The New Normal Is Here. Things Won't Be The Same. But Here are 8 Ideas On How to Adjust.

Hey, everybody. I wanted to give you my eight best ideas for what to do in May, because it's time. In May. I know some of you maybe are doing even better than before. COVID Somehow, some of you are deeply struggling, and most of us are somewhere in the middle. Maybe our growth is flat. Maybe we're not growing. But it's time. It's time for your new normal. It's too much change for the team, and it's time for us to have figured out what's going on in this new world. We are all going to be going back to some new normal. We're going to be working maybe a few days a week in an office. In a few weeks, in a month, in two months, restaurants will start to reopen. We will have a new normalcy. And I do not personally believe we'll go back to the old normal for a year or longer. But the new normal is about here. And your team needs to know. They need to know the goals. They need to know where we're going. You need to know where you're going, and we need to get out of that April mode of cut, cut, cut, react, react, react, even layoff. Whatever it was, it's in the past. It's the new normal. So let me give you eight ideas just to think about the first one, which we've talked about on Saster, but this really will work. Whatever you're doing in May, and this probably works in June and July as well, but whatever you're doing this month, just do better than April. Let's imagine March started off okay. You were. You were doubling, and then, boom, you hit a wall in April and you were flat. In fact, you grew zero net of churn. Okay, well, that's a bummer, but it is what it is, okay? It's time to buck up and say, look, if last month we grew 0%, our goal this month's to grow 10% or 15%. Not back to 100% or wherever it was. But we've adjusted. We've learned, We've listened to customers, we've done 50 zooms, we've talked to everyone. We've gotten the data. You can do better than April. So help your team do that. Set goals for May that use the April data as baseline and make a new yardstick, a new set of goals for this month that is just better than last month, and you'll probably hit it. Okay, the next one, which is obvious of the eight, is it's time to close some of those push deals. Most of you that are Selling to the Enterprise. In the SMBs, we heard a lot of churn last month, but in the enterprise, we heard a lot of this deal got pushed. It was about to close, but budget was paused or I couldn't pull it into the month. So sure, that's all true in many cases. Sales cycles have lengthened. But either people want to buy your product, either it has value in today's world or it doesn't. If it does, close some of them in May, just close one or two of those push deals. Which one can close this month? I bet you you can close one or two of those push deals. So let's see what happens. Create a new category of push deals and focus on closing at least a couple of them this month. That's some of the best pipeline you're going to have in the coming quarter or two. The third one is even if you have a hiring freeze today, even if. I hope not, even if you had to shrink a bit in May, kick off a process of hiring someone that can truly help focus. Maybe it's just one person for right now instead of the five or ten open roles you had before, but who can really make a difference in this new world. Is it finally time to hire head of demand gen? Maybe it is today. Maybe you just need more top of the funnel. Is it ahead of product because you're struggling to figure out which of 28 directions to go? Is it a real head of customer success? So you can drive NPS up in this crazy world? So you can. So you can work on that churn and deflect it into retention? I don't know. But take a pause. Take. Take a break and think about what's the one role that will really make a difference for your company and go out and hire just that one person. Focus, focus. Focus on that one person that can be the most accretive. Okay, idea number four is walk back some drama. Look, maybe your company and even your family was perfect in April and late March, but I think all of us had a lot of drama. People got upset, maybe tempers flared in the beginning and then emotions came out. It was hard for many of us, even for us at Team Saster. Like the game plan often changed every day. It was hard to keep up with the rate of change in the world and that maybe created some frayed nerves, some drama. Maybe you impacted some relationships you should have. Maybe you think you broke some glass. But you know what? It's okay. You can walk it back. Go to anyone on your team, even in your personal life. And just apologize. Just say March was crazy and April was too much. April was just too much and I'm sorry. Can we just fix this? Can we take it back whatever happened? Those heated words, the lack of communication, the end of the one on ones. Whatever happened, walk it back. It's okay. You get a pass if you just raise your hand and say, Covid is crazy. It was the COVID crazies. And let's just shake hands or hug it out over Zoom and move on. So walk back some drama. Point five, Support your struggling vendors and partners. I know a lot of folks wanted to cut cut cut mode. And another thing related to cut cut cut mode was don't pay. Just let everything sit in. Bill.com, pay nobody. Well, you know what? That just breaks relationships with your trusted vendors or partners. Take a look at the folks whose bills you have not paid or. Or that someone in finance said, let's stretch out all our bills to 90 days or 100 days or 200 days. You can do that. You can stretch out paying your bills. No one's gonna. Except for some SaaS vendors who maybe will turn off, turn off the product. Most of your vendors are gonna deal with it. They have no choice. They still want your money. But you're burning bridges. There's no reason to burn. Now is the time to support your key partners that need you. So pay your key vendors partners if you have cash. If you're gonna pay them Anyway, pay them net one. That's what I'm doing. I'm going to bill.com and the vendors or partners we really need. I'm approving those bills the day they come in. I want them to get their cash. Because you know what? Even I'm managing our cash a little bit. But if I'm going to pay that bill the next 90 days, let me pay it this afternoon so that my vendors and partners know we have their back. So enough with stretching out payment terms to vendors where it won't help that you need. And let's get past cut cut, cut. You made the cuts, now it's time to invest. Okay. Point six, Become a distributed company. And you may laugh. You're like, of course we're a distributed company. We've all been sheltering since sometime in March. I know, I know. But most of us were not Zapier or GitLab. We did not start as distributed companies. Yes, maybe you're on Zoom all day and you're on Slack all the time and you have other cool tools, but I think in April you started to learn to become a distributed company. We all did. Even I did. Our little team is work from the office together. We have remote folks, but we were office first. Boy, let me tell you, we were informal collaboration, textbook. But even we have changed. We do Staley stand ups every day. I do a daily Jason email almost seven days a week. Seven o' clock in the morning. It's not something I really wanted to do. These are just two examples of things we didn't used to do. The daily email from me to my team and the daily standups we used to do. Just a weekly meeting. All the other things you do, it's time. It's time to evolve and it will take stress out of the company if they know where is the office. Are you office first? Are you office second? Are you distributed first? I think for most of us it's time to embrace being a distributed company. And whatever you experiment on in April, whether it was stand ups or zooms or team yoga sessions or whatever it was, now become a distributed company. Do everything. Look at all the things you changed in April and now do them better. Do your stand ups, better use notion, better be more effective with your zooms, make your happy hour on Friday more efficient, whatever it is, your email communications, your slacks. Level up everything that even sort of worked and become a distributed company. Okay, point seven and point seven and eight are closely related. Point seven I think for the leaders is most important which is it's time to lessen change. There has been so much change the last eight weeks for team Saster. It's been even longer. Watching what was happening with events and and Covid but now it's too much. People need to know what the plan is for the rest of the year. What's okay, you have. You've had six weeks to reforecast. What's our revenue goal for the year? What's our MPS goal for the year? What's our churn goal? What's our net retention? Even on our again our little team Saster today we went from interim dashboard. We do a dashboard we review every week in notion to dashboard. The interim is gone. Now we know what we're going to do this year for all of our goals. Our top of the funnel goals, our community goals, everything. We have our goals for the year and everyone gets it. And now everyone knows each day the goals aren't going to change. Now we may have to reset them one more time, but I don't think so. I think we know, we all kind of know what our new normal is. And you need to set goals for your new normal for this year so that the game doesn't keep changing your team. You can probably handle a lot of change, especially as founders or leaders, but the team doesn't like it. The team needs as little change as possible and they've already rolled with it. They've already done an incredible job adjusting to this new world. Now minimize for that set goals for this year that makes sense that aren't going to change at least in June or July, and start recording and measuring progress toward these new goals that aren't going to change for 2020. And the last one related to that, and you know this, but the last point is help your team. What can you do more in May to help your team? I don't know. But I don't think any of us as leaders did the best we could to help our team. I know we tried. Maybe you talked more, maybe you communicated more, maybe you, you brought in even, who knows, some therapy, some coaching, some helping. And that's great. But I think everyone needs more help. I know even personally I need more help. We need more emotional help. We need more personal help. We need more coaching help. So I don't the other seven ideas I gave you ideas on what to do. This one I don't know. But take a pause and think. What are two or three things you can do to help your team? And maybe the easiest thing, if you're not sure, like I'm not sure, I'll tell you what does work. Ask everybody. Ask everyone on your team for two to three ideas that you can do in May to help them, to help everyone de escalate things, be calmer. Just ask them what are the two or three things that would help them the most that you could do with the company? Get two to three ideas from everybody, force rank them. And then you as leaders or as founders, go do two or three of those and help your team get through this next level. Because we may be going back to the office soon. Depending on where we live, it may be longer. But wherever we go back to for a long time, it's not going to be the same.