Podcast episode
How to Lead Sales Managers and Address Underperformance (JD Miller, Kantata)
30 Minutes to President's Club27 Jun 202437 min
Description
FOUR ACTIONABLE TAKEAWAYS: Introduce frontline manager talent pulse meetings involving key stakeholders (yourself, frontline manager, HR partner, and sales ops) to comprehensively review both quantitative and qualitative seller performance data. Maintain frontline manager capacity at optimal levels (typically up to eight sellers per manager) to ensure effective control and stability in sales force management. Implement a structured 90-day ramp-up process for new hires, progressing from training to practical tasks like territory familiarization, prospecting, and live calls, to consistently exceed sales plan expectations. Clearly articulate and differentiate between commitment (worst-case scenario) and forecast (expected performance) figures when reporting to stakeholders, ensuring transparency and accuracy in sales projections. JD'S PATH TO PRESIDENTS CLUB: Chief Revenue Officer @ Kantata Chief Revenue Officer @ Motus Managing Director @ Bravo Solution Vice President, Americas @ Workplace Systems RESOURCES DISCUSSED: How to Forecast Join our weekly newsletter Things you can steal 30MPC Training: 30mpc.com/training
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possible. So once a month with each of my direct reports, I have a conversation with the frontline managers of any seller to talk about individual rep performance. The meeting includes me, the frontline manager, someone from sales operations and our HR business partner. “And we look at both qualitative and quantitative metrics.” On the quantitative side, I have the sales operations participant come deliver rep by rep how they're performing against quota and what their pipeline looks like compared to where they need to be. And then on the qualitative side, I have the frontline manager talk about what's going on with the person.
In Metrics
so I will save the entire annual plan for that. My question is, one of the places where annual planning can go wrong most is in your assumptions around ramp. I know this varies a lot based on deal cycle, but let's assume that you're in the sales motion that you're in today. How do you go about estimating time to ramp in your annual plan? “So I'm a really data-driven leader and I hope that we have data on prior performance.” It might be a little bit tedious if you don't have a really great data analytics tool, but can you look at each of the sellers you have in your organization today and can you look back to whenever they were hired, what did they produce every month or every quarter to understand what that onboarding and ramp time looked like? Now that's going to change business by business.
year, what does turnover look like? How many people typically leave your organization? Or how many years does someone typically work for you as a seller before they move on to something else? And you can be pretty predictive about how many sellers are going to leave. Often you can be predictive about what time of the year they're going to leave, and that “can start you on a recruiting path to backfill and start building in on your annual plan.” First of all, remove the performance of a top seller because one of them is likely to leave halfway through the year. And then number two, how long will it take me to recruit a replacement, and how long will it take them to ramp up and be more effective? It's a big spreadsheet. I'll send you the link afterwards. It's a good template that you can use. That's one of the biggest things that I spend time in at the beginning of the year.
on calls by the end of the 30 days. And so we would set these mini milestones where throughout the 30 days, they would slowly progress from learning in the classroom to doing. And so in week one, the milestone was we got to get your hands on your territory and we got to get you tiering your book. “And that teaches you our ICP.” In week two, I want to get you on the phones. I want to get you in the fray prospecting a little bit. By week three, you should know the high-level discovery talk tracks. You should know the demo talk tracks, and that's the mock week. So you're doing a million mocks. By week four, you're taking SMB and disqualified calls. So you're in the real action.
And so in week one, the milestone was we got to get your hands on your territory and we got to get you tiering your book. And that teaches you our ICP. In week two, I want to get you on the phones. I want to get you in the fray prospecting a little bit. By week three, you should know the high-level discovery talk tracks. “You should know the demo talk tracks, and that's the mock week.” So you're doing a million mocks. By week four, you're taking SMB and disqualified calls. So you're in the real action. And then week five, you're in the action taking live supervised sales calls. And then from there, the manager just slowly steps back one footstep at a time.
And then for each of those assumptions, we can map out if it goes, here's the increase we'll see. Maybe it's a 1% increase on our win rate. If it goes really well, what might we see? And we can play all of that too. So when we're doing those monthly flash reports or those quarterly looks, we can track how are we doing against the plan, but then on each of those kind of stretch initiatives, “we can have a discussion about how are we doing on those too?” And how do I start enrolling the other leaders in the company to have us outperform those assumptions? And together, that's really what makes us overperform. So you talked about a 1% increase on win rate, and there was something that you had put in the prep document, which was you should be cautious about thinking that you can improve any one metric.
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