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
Show moreShow less
Listen
Loading the recording
This recording could not be loaded.Open the audio file
Quoted on this wiki
Every place a page here uses this source, in the order the words come in it.
Are there interventions we need to do or training issues or different things like that? The outcome of this meeting then is the ability for us to have a plan going forward rep by rep on knowing what's going well with them, what's not, and how we can continue to improve performance over the next 30 days. We're going to dive deep into that in just a second, but first bring us home. What's number three? “Number three is outsourcing your board reporting to your senior leaders.” I've spent a lot of time working in private equity backed B2B SaaS companies. And one thing you know about working in that environment is every month there's a massive board packet that you need to produce that lays out the performance of each of the divisions and what the goals are for the next 30 days, 90 days, rest of the year.
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.
First one is the frontline manager talent pulse meeting. And what this is, it's going to fit into your typical rhythm of your one-on-ones with the frontline manager. So you don't have to schedule a whole separate meeting, but the folks in that meeting are you, the frontline manager, your HR partner, and sales ops. And you are looking at both “quantitative and qualitative information about each seller that reports to that frontline manager.” When you get in a rhythm here, what happens is, you know, what's going on with your sales force, both from a attainment where they need to improve and how they are doing perspective. Number two was typically the most capacity that a frontline manager can take on is eight sellers,