12/2/20 - Sales Assembly Study Break featuring Mike Harness
Mike Harness, head of sales at G2, explains how remote sales reps stay productive by controlling what they can control. He recommends daily prioritized lists and 15-minute morning meetings where reps commit to three key activities. G2's BDR team uses a daily coffee-break routine to lock in the habit.
Chapters
Hello everyone and welcome to another sales assembly study break. I am Christina Brady, president of Sales assembly. I want to give a quick shout out to Vidyard, our sponsor for allowing us to do this every week and provide these awesome little tips of content. I am here today with Mike Harness. Mike, tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do.
Yeah. Hey, glad to be here and thanks for having me. Mike Harness. I run head of sales for Amer for G2.
Wonderful. G2. Definitely a big fan of them. And I know that you all have a lot of great advice that you've been giving out right now. If we hone in specifically on the idea of control and the idea of discipline and what that means for what people are doing day to day in this environment, what are some of your thoughts around that?
Yeah, so the lead up for this, I know Christina, when you sent me my pre work was thinking about speaking to folks in revenue generating positions and given the times that we're in and sort of what's going on in our world, what are some pieces of advice that we would give them? And that's where you and I landed on this idea of control. So one of the concepts that myself and the entire leadership team at G2 has really been driving home with our folks now that we are dispersed and remote and not in the same office every single day, it's just this idea of controlling what you can control. And so whether you're a bdr, whether you're a relationship manager or you're a hunter in sales, just thinking about what is within your control and then how do you spend your time? How do you create self discipline for yourself and how do you make sure that you're spending your time wisely again to control the things that are within your hands as opposed to again what's going on in the world out there. And I think right now there are a lot of people within our organization, within plenty of organizations that are either young in their career in sales. And so working from home is somewhat daunting. Not being in an office where there is structure, whether you're new to an organization and you can be overwhelmed by I need to educate myself on the company and then also, you know, start to do the actual work of sales or you're somebody very tenured and maybe you have a family at home and you know, kids screaming and things like that. This idea of just being very simple and deliberate about the things that you can control, I think is more important now than it's ever been in the past. So when we think about that, one of the things that we are trying to drive home with our folks is making lists and then prioritizing those lists. So whether that's a daily basis, weekly basis, et cetera, just prioritizing how you're going to spend the time in that next period. And so one of the great best practices that Caroline, who runs our BDR unit is doing is she has sort of like a coffee break at the beginning and the end of every day. What she does with that BDR team is she asks them in the morning to very simply, what are the three things that you're going to do today? Right. Whether that's an outreach campaign, whether that's a set of phone calls that they're going to make, follow ups, et cetera. And then at the end of the day, that entire team comes back together and they discuss whether or not each individual on the team actually completed those three things.
And.
And then they reset it every single day. So It's a short 15 minute meeting on the beginning and the ending of the day. But it really does get people centered around this idea of what is within my control, what can I do and how can I spend my time today to be productive?
My favorite thing that you shared there, on top of just the idea that these, these original thoughts around control are still the ones that are the most effective is I've heard a lot of sales reps, even leaders and executives say, I used to know what I could control. Like when my life was normal in the way that I was used to it being control. What I could control made sense because I had an idea of what my job was and what I could control. But now everything feels so out of control. And so I love the tactical piece at the end there of like yes, holistically we control what we can control. But here's a way to actually figure out right now what that means with some of the people that you've been working with and they're thinking through what can I control? What would you say are the top even just one to three things that they should hone in on right away that, you know, this is within my wheel of control as a frontline revenue producer.
Yeah. So I think it's going to depend on the discipline that you're in. But when you think about, let's take a relationship manager as an example, you have a set of accounts now, whether they are spending more money with you going forward with that expansion plan that you are expecting, let's put those things to the side. What you can do is you can continue to do your monthly or weekly cadence with that customer, you can continue to drive value with the QBRs that you're doing and you can drive non revenue generation, non revenue generating pieces of value for them. Just all of those value add things that you see out in the market that you can share with them that ultimately we hope makes them better at their role. Right. And so, you know, the idea being if you're in a relationship management role, again, you might not expand that deal or get that add on contract that you were expecting, but you can continue to add value with your customers and continue to partner with them. And what we do know is, or at least logic would tell us when we do come out of this crisis, when things do go back to normal, the first phone calls that they're going to make when budgets are released is to the people that stayed in touch with them, to the people that they continue to partner with and the people that continue to add value to them as a business and as a person, frankly. So you know, the idea that just taking that example, it's like at the very base level of that RM job, functionally what am I responsible for with that partnership with that customer and executing
on those things, that's wonderful. That thought of when this is all over and it will be who are they going to call and how do you make sure that you're one of the people on that list is a wonderful thing to feel like you can control because you would think it's out of your control, but by doing the right things now it's not. And so that's really meaningful. Thank you so much for sharing your tips with us once again. Christina Brady, President of Sales assembly, thank you for joining our study Break. Mike, thank you. We will see you again next week. Bye bye.
