who is managing your sales team?

Good morning Predictable Revenue community,

You’ve just spent months or years grinding to get to the mythical $83,333 MRR, hired your first salesperson, and now you can get sales off your plate forever… right?

Yes and no. It’s an amazing feeling to get most of the new customer calls off your plate and many founders I’ve worked with are tempted to hire a professional and let them do their thing. In some ways, this is a good thing, you give them the space they need to step into the role but backing out of the process entirely or backing out too quickly can cause problems. It’s hard to find the right balance of autonomy / management with a rep when you never worked in a professional sales organization.

Managing salespeople
If you’ve never managed a salesperson it can be a very new experience. We can be both confident and wishy washy at the same time. It must be frustrating and confusing. The biggest reason it’s hard to interface with a salesperson is that most companies don’t have processes that ensure your reps are organized. Good process is what takes a hard job and makes it straightforward. It documents “the way we do things here” and when it’s followed by everyone, it can make good reps into great reps.

Being a great salesperson is about doing a bunch of little things right, over and over and over again. Process is the key to consistency. But a process is worthless without someone to teach, update, and reinforce it. I’ll write more about the critical processes that help a sales team function next week, until them, here are three meetings that will help you support your reps:

• Pipeline review - reviewing deals to ensure what’s in forecast is accurate 

• Call review - listening to best/worst calls to provide feedback and encouragement 

• One on ones - managing energy, mindset, and growth goals of the individual 

These don’t have to be distinct meetings. Each one takes about 30 minutes to do effectively. 

Pipeline review 
This is where I review deals that are likely to close this month. I like to sort my opportunity list in descending order (latest stage at the top) and work my way down. For each late stage deal, I’ll ask three things:

• Is there a next step with the prospect on the calendar?

• Has the deal met the stage entry / exit criteria?

• What is the identified pain?

• How do we quantify that pain?

• Do we know the economic decision maker and what they want?

• Why is “do nothing” off the table”?

These questions are based on MEDDPICC but that’s more complex than most teams need to get started. I’m just a sales geek and enjoy the complexity.

Call review. 
Every week I ask my reps to bring me recordings of their best and worst calls from the last week. My goal is to find one area for improvement and one win to celebrate. I like to start with the worst call first so we can end on a positive note. 

When I first started doing these, I acted like it was a driving test, taking note of every tiny mistake no matter how significant. When we finished listening to the call, I would have my list of the 37 things you screwed up on this call. To make matters worse, I once let a class of MBAs sit in on one of these call review sessions (sorry Jason). Needless to say, these sessions weren’t helpful and over time I took a successful rep, murdered their confidence, and left them looking for another job. Not a moment I’m proud of.

Fortunately, I suck at golf and I remember watching a video where an instructor and student were at the driving range. The first take, the instructor watched a few drives and listed the 7 things the student needed to change for their next swing. It didn’t go well. Next, they tried again but only shared one thing to change. These drives went significantly better. Obviously the video was staged but it resonated so strongly with me that it’s burned into my memory.

When you listen to these calls, remember that our goal as a leader is to identify all the areas a rep needs to improve, prioritize them, and only share the one with the highest potential impact. This lets reps build confidence by focusing on one thing at a time.

One on ones.
You probably already have a one on one process so here’s my tl;dr on what’s unique about one on ones with salespeople. Salespeople are human, humans have emotions, and these emotions can impact their confidence.

First goal of a one on one is to connect with the human, make sure they’re good personally and professionally. 

Second goal is to talk through their progress from your weekly call reviews or quarterly development process.

Final goal is to remove any blockers, help unstick deals, and clear up any human to human issues. 

Summary
These meetings take a bit of practice to get into the habit. They can be awkward at first especially if you’ve been managing the rep for a while. It’s helpful to give them a heads up ahead of time that you want to try something different. I also recommend framing these new meetings as a way of helping improve them and the whole sales process. Some salespeople can see the additional oversight as a lack of trust so it’s important to call out your good intentions from the beginning.

Collin

PS - I have a quick and dirty sales forecast sheet I can share, hit me back with “forecast” and I’ll clean up mine and make it fit for sharing.

PPS - if you’re not already recording your sales calls, I highly recommend starting now. You don’t need to spend hundreds of dollars a month, tools like Fireflies.ai, Otter.ai, and fathom.video are all reasonably priced and do a decent job. Are there better tools? Maybe. Are there more expensive alternatives? Yup.