The No-Exception Rule That Every Sales Leader Needs to Adopt ASAP | Eleanor Dorfman

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1. 13:30

   You keep it simple. You tell them what metrics you're going to track. You don't make it a million metrics. You put it in one place and you put it in a place where every single person on the team is constantly looking at it. When I was running the sales development team over at Carta for SDRs, it was really simple. We had a three column dashboard, month, week, day, and it was just “number of cold calls, connect rate, set rate, number of emails, open rate, reply rate,” meetings booked from each channel, and you could literally see it stack ranked by rep and every single week in the Monday morning meeting, that's what we looked at. How many meetings did you book? How effective were your calls? How effective were your emails? And your team starts to get addicted to those things and optimizing those metrics when they see all of those things on the leaderboard every single day versus a lot of times teams

   In Outbound reporting dashboards

2. 21:09

   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

   In Account allocation and ownership

3. 23:24

   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

   In Data decay and refresh cycles

4. 25:00

   Retool. I think you can have that issue anywhere. It's just exacerbated at different levels. But I mean, I've definitely had that issue all the time. And then what do you happen if the employee count changes mid-deal cycle? Do you have to pass it up? And so you have to set rules around all of that. But this is where working with rev-ups and poking holes “from the beginning and doing a lot of role-playing. Okay, if X, Y, and Z happens, what will we” do? If X, Y, and Z happens, what do we do? We include a lot of examples in our ROE. So we can say, before you even come to us with something, is the example in the ROE. So our ROEs and confluence are very long and very detailed and very scenario-oriented because you can sort of game out what the issues are going to be. And again, if what you're optimizing

   In Account allocation and ownership

5. 26:05

   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

   In Account allocation and ownership

6. 26:34

   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 holding on to it. Once it's close lost, it'll then move to mid-market. When it goes back into the account pool or moves into refreshed territories, it'll move to mid-market. But “once you've qualified it, it's yours until it's close won or close lost.” And what do you do when the rep has the magically shrinking territory? You just deal with it. It always happens. There's no 100%. You're going to end up with splits. It's why you try and cover as much as you can with ROEs. You're going to end up in messy situations, so you try and cover as much as you can. And you make it very clear that you won't do exceptions. When you end up in a situation where it's not covered by

   In Handoff ownership and SLAs

7. 29:51

   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?

   In Account list refresh

8. 30:57

   So our internal processes, I have to use it a lot with finance when they're like, well, we need to explain to you from the customer, our internal processes should never impact the customer experience. For holdouts, we had the same rule from the beginning, when territories change over, anything you have that's stage two plus, you get to hold out for an extra quarter. And that's been our holdout rules for everything. How about you? “There was open opportunities, but there was a limit on how many you could have.” That should honestly be countered by managers should be doing better inspection, but there's a little bit of a conflict of interest. Because manager wants their rep to have the deal, right? Exactly. So let's say for example, reps know at the beginning of the year, the territories are going to be carved. What are they going to do? I had a meeting with the prospect, I'm going to create the opportunity, maybe move it to stage two.

   In Outbound capacity modeling

9. 35:09

   You have win rate, AE source pipeline, pipeline generation overall, and forecast accuracy. And then in the center, you have the no exceptions rule. 4. Your internal nonsensical processes should not impact the customer experience. If you “have a segment line that is off by one employee, make sure that there is enough buffer built” into your territories and your ROEs so you're not constantly passing deals and making your customers feel the exchange of reps' deals between different hands. Alrighty, Nick, how can people help us out? So a lot of what Eleanor talks about in her ROEs is stage-based. And we sat down with Mark Cossiglo and we documented his five-step sales process and the different stages that

   In Territory design

10. 35:34

    into your territories and your ROEs so you're not constantly passing deals and making your customers feel the exchange of reps' deals between different hands. Alrighty, Nick, how can people help us out? So a lot of what Eleanor talks about in her ROEs is stage-based. And we sat down with Mark Cossiglo and we documented his five-step sales process and the different stages that “go into this. If you don't have really, really consistent and clear definitions of what constitutes” stage two versus stage three versus stage four, you are going to run into a lot of headache and hassle. And so we've got a link in the show notes on this one to go check out that newsletter we did with Mark. Give it a read. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week on 30 Minutes to Presidents Club.

    In Co-selling opportunity management

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