast on your preferred platform.