Podcast episode
How to Build a Sales Team That Manages Itself | Tara DiCristo-Schmitt
30 Minutes to President's Club20 Aug 202634 min
Description
Tara DiCristo-Schmitt breaks down the tactical sales leadership systems she uses to build predictable pipeline, coach reps, and create a culture of accountability. Learn how to inspect rep calendars, run better pipeline reviews, and catch performance problems before they hit quota. 📅 Eliminate calendar white space: Review reps’ calendars weekly and build two weeks ahead with net-new meetings, referrals, target accounts, and prospecting blocks so cancellations don't kill pipeline. 📊 Track “Days Without” key activities: Identify the leading indicator that drives revenue, then track how many days reps go without it to trigger coaching before performance slips. 🔍 Make pipeline reviews teach discovery: Ask the same qualification questions every week so reps learn exactly what they need to uncover from buyers and stop filling gaps with assumptions. You're one step closer to President's Club! 📱 Connect with Tara on LinkedIn! 🏋 30MPC Training 🛠 Weekly Tactical Breakdowns 📚 Things you can steal and use today
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almost everything I need to know about the customer being a prospect or a suspect. The consequence of no change tells me if they're willing to just keep the business going the way that it's going. And then it's very important that you know that you're at the owner, and what is the decision-making process “and who else will they consult?” Those things being asked every single pipeline review will create a very healthy pipeline. Well, I only have one question for the next part, which is what's number two? Calendar, white space, rigor. So I like to call this predictability in action. So think about sales reps today. They wanna be busy and they wanna be talking to people
Calendar, white space, rigor. So I like to call this predictability in action. So think about sales reps today. They wanna be busy and they wanna be talking to people that can buy from them. And so, so often they reach a place of burnout, but not burnout because they've got so much going on in their calendars, burnout because they don't have enough “going on in their calendars.” So I created the white space rigor, which is meeting with your reps on a weekly basis. Opening up their calendars together and filling their calendar. So there's no white space. There's nothing better than going into the weekend, knowing that you have the rest of the week set up and ready to go, and that you can plan for and have really great conversations. So the trick of
could look you in the eye and say, I really didn't do anything this week to add any new pipeline to the business. And that's when the rep and the manager and the director have the aha moment. And they say, well, what do I do now? And then you start “walking them through who else can refer to you? Who can you meet with that can refer to you?” What customers can you have pre-planned? What targets? Can't always go that well, though. You got to have the rep that gets mad. I mean, they can't all be like, Oh TD, thank you so much for blessing me with your introspection and inspection.
In Referrals
I hear my AI nerds yelling right now. TD, I'm going to just set up an agent. It's going to look at everybody's calendar. It's going to fire off an email and say, hey, why haven't you had a proposal in two days? What's your reaction to the AI nerds? “Not because I wanted to take away the coaching action, because I didn't want her to have to spend the administrative time on it” So she's actually going to that exercise today for us to see what will the output be. The most important thing is that it triggers the manager to take coaching action. More importantly, it triggers the rep to coach themselves.
So here's the question they're asking the buyer, what inspired you to connect with me today? Then I'm asking, okay, so tell me “what business objective are they trying to solve?” And typically in the beginning I'll get an answer, like oh, they need ABC feature. And I'll say, nope, I want to know the business objective that they're trying to resolve. So and then I say, it doesn't sound like you know that, so let's go back and find that out and then you can bring this deal back to me.
So here's the question they're asking the buyer, what inspired you to connect with me today? Then I'm asking, okay, so tell me what business objective are they trying to solve? And typically in the beginning I'll get an answer, like oh, they need ABC feature. “I want to know the business objective” that they're trying to resolve. So and then I say, it doesn't sound like you know that, so let's go back and find that out and then you can bring this deal back to me. So I'll stop them in the very beginning if they don't know. If they do have the answer to the business objective,
And like, you're doing that, you're modeling that, but like, I don't know if you're explicitly telling people that, but I, you know, we talked earlier and you're talking about you're creating this kind of a corporate culture of our coaching culture, a culture of coaching. And, and really what I'm hearing from you is, it is coaching, but what I'm hearing is “it's more about consistency and modeling.” It's more about, we can do this over and over and over. And when you don't know it, I'm going to show you, I'm going to show you, I'm going to show you. And then that breeds people to know what to do and how to do it, right? And then, then, then you can move this stuff out of their way. I want to ask about the format of this. You call it the know your business meeting. And it sounds like part of this