COACHING SESSION I: LEADING, PROBLEM SOLVING & EXAMPLE SETTING
- As a leader, have two or fewer drinks at your sales event, then exit before 9: 00 PM.
- Before putting them on a pedestal, make sure your new top producer isn’t cutting corners or cheating.
- Using rules of thumb or the opinions of others is a good place to start, but if you want to be an elite leader, use your math
- Here are four areas / questions we would discuss in our coaching sessions to assess sales-team engagement.
- Do my salespeople see compelling future roles into which they can advance?
- How do my salespeople perceive their territory or lead / account assignment?
- Do my salespeople feel like there’s an open-door policy that encourages them to communicate and share feedback with the executive team?
- How do my salespeople feel about their opportunity to develop professionally? (Note: This is distinctive from a promotion path)
- If you want to be successful as a leader in a startup, keep your head on a swivel, look for problems to solve across the company, learn that no job is beneath you. Roll up your sleeves and fix the problem.
- Five qualities every startup sales leader should have.
- NO FEAR OF FAILURE
- DATA DRIVEN
- MISSION ORIENTED
- HIGH PERSEVERANCE
- STRONG COMMUNICATOR
- Have you created really clear expectations for your team, in writing?
Coaching Session II: Hiring… Firing
- Sales leaders should always set MINIMUM LEVELS of attainment somewhere below 100 % of quota and create performance management systems around those minimum levels, rather than cutting good workers who might be coachable to that 100 % figure.
- When your top reps leave you, show care and appreciation for their decision. Don’t speak negatively about the company to which they’re going. Tell them the door is open for their return.
- A referral coming from a direct competitor doesn’t guarantee they will be a good fit for YOUR TEAM and YOUR CULTURE. Don’t assume they are.
- Somebody having been an athlete doesn’t guarantee they are competitive NOW. Make sure you’re interviewing sales candidates to determine if they’re competitive NOW.
- Don’t make your salespeople come to YOU to find out how they can get promoted. Create a multi-tiered, objective career path and watch them work with purpose.
- If you want a world-class sales team, why accept anything less than world-class behavior during the interview process?
- [Interview for] behavioral characteristics, like coachability, organization, competitiveness, need for achievement, and optimism,
- Conduct your own reference checks and view them as networking and recruiting opportunities, rather than merely transactional box-checks.
- I improved my hiring success rate to over 80 % with these five steps:
- Define IN WRITING the characteristics of what a great hire looks like.
- Develop a non-negotiable interview template for use by each interviewer.
- Develop a quick but thorough, multi-step interview process (under two weeks) to assess if your defined characteristics are present in the candidate.
- Evaluate your hires six months later and ask, “Knowing what I know now, would I hire this person again?“ (Yeah, it’s that complex.)
- Optimize your hiring process accordingly.
- When hiring for new sales leaders, ask your sales reps about THEIR favorite former managers, and start networking to recruit / hire them.
- A critical component of being great at sales is being competitive, but not all athletes are competitive, and many non-athletes ARE competitive.
- Four keys to adding headcount responsibly without over hiring.
- Do your math. Make the minimum number of hires to exceed next year’s goal by 33 %. Many aren’t using math to support their hires. This is a mistake.
- Create an intentional hiring process. Get really really clear on what an exceptional hire looks like, from the background to the behavioral components. Document it and stick to it.
- Improve your onboarding and training program. This is where I see many startups fail, especially when they’re hiring experienced salespeople. Make sure you have developed company, product, systems, and sales training.
- Clarify performance management. What does it take for a salesperson to get fired at your company? As grim as it sounds, you must get really, really clear about this.
Coaching Session III: Goals Priorities
- Don’t make your SKO about fluff, motivation, and stupid PowerPoint decks from your product marketing team. Emphasize tangible and objective training and certification.
- Distribute YOUR precious leads to reps who are ready and available to jump on them with urgency.
- While I don’t recommend sales contests as a tactical strategy to materially move the needle, you’re gonna do them anyway. So, if you do, make sure you: Get clear on metrics to move. Measure a baseline of those metrics in advance of the contest (something to compare the contest results to). Create incentives for bottom -, middle-and top-tier producers.
- Save yourself the time and hassle of the antiquated Annual Review process. Replace it with the more frequent, documented, weekly coaching your sales team really wants to help them improve. Don’t wait for the end of the quarter, and definitely not for year’s end. In a startup, life as a salesperson moves way faster than that.
- As a sales leader, you MUST protect your time and focus on your priorities. Switching costs are high, especially at early-stage startups. Learn to protect your time when interrupted by saying “Not now” to your sales team, unless it’s a true emergency.
- Hire salespeople who are chock full of drive, coachability, and optimism. Work tirelessly to coach and develop them. Forget trying to hire money-motivated salespeople.
- If you truly want to scale your sales team, you’ll have to learn that managing consistent inputs is critical to producing consistent outputs.
- It’s not micromanagement to set clear expectations. Hold your reps accountable to those expectations.
COACHING SESSION IV: ASSESSMENTS, COMP & PIPS
- Make sure you’ve documented exactly and objectively what it takes to get promoted on the sales floor.
- Set your PIP lengths longer than 90 days OR use secondary metrics, such as frequency or volume of PIPs, to determine if termination is necessary.
- If you really care about your salespeoples’ mental health, you’ll clearly document a performance management system so they don’t need to look over their shoulders everyday, wondering if they’re going to get fired.
- What if a rep takes advantage of your very liberal PTO policy by taking a month off, but the clients they manage renew, buy more, or keep spending with you in some other way? How will the rep get paid? Define it.
- SDRs should be compensated on: Qualified meetings HELD with …… your ideal customer, meaning they have … … the title you have prescribed (persona) …… who has a real problem on their hands … … that we might be able to solve after further discovery.
COACHING SESSION V: COACHING … ON LEADERSHIP COACHING
- Sales recognition programs don’t have to be expensive and lavish to achieve the goal of praising, thanking and publicly recognizing top salespeople.
- Sometimes salespeople are competitive with themselves and set their own high bars for themselves. Don’t pit those people against others; that’s not how they’re wired. The results will backfire.
- A big mistake I see sales leaders make is having a limited promotion path and no safety net for those who get promoted. When they promote people who fail to perform at the new, higher level, they’re fired.
- When giving free trials or pilots, make sure you:
- Set the expectation with your prospect that you’ll be asking for money at the end of the pilot or trial.
- Set a schedule of agreed-upon check-in meetings during the trial to help them use the product and solve their issues. This will move the sales process forward.
- Turn off the trial for any prospect who fails to live up to their commitments (i.e. blowing off a scheduled meeting).
- The great sales leaders know their job as a leader is to teach their teams (AEs, AMs, Sales Development Reps) to DIS-qualify, not to qualify, prospects.
COACHING SESSION VI: INTERESTING ANECDOTES & SOME OH, S%#T! MOMENTS
- As a sales leader, you must create a culture rooted in both performance AND behavior. If you don’t, you’ll find some of your reps will be undisciplined and entitled.
- I actually measured it at a previous company and found there was NO correlation between sales success (or even minimum attainment) and doing well in the role-playing exercise.
- Teach your salespeople to deliver the proposal pricing and then STFU.
- Salespeople, if you want your sales leader to do more great stuff for you and your team, THANK THEM when you see them doing great things.
- Praise in public, course-correct in private.
- Teach your sales reps to ask second-and third-level questions to find out if your prospects actually WANT to buy your product, even if they say they NEED your product. Have your team focus only on the prospects who need and want your offering.
- Educating your customers is one thing. Dissing the competition and being overly negative can have big consequences. Make sure your salespeople don’t cross the line into bad-mouthing the competition.