“Train your reps.” “Practice enablement.” “Hire the right people.”
A lot of advice on preparing your sales team for success is pretty vague. How can you even begin to implement “stay hungry” and get real results with it?
Forget that. We’ve got the real advice here: solid, tangible stuff you can use every day to actually hit those numbers.
We asked top sales leaders who can confirm these techniques work out in the real world, not just as concepts.
Smarter KPIs
When you’re measuring sales team performance and figuring out what needs to be improved, KPIs and metrics are key.
Clinton Patterson, VP of Global Sales Development at Lusha, has a simple formula for it.
“The way I look at it is: activity x effectiveness = success.
Activity is calls, emails, and attempts to communicate – all the actual selling. Effectiveness is how well you do it – your craft.
If you want to find the missing link that’s keeping your team from success, you have to look at ratios. I’m not a numbers guy, I’m a ratios guy. A numbers guy will say, ‘I expect 100 dials a day,’ but that only solves problems that are caused by a lack of activity. It also assumes we can’t improve what you’re doing (the effectiveness piece).
When you focus only on numbers, you don’t really learn how to make changes that solve real issues for salespeople.
Think of what it takes you to book one demo – how many conversations does it take? Here are some easy numbers to demonstrate.
- If your close rate is 50%, that means it takes two conversations to book a demo.
- How many dials does it take to have a conversation? Let’s say every 10 dials you get a conversation.
- That means you need to make 20 dials to get two conversations to get one demo. So we now know what you need to get a demo a day.
Let’s use a more realistic ratio of 86:11:1. In that case we’ve got two things to fix. How do we make it so you have fewer dials to get conversations? And how is it that it takes 11 conversations just to get one demo? That tells me that your activity might be good. It also tells me that the first 10 seconds is pretty effective since you’re having those conversations, but you struggle with converting into the next step. It shows me what we need to do to help you.
For team metrics, I like to look at productivity per rep. It’s not really ‘did we hit our numbers this quarter,’ but more what was the productivity per rep (this can be measured in terms of demos booked or any metric like average deal size). You need to be more specific than quotas, or else you don’t know what you’re fixing.”
Accurate tools
62% of revenue teams want to decrease the number of tools they use, even when there are no redundancies in their tech stack. What gives? Well, this means leaders want to simplify (and improve) their seller workflows and do more with less. It also means that when you’re avoiding sales tool overwhelm, you have to be very careful about the tools you do keep around to make sure they’re actually helpful.
Jeremy Levine, former head of Strategic Business Development at WalkMe, faced this challenge when optimizing his team. “I started to really look at what the problems were, as far as hitting our targets and delivering the pipeline that we were supposed to. The first thing that I found was that the data wasn’t there.”
His team needed a tool that could meet some specific needs: accurate and current phone and email data that was comprehensive and could reach prospects across the world.
“When BDRs complain, the first thing they’re going to complain about is the quality of the data.” So Levine chose wisely when he went with Lusha, which he used to help his team meet (and accelerate) their goals and reach their most pressing customers. “My team is happy because they’re able to achieve their target. That’s the real measure, by the way, of data platforms: the happiness of the team, whether or not they can achieve their targets through their outreach and reach the right people.”
Team-wide competitions
Look, sometimes sales and pipeline building is a grind. Picking up that phone again and again can get old, and your team might need an extra something to keep up motivation. Tony Ramos, Cold BDR Manager at Lusha, has a suggestion to add some zest to sales efforts:
“Every once in a while, maybe a few times per quarter, we’ll run a contest where the person who generates the most booked and approved meetings by the end of the week gets a prize. We’ll incentivize them with anything from lunch to a hoodie to a Friday off. It’s all about finding what motivates your team because maybe your team won’t care about getting a free lunch, but they will compete for a day off. You need to know your team well enough to know what will work for them.”
When it comes to timing these contests, there are a lot of times it could be good to implement them. “If we have a new priority we’re setting or if we’re close to beating our record from last month, it’s a good push for the team to get some extra productivity in there. It also works at the beginning of the month or the quarter to start off on the right foot and get ahead of pacing.
The way I look at it, the team is already working super hard. It’s just an additional push that can spice things up with a little competition.”
Strategic sprints
The average sales rep only spends about 36% of their time on actual selling activities. The rest of the time is spent on things like admin, prospecting, and research. While all of those are key parts of a sales team’s effort, it’s easy to get distracted from the whole “selling” part.
Here’s how George Nammour, Director of Business Development at Lusha, handles it:
“Especially for newer sales reps, adding as much structure as you can to their day helps protect the time they need to spend selling. As a company scales and grows, I’m learning that structure is key. We’re putting call blocks in people’s calendars and creating these sacred calling times. We give them best practices and guidance for these blocks and then make sure that they’re not being interrupted.
I consider them sprints, which is an idea from Jeb Blount. A sprint can be from 15 minutes to an hour, and it’s a way for salespeople to hyper-focus on one task, and one task only. So they don’t answer any slack messages or emails, even if someone is asking them for something. Once you build a practice around these, your reps can rely on having that dedicated time to get their selling done.
What I like to do with those sprints is try to focus more on a rep’s strength. So let’s say they’re really good at social selling and LinkedIn messaging, then you’ll want them to have some sprints where they’re focusing just on social media selling. The more time they can spend doing their strength, the more you can expect the most optimal results. So it’s really important to structure the day to make sure they have time to focus on their highest-returning activity.”
Structured 1:1s
One on ones are your best friend. Whether you’re in an SDR role or approaching it as a manager, having these meetings run well is key to a well-oiled sales team machine. Marc Perroni, Business Development Manager at Lusha, has a winning formula for getting the most out of these meetings:
“I’ve always been an advocate of the 30 minute meeting, broken into three 10-minute sections.
Here’s how that breakdown works:
- First 10 minutes: Start with the human first
- Everyone’s human at work – I don’t think that’s so profound. Making sure that you start with the human first is most important. How are they doing; do I notice any changes in who I’ve come to know as a member of my team? And what’s going on – not necessarily in the sense of granular work stuff, but a pulse check.
- Middle 10 minutes: How they can be successful in the role
- This is where I focus on what I need to communicate. These middle ten minutes are where I discuss new initiatives or give feedback on their performance.
- Last 10 minutes: Discuss personal career development
- The final section of a 1:1 is always about career development. Have we taken any next steps since our last meeting? Have I introduced you to someone within my network based on your career interests? Have you followed up on the assignment I gave to do a peer-led initiative?
Sales reps are successful when they have clarity from their manager on definitions of success and have that defined week over week. To that end, I have all this information live in a one-on-one document that we update every meeting. That’s where we keep our action plans not only for the individual, but for myself as well. Having an ongoing document helps us line up our communication and make sure that there’s progress and follow-through from both of us.”
Consistent note-keeping
Organization is key to keeping your pipeline flowing, especially when you have a lot of volume. Ben Baltimore, Sales Manager at Lusha, has a strategy:
“Keeping a clean pipeline is really important to me so we can understand what the deal looks like from start to finish, what roadblocks we might have in between, and how we can strategize to overcome those.
One thing about salespeople is that we have to move really quickly, and it’s easy to overlook things. We’re talking to hundreds of people in a month; we’re not going to remember what we said to somebody on April 2.
I like my team to keep notes during the entire journey of the customer. They write a timestamp and put in their initials to keep track of who’s adding in a note and what they need to do. They’re documenting every single thing they do throughout the sales process, so they know exactly what’s going on. This makes it easy to pop back in an account and understand what our next steps are.
Another way we keep track of next steps is with a sales methodology called MEDDPICC (metrics, economic buyer, decision criteria, decision process, paper process, identify pain, champions, and competition). Using that acronym, we fill out the information we learn as we go through the sales process. And the goal is that you leave no stone unturned – you know who you’re supposed to be talking to and what your next steps should be. And if you can’t fill out one of these MEDDPICC sections, then you know that’s your next step when you talk to the customer next.”
Key Takeaways:
- Use smarter KPIs, structured 1:1s, and consistent note-keeping to zero in on what can be improved and stay on top of next steps.
- Strategic sprints and team-wide competitions can add that extra oomph to make the most of your sales team’s efforts.
- Using the right tools with accurate data (like Lusha) keeps your reps happy and productive.
See how Lusha can speed up your workflow
