Sales already has a number. It is called quota, it is wired into the comp plan, and no OKR will ever compete with it for a rep's attention. The most common sales OKR mistake follows directly from this: writing "hit EUR 2M in new ARR" as an Objective. The comp plan already says that. An OKR restating it adds a second scoreboard for the same game and changes nothing.
Sales OKRs earn their slot when they target the things quota does not price: how you sell, which segments you open, what happens after the signature. A Key Result still needs a baseline and a target; the difference is that these numbers describe capability changes, and the quota benefits downstream.
Eight examples with mid-market B2B numbers. Adjust every figure to your own baseline before using any of them.
New business
Objective: Open the mid-market without letting the SMB engine stall.
- KR1: Build mid-market new ARR from EUR 0 to EUR 400k
- KR2: Lift mid-market win rate from 12% to 22%
- KR3: Hold SMB new ARR at or above EUR 1.8M through the transition
Segment-expansion OKRs need the floor KR. Without it, every strong rep drifts upmarket chasing bigger logos, and the segment paying today's salaries erodes in the dark. The floor makes the capacity trade-off a decision instead of an accident.
Objective: Make discovery the part competitors cannot copy.
- KR1: Raise opportunities with documented pain and a quantified metric from 40% to 90%
- KR2: Lift stage-2 to stage-3 conversion from 31% to 45%
- KR3: Improve average discovery score on call reviews from 2.4 to 4.0 out of 5
The scoring KR needs an agreed rubric and a manager actually reviewing calls, which is the real work hiding inside this OKR. Teams that adopt the metric without the review habit report a number nobody believes.
Objective: Shorten the road from demo to signature.
- KR1: Cut average sales cycle from 64 days to 45
- KR2: Reduce deals stuck in legal longer than 30 days from 11 to 3
- KR3: Send 90% of proposals within 48 hours of the demo, up from 35%
Cycle-time OKRs decompose well: the total is an outcome, and the two supporting KRs name the specific choke points found in the pipeline data. If your choke points differ, swap the sub-metrics, keep the shape.
Objective: Win on relationships wider than one champion.
- KR1: Raise multithreaded opportunities (3 or more active contacts) from 28% to 65%
- KR2: Identify an executive sponsor in 70% of qualified deals, up from 30%
- KR3: Lift win rate on deals over EUR 50k from 24% to 34%
Single-threaded deals die when the champion changes jobs, and the pipeline never records why. The win-rate KR keeps this honest; multithreading is a means, and if the win rate does not follow, the thesis was wrong for your motion.
Expansion and retention
Objective: Make expansion a running habit rather than a renewal scramble.
- KR1: Lift net revenue retention from 96% to 108%
- KR2: Grow expansion pipeline from EUR 300k to EUR 900k
- KR3: Hold customer QBRs with 95% of the top 50 accounts, up from 40%
The QBR KR is an activity metric, included deliberately as the leading indicator, with NRR as the outcome that keeps it honest. One activity KR per OKR is a reasonable ceiling; three would make the OKR a checklist.
Objective: Stop losing renewals we never saw coming.
- KR1: Flag 100% of renewals at risk at least 90 days out, up from 55%
- KR2: Cut quarterly logo churn from 3.2% to 1.8%
- KR3: Raise the save rate on flagged at-risk accounts from 20% to 50%
The uncomfortable discovery inside this OKR is usually that risk flags live in reps' heads. Making the flag a recorded, dated event is the prerequisite for both other numbers, and the reason the baseline on KR1 is worth measuring honestly.
Productivity
Objective: Ramp new reps in half the time without lowering the bar.
- KR1: Cut time to first closed deal from 5.2 months to 3
- KR2: Certify 100% of new reps on the current pitch and demo, up from 0%
- KR3: Raise pipeline built per ramped rep from EUR 250k to EUR 400k per quarter
Ramp OKRs matter most while hiring, which is exactly when nobody has time for them. The certification KR sounds bureaucratic and is the piece that makes the other two numbers repeatable instead of dependent on which manager onboarded whom.
Objective: Give the CFO a forecast worth planning on.
- KR1: Improve forecast accuracy from plus-or-minus 25% to plus-or-minus 8%
- KR2: Cut commit-stage slippage from 30% to 10%
- KR3: Bring CRM hygiene (every open deal has a next step and date) from 60% to 98%
Forecast OKRs change the conversation between sales and finance more than any dashboard purchase. The hygiene KR is the foundation: a forecast built on stale records is an opinion with a spreadsheet attached.
Adapting these to your team
Set targets from your own baselines, and check each draft against one question: does the comp plan already pay for this number? If yes, cut it and use the slot for something the quota cannot see. Two or three Objectives per team is plenty. The OKR template carries the baseline-target format, the OKR grader flags quota restatements and task-shaped KRs, and how to pick the right goal framework covers whether OKRs fit your stage at all.
Companion example sets: marketing OKRs, product OKRs, and engineering OKRs.
The gap the pipeline review misses
Sales OKRs fail differently from quota. Quota misses loudly, in the forecast call. An OKR like the discovery or multithreading example fails silently: the enablement work behind it stops after week three, and the KR is quietly abandoned while every 1:1 discusses deals instead. Whether a Key Result can still be reached at the current pace of the work behind it is a checkable fact, and that gap is execution risk. Teams that connect sales OKRs to the actual enablement and account work in Vindaris see the abandonment in week four, while the quarter can still absorb the correction.