Podcast episode
The No-Exception Rule That Every Sales Leader Needs to Adopt ASAP | Eleanor Dorfman
30 Minutes to President's Club9 Jan 202539 min
Description
ACTIONABLE TAKEAWAYS: SPFs for Short-Term Change: Use SPFs to drive short-term behavior changes. Long-term shifts should align with consistent metrics in your "iron square" framework. Strict Holdover Rules: Allow one quarter for closing open opportunities after a territory change if they’re past stage two. No exceptions ensure fairness and consistency. The Iron Square: Track rep productivity with win rate, AE-sourced pipeline, total pipeline generation, and forecast accuracy, with quota attainment as the central North Star. Customer-First Processes: Avoid letting internal rules disrupt customer experience. Build buffer zones in ROEs and territories to minimize deal handoffs. ELEANOR'S PATH TO PRESIDENTS CLUB: Head of Sales @ Retool Global Head of Commercial Retention & Regional Director of Commercial Sales @ Segment Global Head of Commercial Renewals and Retention @ Segment Head of Customer Success and Solutions engineering @ Clever Inc RESOURCES DISCUSSED: Join our weekly newsletter Things you can steal 30MPC Training: 30mpc.com/training
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that you can use to close deals faster. Grab it in the show notes. So let's talk about the common buckets of ROEs. Looking at it, I see them falling into three different categories. The first is who is allowed to work what. That includes regional territories, “employee counts, segment lines, things like that. Number two is what happens when something changes” hands. So you have territories changing hands, opportunity holdovers, SDR to AE handoffs, AE to AM handoffs, etc. And then the last bucket that I had is a little bit more associated with
what are some of the baseline rules you need to set as a sales leader? I think there's a few. Gosh, even that one bucket is so many different buckets because the ROEs are so messy. So again, it depends on the size and nature of your business. But as you move beyond your first two or three reps, you'll probably start to draw some segmentation lines. These reps “will work zero to 100 employees. These reps will work 100 to 1,000. These reps will work 1,000 plus.” Those will change year over year, again, as your business moves up market and expands. So that's one. Again, as you move internationally, suddenly it's going to be, okay, where is this headquartered? And then there's complexities around if it's headquartered here, but everyone's over here, but the buying note is over here. You have to have an objective way
be accurate all the time, but it's going to be the same. You're focused on consistency more than accuracy 100% of the time. You'd rather be consistent 100% of the time than accurate 100% of the time. How often are you revisiting these data refreshes? Is it annually, quarterly, otherwise? Data's refreshed. It depends where your sources are. But I think we try and keep “the data refreshed constantly. And it matters at the moment of time. So when the demo is request,” what does the data say on that day? So you have to say on this day, this is the source of the data, but you always keep your data up to date. So this would drive me crazy, extremely triggering. When I was at Carta, the way that we would price was based on the number of investors you had on your cap table, which would include everyone who invested in your company and all of the employees
everyone motivated, it needs to be fair. You need to do what you say you're going to do, and it needs to be consistent. Could you give an example rule for how you would draw segment lines? And if you find that the actual pricing metric is really different from the segment lines, what's the rule around that? “For us, the examples are, it's whatever it is when you get the deal and when you qualify” it. And so if it's a zero to 100 employees and it's 99 employees, when it comes inbound, it goes to stage two, you're working it, it stays with you even if they grow to 200 or 300 employees during the course of the deal. Once it's close lost, and again, this is where you have to have accountability and the manager making sure it's real and you're not just
Those are going to be your accounts till the end of the year. And you know that so you can build out a plan and work them. Very similar. My goal is to minimize handoffs between reps and not create a jarring experience for the customer. And so what that meant is we would establish what accounts were commercial mid market and enterprise based on employee count. So one to 250 was commercial “250 to 1000 was mid market. 1000 plus was enterprise. And then eventually we had strategic” because we didn't do much SMB selling. Even for our commercial reps, we were able to carve out books where we got most of the time covered. And that was your book for the year. And then there was a pool of accounts that were named and stamped commercial where mid market reps literally could not pick them up. And same thing with enterprise. And then we would continuously
because we didn't do much SMB selling. Even for our commercial reps, we were able to carve out books where we got most of the time covered. And that was your book for the year. And then there was a pool of accounts that were named and stamped commercial where mid market reps literally could not pick them up. And same thing with enterprise. And then we would continuously “refresh the data, but we wouldn't continuously re-stamp the account. So you didn't have this” constant moving across segments. It wasn't perfect, but my goal was so that When we carve territories with a plan, if a company grew by 30 employees over two quarters, to me like there's not such a radical difference that you should take that from one rep and put it in another rep's hands. How did the two of you approach holdover period?