How TOP Sales Leaders Run 1:1s That Drive Revenue

Let's talk about one on ones. This is one of my favorite topics, reason being. And when we talk about that enablement gap, I can't tell you how many managers I work with that say, Sean, how do you structure a one on one? What should we be discussing? Why do I feel like I'm winging it when I go into it? How do I improve them and do them more effectively? What should I be seeing afterwards? So this is where we're going to lay down the foundation, the groundwork, and we're going to talk about running effective one on ones. Because your time with your rep each week, whether it's 30 minutes, 45 minutes an hour, is arguably the most important time for them in their entire schedule. So let's get into it. All right, so there is a lot of things that your rep is responsible for when coming into a one on one, but what's often never talked about is what you're responsible for as a manager. Right? So when you were ever trained as a manager, you were brought up from a rep and let's say maybe not trained, it's rare that you were ever talked about how to run a one on one. Right. More often than not, you're just picking and choosing things from your favorite one on ones or when you were a rep and you went into it with your manager. And I'm sure there were some managers that this was great, you got a lot of value out of it. I'm sure you also reported to some people where you felt like that was a complete waste of time. Should have been a slack message or an email. But I want to teach you how to drive these forward every single week, what these should look like, how your rep is going to gain the most value out of them and actually show you that there should be different types of one on ones. So the first thing, right, we talked about blocking time on your calendar. We'll talk about it again. You as a leader have to be prepared for your one on one on what you want to coach your rep on. If you go into that meeting thinking, oh, it's fine, like Johnny and I will just talk about, you know, the Eagles and then we'll dive into his numbers a little bit. You're going to leave that 30, 45 minutes not having an actionable plan of what you want to do and another week is going to go by without structured improvement. Right. Put yourself in the rep shoes. I'm sure there's plenty of times that you had a really fun chat with your manager. It was about, you know, Shopping or what you saw on tv, but you never really learned much coming out of it and there weren't actionable items for you to take back to your day to day. Right. So being prepared is arguably one of the most important things that you can do on the manager side. So block that time to dig into the metrics and be prepared going into that conversation. And this is where the key unlock happens is there should be a prep doc that you are sending out to your reps and having them fill out prior to the one on one. Now how I do this and how I've seen it work best is I actually have each one of my reps complete this document by end of day on Friday. So Friday by 2pm Pacific, 5pm Pacific, whatever you want to say, they are filling out this Google Doc that is shared between us by the end of day on Friday. So that as I'm doing my prep, this is the first thing that I pull up is that prep doc that they have filled out with their information. Right. And what does that actually look like? All right, so these key topics, right? Let's, let's imagine we're managing AES here. They're going to include their close one revenue. So basically how much they've closed in the month, how much they've closed in the quarter, how they're pacing towards this number, are they above pace, are they behind pace, what is the actual percentage? Right, so if they've closed $10,000, their quota is a hundred thousand dollars, they're at 10%. Right. Simply put, their open pipeline. So if their quota is a hundred thousand dollars, do they have 200k of open pipeline? Do they have 70k of open pipeline? What does that look like, how they are projected to finish the month of the quarter now they're key KPIs, this can be completely different per shop. Right? So if you're focused heavily on dials, if you have an email quota that they're trying to hit, sequences, send meetings booked, whatever it may be that you track for those key KPIs. And a lot of people will say, oh Sean, can't you just look up Salesforce and see what they're at? Yes, but it's not about me knowing the number, it's about them knowing their number. Right. So there is a key psychological difference behind me opening Salesforce and seeing that they hit 30 dials when they were supposed to hit 40 versus them having to send me that they sent 30 dials as opposed to 40. Right. If they are the ones writing down and sending it to me that they fell short. There is already collaboration there versus me bringing up something that I saw on a report. So I want them to actually Write down the KPIs and send it to me. Now that is the objective information. That's kind of like the what, right? Close run revenue where you pace open pipeline. Right. All that stuff can be easily tracked or looked up. But this is where I want to dive into the subjective. So I want to know from them what's going really well right now. Do they have a couple key deals that are trending in the right direction? Like what's firing them up? Do they have a, an awesome collaboration session with their enablement manager? Did they have a great, you know, team whale room? What's going really well for them right now? And then on the flip side, and this is almost more important, what is it going well? Did they have a couple of key deals fall through the cracks? Right. Did they get a no when they weren't expecting it? Had they had some struggles working with their sdr? Right. Have they had trouble with time management this week and things got behind them and they didn't get to do their KPIs like they expected? Right. So what's sucking right now is a combination, is a conversation I always ask or a question that I often ask. What sucks right now? What's not going well? Like where are they hitting roadblocks, where are they hitting bottlenecks? And getting them to think about this and write it down makes a big difference instead of that, like surprising them with that question on the one on one. So I want to know what's going well, what's not going well? And this sometimes correlates into this next topic. Where do they feel like they're spending the most time? Right. Is this developing, you know, account breakdowns or POVs for their SDRs? Is it that they're spending a lot of time cold calling and really reaching dead ends? Right. Are they spending a lot of time putting together demo decks? Right. Whatever it may be, where do they feel like they're spending the most time? And sometimes this correlates into what's not going well. And you can help as a manager to kind of unblock small changes. And then the last thing is what are you working on together? Right. So what is that key coaching metric that you are meeting in the middle and working on together? Is it that know average contract value which I talked about in terms of setting next steps or sorry, in terms of the sales cycle, in terms of setting next steps, is it average contract value in terms of discounting too early, what is that key coaching metric? So the first time that they fill this out, obviously they won't know this, right? And this will give you some information that maybe they have a key coaching metric that they would like to improve on. And you can obviously come in with your own opinion. But if you've been working on this a couple weeks, right, in its collaborative, that's where they put that last key coaching metric. Now, obviously for SDRs, it will be a little bit different, but this is my AE template.