How to Fix a Broken Sales Org in 90 Days | Kevin "KD" Dorsey | Ep. 285 (Lead)

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Everybody. And welcome to this leadership episode of 30 Minutes to President's Club. My name is Armand Froh and I'm here with my co host Nick Skielski and we are live in studio with the legendary kd. I was looking before this and you know, this is a good sign. I literally couldn't count how many times KD has been on our show. I think it is over 8 at this point and it is certainly the single most brought back and and most requested guest on 30 MPC of all time. If you are not familiar with KD, Kevin Dorsey. He is a 4 time sales leader running org's over 100 million of ARR. 2 time sales leader at unicorns and he is currently the CRO at Finally Nick. Why should people listen?

So KD gets into how he diagnoses where he is going to focus his efforts when he takes over a new revenue org. He talks about what he's willing to let burn, what he's willing to work on immediately and how you can think through that. There was one point in the show where he literally rattled off probably 30 different metrics that he investigates and how he determines which ones he's not even going to touch. Then he gets into how he messages this stuff out to his leadership team and how he builds one on one structures so that he gets visibility all the way down to the rep level, but also to the manager and the director level. And he goes through his one on one framework. And then we ended with There's a ton that Katie implements into his organizations to help run that organization. And you can't do everything at once. And he takes us through the order of operations of the best practices that he installs in a team.

All righty, Katie, welcome back to the show. We start every show with your top three actionable leadership takeaways. Let's get your three.

My first one is identifying your dominoes and this falls into the people bucket. So when I'm joining a new company, I want to get to know my people very quickly and I'm trying to identify my domino. So the domino is if this person falls, the rest of the team falls with them and that is either a good way or a bad way. And so I want to know who's the emotional center of the team. Who do people look for to say, all right, if this person is bottom, I'm with it? So I'm very quick to identify my dominoes both at the team level but also at the executive level. So that is step one for me. Boom.

What's Number two.

Number two is I'm looking for two x levers. Too often when leaders join a company, they're trying to fix everything. They're trying to fix every single thing at once. Where I'm trying to identify where do I think things can get two times better, both from a metric standpoint, but from a behavior and skill standpoint. So I'm going through the entire process as a seller, as a customer, as an onboarder. Say, where do I think this can get two times better? Because that's where I'm going to have the fastest impact. When I joined my team there, the show rate was like 65% for SDRs, which is not great, but it's not horrible. But it was the complaint I was hearing from AES. Oh, they don't show up. But the measure, we need their show rate to be improved. But our conversation to meeting rate was 13%. I can't 2x a 65% show rate, but I can 2x a 13% conversation conversion rate. And so I shelve show rate and say, hey, we'll work on that, but we have to fix this first. So I'm looking for things that will have far bigger impact. That doubled. I mean, it's more than doubled at this point. We've almost tripled the amount of meetings per SDR from getting our conversation rate up. The show rate stayed at 65% and I was fine with that. Slept just fine.

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So number three, and this is. This is going to shake some people. I do not jump on calls when I join a new company. And a lot of leaders do. They're like, oh, let me get on the call. For either two reasons. One, they use it as they want to observe, like, I want to see what's happening. They don't understand how much pressure that puts on the rep. Your new CRO is jumping on your disco call or your closing call. Like, you're going to get a completely different version of that call. So that messes with it. But the other side is they jump on like, let me show you I still got it. Let me show you I can do this. And it tends to make things far worse than they realize. That's not as much as people preach it. That is not actually how you build the social credit that you need with your team. Leadership would be so easy if all it took was to show people I can still close. That's not how you do it. I observe a lot of calls. I listen to hundreds. I read hundreds of calls when I join, but I don't jump on calls out the gate. I think a lot of people get that wrong.

So, Katie, I want to ask you about the diagnosis of where you focus your time at all. Can you speak to the diagnosis process both from a quantitative perspective, but also from a qualitative perspective?

So metrics are easy to diagnose. The problem is a lot of companies don't have all the metrics in place that maybe they should. So. But the metrics, you can spot those very, very quickly. So on the closing side, I'm looking at close rate, obviously, deal size, ACV across the board. Then I'm also looking at sales cycle. I'm looking at stage progression. But then I take those metrics and I break them out by channel. What's my close rate by inbound? What's my close rate by outbound? What's my close rate by partnership? So I take those core ones, and the closing metrics are actually easier than all the other metrics. So those are really the core ones I'm looking at there. And then I splinter it out. Then I'm going to my pipeline metrics. Where I'm going, okay, there's pipeline volume. How many, right. How many opportunities are we creating Pipeline value, what it's worth, and this is one that so many people get wrong is, you know, and some of y' all listening, like, if you have, you know, pipeline coverage, like, oh, we need 3x coverage. Yeah, 4x coverage, people just make it up. It's like, well, 3x coverage only works if your close rate's 33%. People are just making it up. But the problem is coverage is a value number and close rate is a volume number. And this is where people go wrong all the time. Where, okay, say my quota is 100k. Well, 3x coverage would be a 300k coverage. 300k. But if my close rate's 20% and I only have four opportunities that add up to 300k, how many deals do I get out of those? Four, my close raise 20%. I've got four deals. How many deals do I get?

That means one in five deals you close, there's a chance you don't get any of those deals.

20% to 4 is 0.8. So although I had 3x coverage in value, I didn't have the 5x coverage needed in volume, right? So I'm like, pipeline value, pipeline volume. Then I'm going below that. There's show rate that I'm going below, above that meeting set. I'm looking then what leads into meeting set? Well, now I have activity, I have my calls, I have my emails, and I go into the subcategories with calls, connect rate, conversation rate, conversation conversion rate, number one. Objection. Top two objections. I go to email, open rate, click through rate, response rate. I'm going through every sequence. So I'm breaking all that down. Then again, onboarding, right? So now I'm on the customer side. Speed to onboarding, call onboarding, show rate, speed to value, speed to login utilization within 90 days, churn rates, renewal rates, upsell rates. So I'm breaking all that down. Okay, now when you not every company is going to have have that, and if they don't, well, then I have to go qualitative only. And you can very quickly spot some of these things, right? So on all those metrics, and like I said, I splinter them out by channel, I splinter them out by rep. But I'm looking for my 2x leverage. So I'm like, okay, if a connect rate is this, in my experience, I know it should be here, right? Or if it's lower than I expect, like close rate, close rates, 15, I go, why would global. Now I'm looking at closed loss reasons, closed loss reasons in there. What are the reasons things aren't moving forward. So metric wise, I'm looking at all that you don't have that you have to go qualitative. And this is where experience comes in. Y' all could listen to a disco call and tell me whether or not it could get two times better. You could, you've been in the game long enough to look at that. You could dive into pipeline and go, wait, no one's following up and say that could get two times better. So this is where the qualitative comes in. And like, you know, I've talked, I've been on your show a few times. I talk about bipsy, right. But like I'm looking at behaviors, I'm looking at the process, I'm looking at the skills of the team. I'm looking how the managers are actually leading those team for the qualitative. Perfect example. Customer closes. There was an almost two week delay between close and onboarding call. What do you think that does to a customer? They bought today and they don't even start their onboarding until two weeks later.

What is that? Serious lack of momentum. They're frustrated. They have a problem they want to solve.

Right. They signed up for a reason. And it's two weeks. That's where buyer's remote shows up. Right. So go figure. We had a, a high pre onboarding churn rate. Why it was two weeks out, rejigged the entire model to get people booked within two to three days. We saw that number drop by almost 40% within the first 60 to 90 days of like implementing it. So you can like experience things as a buyer and go, yeah, that would suck. Right? So that's like the qualitative is like, what does it feel like to go through the process? New sales leaders, if you've joined a company and you have not call it secret shop to your own company as a lead, what's the follow up like as a demo? How do people pitch? Right. Like the reps don't know that I secret shopped. Finally before I joined 100%, I opted in 100%. I had friends put their name in to see what that follow up was like and what that demo was like to see how things actually operated. Right. Onboarding, same idea. Go through that onboarding process. What are you asking your customers to do? So there's so many places to find 2x levers. He gets to get to pick. I think one of the hardest things for most leaders is prioritizing. They try to do all of it. Whereas I'm very open to say I'm not going to fix that. I'm just going to let that burn for now. As long as it's a controlled burn, move on to what's most important.

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You have your quantitative levers and then you have your qualitative levers. So you're going in on discovery calls, you're looking at deal reviews, things like that. How much are you relying on your own instinct and knowing where you know you always need to look versus meeting with your leadership staff and with the reps and letting them give you hints or almost like bias where you start to look first.

So I, I don't, I guess I don't accept that feedback very early on because everyone's going to have that bias, right? They've been in it. So this kd, this is what's broken, this is bad. Fix this. And that will send leaders down a rabbit hole of like, okay, I gotta go fix this thing and it may not be the most important, important thing to fix. So I am very, very observant early on I take feedback, I hear from everybody. We'll talk about it when we get into dominoes. Like I, there's questions I ask everybody around challenges, blockers. Like one of my favorite questions to ask when I join a company is what sucks right now? And so very early on I'm showing the reps like, look, I know, I know stuff's busted. Let's just talk about it. Like what sucks. And I want to find those things out, but I actually don't allow the feedback to drive my direction. I know what I'm looking for. I'm going to go see if I can find. Then I'll verify it with their feedback, but not the other way around.

How do you message that to the folks reporting to you? Because I could imagine if I'm the SDR leader at your org and you're the new CRO and I'm like, katie, we gotta fix this show rate problem. The AES are screaming at my reps. They're getting discouraged. We gotta fix this. And you're like, that's not the thing I need to fix right now. I need to let that burn. You're just taking stuff in. How do you address when someone's got like a hot. We need to fix this without making it seem like you're just ignoring the thing they're focused on and the thing they care about.

The first level is it's getting the whole team together. Right? So only one time in my career and I will never do this again. Only one time in my career did I only lead the sales dev side of the house. Every other org I've had, I had both sides. And it was because I experienced that where like, all right, I'm trying to fight these fires, but I can't get the buy in from the AE side. Because I oversee both sides of the house, I'm able to unify that of like, hey, so y' all could ping my. My leaders. And if you said this phrase to them, they'll probably laugh, maybe throw up in their mouth a little bit because they hear it so often, which is volume versus volume. So there are high volume problems, AKA loud. It's high volume. It's loud. It's a loud problem. Oh, these STR meetings suck. Oh, the leads from marketing are awful, which they are always blame marketing. But it's a high volume. It's loud. But then you also have high volume. There's a lot of it, right? Different definitions of volume. And I talk about this with my team. Often is I care about the high volume. There's a lot of it. This is happening a lot. We can actually point to it. But too often you focus on the high volume. Loud. Jenny stole my leads. This always happens. How many has she stolen? This. This literally just happened. One of my teams was like, oh, like the. The leads have gotten worse and we're getting way more like bad data. And then even my leaders are like, yeah, like we found in one of the campaigns, like the bad data rate was much higher than it's supposed to be. And so we shut that campaign off. I'm like, great, how many leads we talking about? It's like, yeah, there were 103. We get almost 4,000 leads a month. You shut off a campaign for 103 bad debt and you think that's what took down our L to C by. No, that was a high volume, loud, high volume, a lot of it. So like that's how I also bring my team together. It's like, look, this is a problem. This is a loud problem. And then I do explain the concept of 2x all the time. Can I 2x this? And if there is the complaint, it's like AE leader, how high do you think I can get the show rate? What do you think? What's best case scenario? It's 65 right now. How high do you think we can get an outbound show rate? And I'll let them say, well, if we get it to 80, I'm like, okay, cool, let's get it to 80. That would be an additional 19 meetings. Is that enough to make you happy? No, we need way more than that. Cool, then let's find another way to go do it. So I'm very, I'm very communicative with my people on like how we're making decisions and why we're making those decisions. And I think that helps get the buy in.

I was literally triggered by the loud volume problems because I remember when I first took over both the SMB sales and SDR teams over at Carta, I did that same interview and 9 out of 10 complaints sounded like this. We price based on the number of equity holders a company has, but we carve territories by the number of employees a company has. My territory is 25 to 100 employees. This SMB rep had a 20 employee count with 30 shareholders. I should get that lead. And everyone was furious when you'd have like one out of segment opportunity closed by an SMB rep. And to be clear, I'm not okay with roes being broken left and right. But I was like, okay, let's pretend that I go to Revops and I try to come up with this fancy lead enrichment process and qualification process with a million different handoffs. But between reps, what happens to my top line number? Literally nothing. Absolutely nothing happens to the top line number. But reps will complain about things that are important to the reps but not necessarily important to the business.

Volume versus volume. Right. And now if one thing is happening to 100 reps now, that volume is relatively significant. But if it's not happening often, I, I taught this. Even with my team, it's like, look, I hear you. Which would you like me to solve first? I can work to solve this or I can work to solve this. This over here, I'm highly confident will increase what you can make over the next quarter. This over here, will. We're gonna punish Jenny. We're gonna make sure that Roe gets followed. And the one deal that got stole this quarter, Congrats. Right? So I'm very open with that with my team. Especially if it is something like, look, I'm gonna be honest, we can't prioritize that. Right now I have a higher volume problem to fix and that's where my energy's going.

One of the things that you were talking to us about on the pre show was that you have an extremely structured way that you run your one on ones with each person in your revenue org and you document this stuff. Can you take me through how you run those?

It is very structured and it's kind of split into two halves with that. Because there's a rep one on one, there's a manager one on one, there's a director. Okay, one on one. So the concepts are relatively similar throughout all of them. But for my rep one on ones, right? There's the metric portion. So it always starts with how are you pacing to goal? Right. And I always emphasize how are you pacing to goal? Not how are you pacing to quota. Those are different things, right? Quote, you give someone a quota, someone has to set a goal. How are you pacing to your goal right now? Not your quota. I just got off a call with one of my directors right now where someone's like, oh, like, but I'm hitting quota. It's like the rest of the team is like 2x in it. Quota is no longer our benchmark for like what performance looks like. Like, we should be above these marks. So how are you pacing to go? Then under that is their key metrics. So like if it's an ae, what's their close rate? What's their deal size? What's their pipeline value? What's their pipeline volume?

Right.

It's like their key metrics are there. Underneath that is the skill. Focus is where they have a couple of call reviews in there, a couple of call scores in there, and what their practice plan is for the week. Then under that are like the update questions. Right? Like too many one on ones are just run for updates.

Right?

All right. Like where are we at? How's that deal looking? I ask those questions ahead of time, right? So the first question almost always is like what were the wins last week? Where are the wins? That's not allowed to be blank. I'm going to force you to find some wins. It could have been the worst week in the world. There's some wins that happened. Right. So what were the wins from last week? Under that is some of the deal related questions. What deals are in X stage? Right. Some of the deal management docs go there. Then it is looking into like we always have a self care question. So my personal self care question is how are you taking care of yourself this week? Not how are you feeling? How are you taking care of yourself this week? It is forward looking and focused on self care. How's your energy? Is another great one. I don't like asking people how they're doing. It's just a bland question. How you doing? Good, good. Move right along. Right. Versus like how's your energy this week? Like I want to know where, where you're at there. Challenges or blockers. Right? Anything that we're running into recognition. Who on the team deserves a shout out and why? Then the last question is, you know, what is your plan for the week? How are we going to make progress towards, you know the, the goal above? And the key to this is one, the rep fills this out. This is not filled out by the manager. The rep fills this out. It's the reps one on one. So they fill it out and this is done Friday afternoon. So this is our end and send it for the week. Right. When do you want your rep to come up with a plan for next week? Friday afternoon, not Monday, not Tuesday, not Wednesday. What's your plan for next week? So that's, that is all done Friday afternoon. So that's like the rep setup that flows to the manager one right. So the manager has their team performance. All the reps names on that doc are blue because it links to the rep one on one doc and then what the managers are reporting up to me is very similar but then it's rep by rep. What's the number one metric? What's the issue, diagnosis? What's the plan to address? Rep by rep by rep. This is where we spend almost the entire one on one is one of my most important jobs is actually making sure they're focused on the right metric.

Yeah.

Oh, I'm working on, you know I'm on for activity. Right. His activity is not where it needs to be. So that's the number one metric. And I go, cool. The conversation conversion rate is 6. I don't want them talking to more people. Right now you're actually focused on the wrong thing. You're forcing them to make more dials when they're actually not good at the dials. It's the wrong metric. Let's make sure we focus back. This just, this just happened with, with one of my reps. Unfortunately, they were doing pretty damn well. They were in the top 20% of the org, sometimes top 10%. But they had a lower deal size than some of the other top reps. They focused with this rep on bringing their deal size up. What do you think happened? So all of a sudden the focus is they focus on deal size. They want to try to charge more. What other metric may have gotten impacted by that?

I think their win rate because they're probably artificially trying to inflate these. Exactly, yeah.

All of a sudden their ACV went up, but their win rate dropped by 50. So they saw a 20 increase in ACV, but a 50% increase. And Y', all, the faces that all are making, if you're not watching this, like you can do the math. It's like, wait, so the reps performance went down? Yeah, because they were focused on the wrong metric and I caught it too late. This was manager to director, director to me. And so when I started to dive into like what's happening with this rep, they used to be here. Then I dive into the manager one on one doc and into the rep one on one doc and go, oh, no, no, no, no, no. Why, why did we focus on this? Like, oh, because their ACV could have been higher. It's like first of all, it wasn't a 2x possibility, but two like we took a rep that was performing well and that like we lit Literally the assignment was I10 of his calls back when he was performing high. I want you to listen to all those with the rep and get him back to that.

So do I understand this correct? That you have, for example, eight reps on one manager team and then you as the CRO, you can see all of the one on one docs and that's public. So the rep knows that KD could be popping into my one on one dock with my manager.

Best believe I throw comments on there from time to time. It's highly inconsistent. It is not legit. I might go a couple months and all of a sudden. Oh, celeb cameo.

Right?

What's happening here? Oh, damn it. KD's on right now, right? So absolutely I have the whole flow rep to manager, manager to director, director to me at the same time, every single one is linked all the way, all the way through. That's and then the reason why I love this too is like then there's the comments on the side. So this also just happened. I can tell when a manager is not running great one on ones because there's no comments on the side, right? There's no like okay, we talked about this. O I like this. Let's try this for there's nothing there. And I go what are we doing? Oh I, I, I took them out to a couple lunch one on ones.

It's like that's cool.

Take them out to lunch. That's not the one on one. That does not count. That does not count as the one on one. Right? So that's the structure for the one on one process and that what connects all this now. The reps know their metrics and what they're going to do about it. The managers know the metric and what they're going to do about it. That flows to my director, to myself directly. We've got the whole system connected.

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Okay, so managers focus on the rep metric, Director focus on team metrics. So what's the number one metric for the team? Right.

For that manager's team.

Exactly right. There's individual ones. And this is how management is supposed to work. It should be individualized. Right. Your goal might be 10k, your goal might be 9k, but your number one metric might be close. Right. Yours might be pipeline value. I don't believe in blanket like activity metrics because that's dependent upon your performance. I don't believe in blanket pipeline metrics that's dependent upon your performance. Right. Take, take the rep that I was talking about had a higher close rate, a lower deal size. Was it working?

They're in the top 20% of the order.

Were they making what they wanted to make? They were making what they wanted to make. It was working and we effed it up for no good reason. He not everyone has to be the saint. The outcome needs to be the same, but there are different paths to get there. And something I stress to my team often is structure is what creates flexibility. The fact that the one on one is structured is actually what makes it more flexible. Because when that's filled out ahead of time, first of all, the manager can review it before the one on one. We got the updates out of the way, all that's written down. So if I'm reviewing that doc and you come in and let's say you filled it out and the energy question is a two, I know that going into the one on one it actually gives me more flexibility of like, okay, I know this one on one has to be focused on energy and mindset. It actually gives more flexibility. Whereas some people I think, think of the structure like, oh, that's going to be too restrictive. It's like, no, it actually makes it easier to lead and to know what you have to focus on every single week. So it works. And it works. It's one of the first things I install and every single company I join is the one on one process by far.

You've been on the show multiple times. You've talked about bipc, this one on one flow, how you coach calls, documenting everything, practice the wiggle, yada yada yada. My guess is you don't come in, you're like, alrighty, folks, all nine of these frameworks start tomorrow.

Yup.

What were the first ones that you implemented and why?

One on one is almost Always where I start with an org. Because if you think about what that pulls in, there's a metric element, there is a skill element, there is a day to day deal, update, process element, and there's a planning element. What are you going to do next week? Right, to make progress. So that's the first one. And for myself, it gives me massive insights to the org. The second thing I install is call coaching and scoring. Because at the end of the day, all the tools, all the gizmos, all the gadgets, for at least the next three years, they're gonna have to talk to a person. After the next three, I don't know, next three, who knows what happens the next three years. But right now you still gotta talk to a person that there's something still occurring. And so I look at the calls and we install the call scorecard system of like maybe just the disco or maybe just the cold call intro, or maybe it's wrapping up. But we're getting that in because I'm trying to install the habit of practice. We're practicing and coaching. We're practicing and coaching. That is almost always number two in terms of the process. Then we get to like Wiggle and the 4Ds, where at that point, now, say we have a baseline of what good looks like. Now we start to document, demonstrate deliberately practice, define all of that. And funny enough, at finally, the first three months, we had an hour every single week, blocked call. It was on Wednesdays too, because I love alliteration. The weekly wiggle. Yeah, the weekly wiggle on Wednesdays hour blocked every single week for my first three months with the managers to build this stuff. And there's actually a checklist, you know, maybe we can do it as, as an attachment of like from this. Of like. Here was the, it was called project codename Dull Wiggle. D A D A W I G L, E, the wig. I codename all my projects because why the hell not have some fun with this, right? And it was there. Here's all the things, right, that we need to, you know, define document, demonstrate delivery practice.

How'd you run that meeting?

Today we're talking about lead handling. First step, define what does good lead handling look like.

And you're just working the room, right?

We're just, we're writing this down. Second step, okay, we gotta document it. This is what good lead handling looks like. Third step, we gotta demonstrate it. Let's record a video of us moving the leads around. Four step, deliberate practice. How do we want to map out a practice plan? For this, point by point by point by point was blocked on the calendar for the first three months. And we create, you know, people tell me I don't have time to do this. Well, you're just not making time to do this. And what is possibly. I will debate this with anybody. What on earth is more important for an OR than defining what good looks like and rolling it out? I can think of nothing that is more important than that. Include what about people? Yeah, that's also part of this. What does good look like for the people we're trying to hire? Define it, document it, demonstrate and deliberately practice those interviews with the managers. Like it's all there to me. This is the number one priority. You have too many people joining companies and they never define what good looks like and they wonder why it doesn't work.

The second thing you roll out is call coaching and scoring. What happens when you walk in? You want to implement a call coaching scorecard. Everyone is running their calls completely differently from how you traditionally teach it and perhaps what is correct. How do you first correct the behavior and establish what good looks like so that you're not giving them a completely different call coaching scorecard from what they've been taught in the first place.

So it depends on the maturity of the org. Right. Is there anyone on the team that is doing well? Right. I study my top performers first.

Yeah.

Who is the number one? I'm gonna study the absolute out of them. They're doing something different. There's probably things I can already take out of that that I can layer into my my own. But then it does, it starts to go into trainings. Actually last month was one of the first months. Like I hadn't done it in a while. Like I lead trainings this morning before this, I had an hour long call reviewing the SDR cold call script and what that needs to look like. I'm the CRO of this company and I'm literally still into that level of like, what is our messaging on this? Right. So I'm looking at who is doing well, what do they do and can I start with that? But then two, that is where the experience comes in. But I'm very heavy on training. We're going to train it. Like I'm going to break this down. Like here's what we're going for and why. Here's how it works, what we're looking for. How could you make this your own? Then we go from there. But we do need to establish, right. To have a team. If everyone's doing everything differently That's a problem. If I'm making a pizza, there's certain ingredients that I need. I need dough, I need sauce, I need cheese. If I take the cheese away, it's not a pizza, period. Doesn't matter. I can put the cheese bag on. There's no sauce. It's not a pizza. I can take away the dough, it's not a pizza. If I take the flour out of the dough, it's no longer a pizza. Now, if you want jalapenos and pineapple on yours, and you want some pepperoni and sausage, as long as the ingredients are there, add your flavor. But you cannot remove an ingredient discovery. Right? If you're not getting someone to agree to a problem, you're removing a crucial ingredient to the sales process. Now, there's different ways to find that out. There's different ways to ask that question. And the scorecards that we build are very rep focused. Did you do this thing? Did you get them to agree to a problem? Now, underneath that, there's some prompts, there's some ways you could do it, but I really don't care how you did it as long as you're accomplishing what it is. So what I tell my team often is I am pretty unrelenting on the what and the why. I'm very flexible on the how. Here's what we're trying to achieve. Get a problem. Agreement. How. Shoot. You got a way to do that that's different than mine? God bless you. I'm all for it. I'm give you some ideas, but I don't care as long as you're accomplishing the what.

We have to talk about one bad habit that you oftentimes see sales leaders make. So my question to you is a little bit tapered on this. What is one bad habit that most sales leaders make when they are first stepping into a new sales organization that they should stop doing?

I will say prescribing without diagnosing. They come in and they think they have, like, the playbook in their head already, and they just start prescribing, and they never actually diagnosed, they never actually found out what was going on. Because of that, they're prescribing something that doesn't matter or they're working on the wrong things. I'd say that's probably one of the biggest bad habits is people come in and they think they already know what to do, and they just prescribe it without ever actually diagnosing what's causing the problem.

Amazing, man. Well, everyone hang on for a 60 second recap coming up soon. Alrighty folks, it is time for a two by two recap from this episode with kd. What do you have for your two?

The first one is understand volume or volume. What Katie got into is that there are two types of problems. There are loud problems, the volume of the noise of the problem is loud and then there are a lot of problems where the volume of the amount of the problem is a lot. You should be focusing on the high volume problems rather than the squeaky wheel. Number two is in the beginning of the episode he talks about looking for 2x levers. If you're only going to increase show rate by 10% that has far less impact than if you can double cold call to meeting booked conversion. One of the things that you have to do is focus on those two x levers, but you also need to socialize with your leadership team that that is where you are focused. Otherwise you run the risk of folks getting frustrated that you're not solving a problem that they think matters. That just isn't as important as the other levers you're focused on pulling.

Hey folks, if you keep getting grilled in your pipeline reviews, try this. Show up with your deal risks already flagged. So gaps in pain, timeline or power and your next move ready to that's kind of where Clary helps is they will show you live signals and risks on your deals in one clean view so you can run your business, not have your manager do it for you and poke a bunch of holes. So we put together a free guide on three plays to get your sales manager off your back. The link is in the show notes. Go check it out. Number three Weekly Wiggle Wednesdays. My favorite alliteration. It's one hour on the calendar every Wednesday. You and your leadership staff, you're getting in a room and you're saying, all right, this week we're talking about the Discovery question framework. What do all of our top reps do step by step by step? And then from there you run the four Ds, define it, document it, demonstrate it, and then run deliberate practice with the sales. Org. And then lastly, number four, there was a huge paradigm shift in my mind where KD has the manager and rep one on one docs all linked in a one on one doc between the manager and the director. So if I'm a director of sales, I can see all 8 of my managers one on one docs with their reps and in that I want to know what is the number one metric they're working on with their rep? What is the eight issue diagnosis and what is their plan to fix it? Or the plan to skill up the rep? Alrighty, Nick, how could people help us out?

One of the things Katie got into in this episode was the structure of those one on ones. We actually worked with him recently where he was a guest writer on our newsletter and actually wrote how to structure a one on one. And so if you want that, I would highly recommend you go check it out. There's a link in the show notes to go check out that newsletter edition and check out some of the other episodes we've had. Katie, join us for there's links in the show notes to that. We'll see you next week on the show.