8 Ways to Help The Sales Team Get Through A Rough Patch

Hey everybody, I hope you're doing great in these crazy times. I hope your business is a Covid beneficiary. I hope you're doing better than ever. Maybe you are, maybe you aren't. Maybe these are challenging times. But no matter what, at some point on your journey, you're going to have a rough patch. And even more so at some point and probably several times on your journey, you're going to have not just a rough patch, but a rough patch that demotivates the sales team that hits them hard where they they start to maybe lose a little bit of faith. And sales is hard sales, it may be tried to say it, but sales is a lot of no's to get to a yes. Even if you have a hot product, even if you have a great brand, you're going to hear more no's than yeses. And when that ratio starts to change, when you start hearing more no's than you're used to, more laters, it can be demoralizing on the sales team. And when the sales team loses its confidence, it's tough. It's tough on them, it's tough on the rest of the company. So what can you do? How can you help? Especially if you're in a rough patch, what can you do to motivate the sales team? So let me give you the best ideas and the first one sounds simple, but not enough of you do it. It is deliver a killer feature to sales ideally every month or at least once a quarter and let them know it's coming until you literally have the dominant brand in your space, until your zoom, until you even slack today sales team loves a 10x feature. We just interviewed Stuart Butterfield at our first big digital event and he talked about all the features where they crushed Microsoft Teams. Today the 10x feature exists even at Slack. So what's your 10x feature? What's that one feature that even if you don't have feature parity, even if you have feature gaps or other issues, what's that 1 10x feature where you win deals today and what's one you can deliver to the sales team now, this quarter and then another next quarter and following, the sales team will go out, they'll sell it, they'll socialize it, they'll sell it a little bit ahead, which is okay. But get them that 10x feature. It's the best weapon, it's the best asset you can give your sales team. So that's idea number one. Let them know a 10x feature that they've been asking for is coming and they will believe, they will regain their faith. The second thing you can do when times are tough is usually, almost always, even in the toughest times, there are one or two reps that are still doing well. In fact, I found at least that in the tougher times, the gap between the mediocre reps and the best reps grows. Because when the competition's tougher, when times are tougher, when you start to fall out of product market, fit the mediocre rep, the rep that you can just answer the three to four questions the same way, their close rates start to plummet. But the reps that deeply know your product, they deeply know the customer. They deeply know how to solve the customer's problems. They, they can still close. So the gap, the gap grows. So what do you do besides celebrating that rep? Promote her. Promote him or her. Not everybody. And it's hard. There's usually not enough spots for promotions ever, ever in a sales team if you have enough good reps. But promote your number one rep to something to team lead to director to head of enterprise sales to enterprise ae. Whatever it is, promote your best rep. It's a great way to show your recognition beyond the cash, which hopefully you're paying up for your best rep and the team will respond to that. Tip number three again in this super obvious bucket. But I don't see enough people do it. Ask, ask. Get your sales team together and ask them to do their homework before the ask meeting. Tell them to come to the meeting with their best three ideas for the product and to make sales easier and better. They're not necessarily the same thing. They may come and say, I don't need any features, I need sales ops, I need sales collateral, I need a better marketing website, I need a weekly webinar. Who knows? But ask. Have everyone on your sales team and only them. Don't let other folks talk over them or interrupt them. Even if your sales team is tiny, even if it's two of you, ask them, tell them to do their homework and come up with their top three ideas of what will help them sell better. And then do some of them. Do a couple of them and it works. It always works. They know, they don't know. Sales team often doesn't really know what features you need. Two years down the road, three years down the road, maybe not even next year, but they know what you need now and they know where they need help. I did number four to help your sales team get them more leads. Okay, I know you're thinking, duh, that Sounds obvious, but it's not that obvious. More leads, more qualified leads, more good leads does always help. Even if you're going through a rough patch, even if your close rates are going down a little bit, even if the competition is everywhere. Get the sales team 20, 30, 40% more leads and you can make up for it. So ask yourself honestly, do you have a strong enough demand gen team? Do you have a real VP or director of demand gen? Most of you don't. Most of you have a generic marketer or someone wearing multiple hats or a mediocre person. Do you have someone in your company that each quarter will drive more qualified leads to sales, more MQLs or sales accepted leads? It really doesn't matter which stage of the funnel you pick. But someone that's good enough to drive those numbers up month over month, quarter over quarter. Most of you actually don't have that. Be honest. So then go find her or him. Go find a real VP or head of demand gen for your sales team and help them. They will respond, they will be excited, they will love to work with the professional and they will be thrilled to get more good leads even if it's harder to close. It will inspire them. Point 5. If you're struggling modestly, modestly reset the plan, but ideally only once. If your plan looks unachievable, that does no one a service. It does not do you a service, does not do your investors a service, your customers or anybody. If the plan is simply unachievable for the year, and many of you probably have already done it this year, but reset it. But reset it with data so that everyone understands why. And do it once if you can. Resetting the plan every month, every quarter, it's exhausting. And no one knows where they stand in sales or in the rest of the company. So pick a reasonable plan. Take a look at the last three to four months of data. See how you're really doing. Were you previously growing 100% a year and now you're growing 50% a year? Well, if that's the case, you know, maybe 50% needs to be the plan for the rest of the year and you can develop a new sales comp plan where if you do better than 50, they're in the bonus. They make real money, but reset it but just once. Point number six. And again, this one should be obvious, but people don't do this enough in a tough time. Let your one or two worst reps go. It's time to let them go. And why. It's really simple. But people don't do this. In tougher times, it's better to concentrate your leads in your best closers. It's always true, of course, that your best reps will close more than the next reps. But they can only do so much. One human being can only handle so many leads. It really depends on the velocity of your business. But for a higher velocity sales business, an average AE can only handle 50, 80, maybe 100 leads a month. There are exceptions in very low price points like one close sales. And in the enterprise, 50 leads may be too many. But think somewhere between 50 and 80 leads is about as much as a run rate AE can handle. So as you grow quickly, you may need to let the quality bar, if not go down, expand. You're going to need to allow reps to not be as good as your best reps as you grow. But if you're in a rough patch and you have 500 good leads a month, give them to your best 5 reps, not 10. 5 good reps and 5 mediocre reps. Because you'll just close more. You will close more if you concentrate your leads and your best reps. And the easiest way to do it, rather than force ranking anybody, what you're probably doing anyway is to let your two worst sales reps go and just give their leads to your closers to the rest of the team. You will probably grow 20% faster. If you just stop giving leads to your worst reps, you'll probably grow 20% faster just doing that. Think about the math. It's magical. Point number seven to help the sales team drive your mps up. Now, your sales team may not focus on NPS and customer happiness the exact same way the rest of the company does. The founders do, the customer success team does, and others. Sometimes sales teams don't really care. They just want to close the deal. But it will help your customers. If your existing customers are happier than last quarter, they will spread the word. They will do case studies, they will do webinars, they will do tweets, they will do blog posts. It will work. And you can share those great stories in Slack, in wherever you're doing across the company. And these success stories, these we love your product stories. They inspire the sales team. They remind them that there's a reason that you matter, that you are adding value to the world. So driving NPS up isn't going to quite have the magic impact of letting the worst reps go. Giving them more leads, giving them the 10x feature, those are things that work right now. They're like sugar highs, they immediately accelerate your business. But boy, it works over the course of the year, make your customers happy and sales gets easier. And the last point, the eighth point when times are tough is lead from the front. Lead from the front. It's hard to get on jets these days, but do more zooms. Talk with more customers yourself. As the CEO, as the founder. Start doing a weekly customer webinar where you're out there as the CEO talking to prospects and leads. As we scale, most of us, you know, we step back a little bit from the nitty gritty of sales. You can't spend your whole life if you're growing a SaaS business, writing the sales collateral and joining every single zoom you'll never scale. But most of us step back a little bit too much. We don't even talk to many of our larger prospects. We don't as CEOs and founders, keep enough in touch with our existing customers and we're just not enough of a wing person for our sales team. So lead from the front. Don't force yourself into deals where sales doesn't want you, but tell them you're willing to join 10 sales calls a week. Give yourself a number, a quota. Tell your sales team, I will join 10 sales calls a week and have your VP of Sales or your sales leader someone decide which of those 10 calls. Don't decide yourself. Let the team decide, but tell them you're there for them and you will join 10 either customer calls or prospect calls or any calls they want. You just tell them and you'll be there. Watch what happens with your sales. You'll lead from the front. They will close more because they'll believe more. And they'll also close more because customers and prospects love to talk to the CEO. Even the CEO of a four person company, a 10 person company, a 20 person company, it really, really doesn't matter. Customers and prospects love to talk to the CEO and if they get to talk to her, him, more deals will close and magic will happen. So those are my best eight ideas. These aren't magic. They're not going to change the course of your product overnight. But if you act on these eight ideas, you will actually sell more next month. And that, my friends, is magic and will inspire the sales team.