15 Ways Help The Sales Team Crush The Plan!!

15 ideas to help your sales team do better now, this year to help them crush the plan. A lot of these may be obvious. Some of them you, you may be doing. But I found it especially between 10 and 15 million AR, most of you are not doing these things or enough of them. So what's number one? Number one is higher dedicated sales ops or revenue ops. And you know, if you're on LinkedIn, if you're in sales related discussions, you'll hear so much about revenue ops. Revenue ops is a lot of things. In some ways it's a new name for sales ops, for supporting the sales ops just with better tools. And like plg, in many ways is freemium and viral acquisition with better instrumentation. Revenue ops is a much more sophisticated approach in many ways to sales ops. But that point aside, you want your sales team focused on what they're good at. You want them specializing now when you have one rep, two reps. Look, either you or them are going to have to make collateral. You're going to have to figure out sales commission plans on your own. You're going to have to train folks through osmosis, through zoom, however you do it. But as soon as you get to even four or five sales reps, usually your head of sales or your CEO, or sometimes your head of marketing or demand gen, are spending way too much time on sales ops on revenue operations, and you want every minute of that time focused on closing those deals. So get leverage, get leverage for your sales team and think about hiring. Train a leader in sales ops or revenue ops as early as rep 4 or 5, because you're going to hire more. You're going to go from 4 to 5 reps to 7 to 10, to 20 to 30. And you're just wasting time having no enablement, no training, no onboarding, no processes. So hire this early if you have any money at all in the bank. Sales ops and revenue ops point 2 related to the first one. Even before this, you've got to invest, at least after your first two reps, more in training and onboarding. And you know, it's almost always the case. Almost every SaaS startup I work with or talk to, the first two reps learn by osmosis. They report directly to the CEO. They're usually a little bit quirky, but pretty bright. They really know the product well, those first two reps. And they basically get trained by watching, by watching the CEO sell founder led sales. And that sort of works for 2 reps. I've almost never seen it work for 3, 4 or 5 reps, the co just stops training them herself and you just run out of time in a handcrafted way. Work on all these deals with anything more than the first two reps and I often find reps 3, 4, 5, 6. Especially if you haven't hired a real good VP of Sales yet. They're mistrained, they're untrained, they're not trained and they perform very poorly because of it. Best case, it takes them months longer to scale up. So invest as much as you can in training your reps and if nothing else, a good exercise I like for CEOs while they're still ahead of sales is build a bible. Build a course to train your reps. Now, it won't be perfect. You haven't done it before and hopefully you won't do it again. But if you force yourself to do an eight part test, an eight part course, that will force you to have eight meetings with these reps over eight weeks or two week, four weeks, it will force you and do it. And also whatever you do with these new reps for training onboarding, you've got to listen to their gong or chorus or salesloft or whatever tool you use to listen to their calls. You gotta do it. It's one of the best tools. And these tools were sort of great to have before all this. Before we all had distributed teams, but now that our teams are distributed, you've got to listen to their calls and you've got to read their emails. People are not going to that. It's intrusive. That has changed. Sales executives expect their calls to be listened to. They expect their emails to be read and you should go in there and help them. Don't be overly critical. Don't say how could you claim we have this feature that we don't or that the product does something it doesn't? That's not the point. The point is provide constructive feedback and iterate. Because if you have, especially if you haven't trained folks well, they will say the wrong things with prospects and you don't want that happening. Okay, point three, do. Especially if you're enterprise. But really for any, any, any type of SaaS product, you gotta add in more SDRs and BDRs. Two different reasons. First, specialization. You don't want your AES opening middling and closing deals. You want them closers as much as possible. You want prospects delivered as far down the funnel as possible so your closers can be closing. So SDRs can help generate more business than A is on their own. BDRs can help screen inbound leads better. Whatever you want to call roles, more of them, more of them. And if that means the AES have to hit a little bit higher of a quota to pay for the SDRs and BDR, so be it. It's almost always work it worth it. So get folks to help with top of the funnel activities so your AES can close more almost always and related to that. So that's one way to make things more efficient. The other thing I see for some reason today is more and more founder led sales is going further in the enterprise. If you're doing bigger deals 50k 100k 250k 1 million and I see founders that are not familiar with what a great SDR does, not even build an outbound team in the enterprise until past 10 million in error. That's just a missed opportunity. You know, let's say your enterprise, your deals are bigger and you've got 100 customers. Just an outbound team getting you into another 20, 30 deals. It doesn't have to be 2,000 or 3,000 just getting you into 20 or 30% more deals than you're already getting. If the deals are bigger, it's always worth it if the team's good. So especially if so add SDRs and BDRs to make any sales teams of any size more efficient. So closers can be closing, openers can be opening. And if you're more enterprise, if your deals sizes 50k 100k or up, you really need a thoughtful targeted outbound team going after customers or prospects that are like the ones you already have. Okay, point four way to help your sales team now is have same quotas. I know this sounds obvious but sometimes folks get confused. You have to have quotas that most of your reps can meet. Now it may take you a little while to figure this out. They can be low in the beginning. They can be low for the first 90 days, the first sales cycle if you want. But you need most of your reps hitting quota for everyone to feel good. And no one can succeed when they're set up for failure. So generally saying quotas are a great idea. It's interesting. I was just reading that Salesforce has just lowered its quotas. Salesforce. And why did they do this? They did this for employee retention. They wanted more of the reps feeling like they were hitting quota and doing well. It's not the silliest thing I've ever heard. Listen, math has to work. If reps at the end of the day aren't, aren't closing at least three times their OT, they're fully burdened cost. Your business model does not work. 55 would be great in the enterprise. You know, 4x mid market 3x for SMB. The math eventually has to work, but you don't want to add excessive stress into the system by having quotas that folks just can't hit. Okay, next point. Optimizing lead scoring and management. If you're not doing this today, you're doing your sales team a disservice. Okay, if you have a sales op team, they can help. If you have a great head of demand gen, she or she can help. But what's important is that the right rep gets the right type of lead, the right number of leads and the ones optimized for them. If you have one rep, this doesn't really matter if you have two. But even by the time you have three, four or five reps, let alone more, it's some reps will can handle more leads than others. Some will be overwhelmed with too many. Some follow up very quickly. Some are slow on some of the leads so you need to take them away with SLAs and others, whatever, you've got to score them and route them to the right reps and make sure they get the most optimized number. And if even if you're at four or five reps, you're probably ready to even. Also to break your team up, have have the one that's better at bigger deals handle the bigger ones. Have the one that can handle a lot of volume. Do SMBs. You don't have to specialize 100% if it stresses the team out. But even by reps 4 or 5 they're ready to specialize by segment and customer size as well. And a lot of folks wait. A lot of folks wait because they want to give every rep a shot. And maybe that's okay. But I'm shocked how many SaaS startups hit 10, 20 or more million in ARR. And reps are all getting the same type of leads. They haven't specialized. And what you'll realize as A as a SaaS founder is every time you specialize sales, if you have the right people handling the right leads and the right number of leads, you always do better. It's often almost immediate. 20% lift by getting the right type of lead and the person that's best at that lead and a 20% lift is huge. Okay, next point to help yourself sales team. And I know you know this, but you've got to cut sales reps that aren't cutting it and hopefully it's not too many. I. The last thing I believe in is firing tons of sales reps. It. It doesn't work. It never worked before and it doesn't work in today's world. But you're not doing anyone any favors by keeping a sales rep that cannot close. In fact, you're harming everybody. You're harming the top closers because they're not getting as many leads. You're harming the company because they're not closing those precious leads. Okay? And you can give folks a sales cycle, you can give folks longer than a sales cycle if you really want to. But you need to see some real progress and you would need at least need to see a path to mid pack performance. It's not because we're merciless. It's not because we don't want to be supportive. But leads are so precious in the early days. Leads are often Precious. Up to 20, 30, 40 million in ARR. Okay, if you have, if you have too many great leads, congratulations to you. Congratulations to a handful of folks like Calendarly and Zoom and maybe Slack back in the day that did. But almost all of us don't have enough leads. So not only do you not want to stretch folks too thin and have quotas that are unattainable, but you want to make sure that you're not giving too many precious leads to folks that can't close. I know it sounds a little Glengarry Glen Ross, but it's true. You're better off having fewer reps that are good and giving them more leads than spreading them across reps that can't because those meet those, those mediocre reps. They'll close nothing. They'll close nothing in many cases. Okay, next point, take a zoom quota. Take a zoom quota as CEO or even as CEO and CTO as co founders. Do a zoom quota. Give the team, your sales team, a quota that you will do six to ten zooms with them per month. I just, I just did this with the startup yesterday and they asked, well, what type of, what type of calls should my CEO do? Should they do prospects, folks far down the funnel, customers about to close. Where should the CEO join the sales process? And I don't think it matters because each AE has a slightly different process. Some AES will want to bring the CEO in to help close the deal. Some will want to bring them in the middle as discovery is going deep. And some may love just to join a big call like they get a Big lead. If it looks like a big deal, they may want the CEO on the first call. Any event. Let's say you commit to 10 Zooms a week to a day and have whoever sort of running sales, however you're doing, hopefully you have a VP of sales or sales ops or sales enablement or head of demand gen or someone. But have someone on the team take responsibility for those six to ten zooms a week and just let the sales team decide amongst themselves. They'll figure it out. And maybe that means each of the reps gets two calls a week. Two zooms a week they can bring you in on and they can decide what type of zoom they want. But you will see a huge lift. Prospects and customers love, love, love, love to talk to the CEO. It does not matter if you're a six person, 60 person, 600, 6,000 person company prospects and customers all love and appreciate talking to the CEO. In fact, it's one of the reasons they take a bet on a startup is to build these relationships. And the relationships are much deeper when they get to meet the CEO. So I would say maybe 10% of founder startup CEOs I know have quotas, have prospecting customer quotas each week that is given to them by sales. But it's just magic, magic when it works. Okay, next point is challenge alignment between customers success, marketing and sales. Is it aligned? Okay, do you have a smooth handoff? When is customer success brought into a deal? Are they brought into deals before it closes? You've just got to make sure that the, the process from first touch to year 10 is as seamless as possible. Make sure your KPIs are overlapped. Make sure your goals are up. Make sure your, your incentive structures are overlapped. Okay, that CS and sales are partners. And so look at it. Are they partners? Are they working closely together? Is there friction? Or are they too siloed and there's a million tweaks you can do but I don't have a single bit of advice. It's to listen. Listen and make sure that no, no customer is like dumped on CS on customer success after a deal closes. And make sure that customer success is supporting sales even before the deals closes so that it's seamless. Make sure it's seamless and jump in if it isn't. Next point to help your sales team do more customer marketing. And we've talked about this a bunch on Saster. You can do a Google search or rather an Algolia search on Saster, but almost none of us do enough customer marketing. Almost none of us do it. And what is customer marketing? It's as simple as it sounds. It's a percent of your marketing budget. Your efforts, your money, your activities. From webinars to emails to drip campaigns to content marketing that is focused not on getting you new customers, but on keeping your existing customers happy, successful and enabling them to be even more successful. Customer marketing works the more you do it. It helps with upsells, it helps with bonding, it helps buy more seats earlier, it helps reduce churn and look. It sounds, if folks have an customer, it sounds both obvious and strange. What is it? Do I need a VP of customer marketing? Well, maybe most bigger marketing departments will have a head of customer marketing, but in the short term, just you can do your best by dividing your marketing budget up and say like, hey, I want 80% of my money and time and effort in marketing going to new customers and 20% going to my existing customers. And then, and then challenge yourself. How much, how many, how much, how many blog posts, how many events, how much customer marketing, how many webinars, how much, how many drip campaigns and emails are to help my existing customers? For example, most of you will eventually develop drip campaigns to your prospects where you'll push them new information, whatever it is to try to push them down the funnel. I bet less than 5 or 10% of you do have the same campaign to help new customers and existing customers. Features they didn't know about, ways to use the products they didn't know about, how to get in touch with the company, how to, how to connect with your forums or their rep or whatever it is more customer marketing. Make sure 20% of your marketing efforts are aimed at existing customers and magic will happen on upsells, retention and nrr. Okay, next point, which I just see a subset but a material number of founders forget, which is to celebrate the wins, you've got to celebrate the wins with your sales team. And we often not only forget, we often don't appreciate them as founders. You know, if our goal Is to hit 10 million AR this year and we cross 5, it's we often don't celebrate, we've got to get to 10 and maybe we even hit 10 and we're like, well, the stretch plan was 12, so I'm going to hold off on a big party. You know that that can be okay for a certain type of founder, but sales is hard, sales is a lot of no's, sales is every month, you've got to hit your number every quarter. And if you're the VP of Sales, it gets harder each quarter because the number goes up. Maybe for the AES, it's consistent, right? Maybe the quote is the same each month, each quarter or year. But VP of sales, the managers, their job gets harder because it gets ratcheted up each quarter and you've got to celebrate the wins because sales is graded every month. You got to do it it. Okay, now just four more simpler tips to implement. Maybe even now or soon. This month, this quarter. First one is it's small. But in the enterprise it is true that a January 31st fiscal year can help. I know a lot of folks do this. I genuinely do not think it helps with SMB at all. SMB has a lot of velocity, it has short sales cycles. And I think not holding yourself accountable to December 31st calendar and fiscal year doesn't help you. It's just an excuse to miss the plan in December and give yourself more time in January. But in the enterprise you have to experiment. On the one hand, and we've written about this on Saster, I see folks that are more mid market enterprise that stick to a December 31st year. Magic happens. Customers are responsive. Customers want to come through for you during the holidays if you've come through for them. Elena, we've worked so hard together this year. The pilot went well. Can we get the deal done before Christmas? They often respond. So it's not as simple as moving from December 31 to January 31 is magic because you lose, you lose the ask, you lose the holiday ask. And I know a lot of sales leaders have challenged me when I've talked about this. Yet almost every SaaS company, including my own and many I work with that stick with December 31st. They see the Christmas ask working if. If you provide a lot of value to your prospects. Having said that, it's stressful. You need to give your team a break. You cannot overload everybody every day, every week of the year. And if January 31st really lets people enjoy their holidays, lets them recharge and come back and do better next year, that alone often makes it worth it to change January 31st fiscal year for SaaS companies. Okay, penultimate one or actually pre penultimate three more. Next one is we're coming out of all this. We're coming into the new, new normal world. It's time to have a customer conference. If you haven't had one before, just start. And here's the thing. You don't have to do Dreamforce or Saster, annual or inbound, do a small one. Just get your existing customers together and Invite whoever's in your funnel. Get 50 people together, 100 people together, small is almost better. No one's going to mind getting 100 customers together, 50 together with the senior management team. So everyone can chat and just talk. Bring your whole company, your whole team, all your senior team, all your CS team. It's amazing. And if you just. If only your customers come and it's small, it's great because they will talk with each other and they will share best practices and bond and become advocates with each other and churn will go down and NRR will go up. But even better, you can invite. Even if just a few prospects come to your customer conference, even if it's mostly existing customers, it's always magical to me how your existing customers sell your prospects for you at a customer event. In fact, the smaller and more intimate the gathering, the better. I haven't seen it happen much at Dreamforce. I'm sure. I'm sure back in the day it did, but it's so big. But almost every customer conference I've been to, that's a couple hundred folks or smaller. Any. Any customer that's paired with a prospect, they just start selling them on your product. It's almost human nature. If they love you. So get a customer conference this year. Get it going ideally before the fall when the schedules get too crowded. But however you do it, just do it. And don't do it digitally, don't do it. Virtual events have their place, okay? And we do them a lot at faster. And if you do them well and you do them at scale and you have great content, they work, but they're not a replacement for getting together. You've got to do an IRL customer conference. It just always works. Okay, two last points. One super strategic. And then we'll have one last tactical point, the super strategic point. And I think I see so many founders not doing this enough is if you want to help the sales team, you've got to be honest. Do you have a real VP of demand gen? Does your head of marketing, whoever she or he is, whatever level, whatever the title, are they really delivering pipeline, leads, opportunities, whatever the right metric is for your company or whatever you are, they really delivering it to sales and sounds silly, but it's not. First of all, most SAS CEOs, I find hire a head of first head of marketing that doesn't really know demand yet. They know corporate marketing, they know brand marketing, they know product marketing, they know other types of what we call marketing, but they don't know how to get you leads not really. And even the few that hire marketers that actually do demand gen, they often hire folks that are trained at the wrong ACV. They'll hire a growth hacker when their ACV is 100,000, right? Or they'll, they'll. Or they'll do the opposite. They'll hire someone that's done very sophisticated ABM when their customers pay 49 bucks a month. Where you need a growth hacker and so you have to be honest. Is my so called head of marketing delivering enough help leads to sales or not? And I would say 8 times out of 10, 9 times out of 10 and SaaS companies even all the way up to 20 million ARR, even beyond. The answer is no, you are not helping sales enough. So that means you fire that person or top that person. I don't know, maybe bring in someone more senior to them. It really doesn't matter. But you owe the sales team a VP of demand yet ahead of marketing. That can be a VP dimension and you're not doing your sales team a service and you don't have their back. If your marketer's number one job, at least in a sales driven model is helping the sales team, serving the sales team and getting them more leads, pipelines and opportunities. So challenge yourself, make sure it's true. I know if you just hired a marketer, you think you don't want to do it again. But if they're not serving sales, everyone's going to come up shorter than they could have. Okay, last little hack. So that's very strategic. You and we should almost end there. Be honest. Do you have a VP of demand gen or not? If not, go hire them. Go hire them. The last little hack and maybe they should have been in different orders is if nothing else, do this next week. Because this one always works to help the sales team. If you do it right and you can do it next week and it will take you one hour each week, which is do a weekly webinar, a weekly webinar. And you have to do it every week and you have to do it the same time each week. And you can't skip a week or do it every other week or do it once a month or do it when you get around to it. It has to be the same time each week. And this always helps the sales team. Always. Why? Two reasons. One, put together a list. Invite all the prospects and all your existing customers. Mix it up. Have some customers speak some weeks talk about new features. One week, talk about whatever each week. But whatever it is, if you make it half decent, especially if you start off as a founder, because whatever you talk about is going to be pretty good as a founder. Whatever the topic of this week's weekly webinar is, sales has something invite their prospects to you're giving sales help because every single rep on your team can say, hey, I know we haven't chatted a while, Michelle, but we've got a great webinar with one of our customers this week on how to use our product this way or that they can personally send that to everyone in their pipeline in their funnel and push it down and have some action item and build that relationship more. It always helps. And if the content's good, it almost always increases the odds things sell. And it's also a place to put put folks that want to learn more but don't want that one on one or already had the demo. There's a million ways you can use this webinar, but if you only do it occasionally or when you have time or when you're ready, it doesn't work. But if sales knows if your sales team knows that they can send anyone they're talking to not only to a demo with them, not only to be there for calls for whatever, but if the deal's a little bit stuck or they want a little bit of help, or have an excuse to interact more with the prospect, they can invite them to the webinar you have this week. And I've literally never seen the weekly webinar not work to improve sales. It works especially well in enterprise because you only need a few people show up for it to work. But it works with SMB as well. But it only works. It only works if you do it 52 weeks a year, same day, same time. That way sales and everybody knows It's Wednesday at 10am Come come to our weekly webinar. The title is this this week, start next week. Even if you don't have the right VP demand gen like we just talked about, right? Even if customer conference seems overwhelming, even if customer marketing you're confused about Alignment's hard, you're not sure who to cut, you're not sure about the quotas, you don't know where to find SDRs, you don't know how to do training and onboarding or revenue ops. The reason I bring this one up is it always works and everyone can do it. Start that weekly webinar for your customers and prospects next week, same time. Do it for 52 weeks. And if it didn't help, if it really doesn't, didn't help, email me. And you really did it. I will give your entire team free tickets to Saster annual.