Your guide to getting AEs to self-prospect (finally)

Getting AEs to self-prospect is fun: AEs will complain, procrastinate, and straight up not do it.

In todays episode, we share some simple tricks to get account executives excited and motivated to self prospect (hint: it's about $).

• (00:00) - Introduction
• (03:12) - AI in Sales and Self Prospecting
• (05:41) - Challenges of Self Prospecting
• (07:57) - Incentives for Self Prospecting
• (11:43) - Pipeline Generation and Commission Strategies
• (16:53) - Navigating AE and SDR Roles
• (17:43) - Impact of Self-Prospecting on Performance
• (18:50) - Incentivizing Prospecting Targets
• (23:01) - Team-Based Incentives and Collaboration
• (26:33) - Testing and Adjusting Incentives
• (28:34) - Simple and Effective Incentive Ideas
• (29:52) - Visual and Tangible Incentives
• (31:42) - Incentives for High-Value Deals

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Creators and Guests

Host

Mikkel Plaehn

Marketing leader & b2b saas nerd

Host

Toni Hohlbein

2x exited CRO | 1x Founder | Podcast Host

What is The Revenue Formula?

This podcast is about scaling tech startups.

Hosted by Toni Hohlbein & Raul Porojan, together they look at the full funnel.

With a combined 20 years of experience in B2B SaaS and 3 exits, they discuss growing pains, challenges and opportunities they’ve faced. Whether you're working in RevOps, sales, operations, finance or marketing - if you care about revenue, you'll care about this podcast.

If there’s one thing they hate, it’s talk. We know, it’s a bit of an oxymoron. But execution and focus is the key - that’s why each episode is designed to give 1-2 very concrete takeaways.

[00:00:00] Mikkel: yeah. I mean, I wrote down in my notes, so how would Toni and Mikkel finally get AEs to self prospects and it's. Money. This has money here. That's basically what it says. It's,
[00:00:09] Toni: it's the bane of every ae.
[00:00:11] It's the dream of every CEO. But those two things usually never come together. You know, the, I've asked this question, my VP of sales so many times, like, why? Why aren't they just, you know.
[00:00:22] Mikkel: Yeah, they should be
[00:00:23] Toni: sitting there chatting. I see them. I see them. Why can't they do some self prospecting now? Um, and then it's always very complicated reasons why it doesn't work.
[00:00:33] Mikkel: No, we haven't. We haven't trained the guys in SalesLoft.
[00:00:36] Toni: Oh yeah. That's, that's what it
[00:00:37] Today's episode is brought to you by ever stage, the top writer platform to automate sales commissions. You can create a single hub for your reps to track all their deals, earnings, and performance history thanks to EverStage's seamless integration with Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Slack, and MS Teams.
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[00:01:08] And now, enjoy the show,
[00:01:10] Mikkel: And I think the Avid listener, which in this case is my co-host, I think he's listening. Yes, I have a bit of the sniffles going on. It's kind of crazy because now the, it's. Every time, summer or spring truly approaches and the weather is awesome. Then you get sick. It's not like when winter is insane, there's a blizzard outside. Then you're like, totally. Then it's just the flu and you're completely knocked out. But the sniffles like always now.
[00:01:36] Toni: No, but it's like, you know, you go outside, you think like, oh, it's sunny outside. That's great. Let me just kind of put on my thin jacket, you know, my spring jacket,
[00:01:45] and then you go outside and it's really, really cold. Like really cold right now. It's so many times it, it just hit me. I walked outside like without gloves or something and it's like, oh, actually let me let get my gloves right now.
[00:01:57] Please, you know?
[00:01:58] Mikkel: And then you see your kid when you pick him up at school, who's running barefoot outdoor in a t-shirt. It's like, dad, I was really hot. I just need to be outside for a minute. It's like, yeah,
[00:02:07] shut up. Put on, put on a goddamn shirt. Yeah.
[00:02:10] yeah,
[00:02:11] Toni: then next week, oh, I have an ear infection. It's
[00:02:13] Mikkel: yeah. It's exactly, it's like, I can really feel like I've become a parent.
[00:02:17] It's like, put on your clothes. I mean, listen to me. I decide what goes, I make the rules. It's like, oh my God. Oh my God. It's
[00:02:26] terrible.
[00:02:27] Toni: That's it. That's
[00:02:28] Mikkel: So that was the intro. That's done. Thanks so much for listening. By the way, if you are gonna enjoy this episode don't forget to just hit pause and then like, subscribe, share, review. It helps us grow this show.
[00:02:38] Really do appreciate it. I mean, we're doing this just out of the goodwill of our heart really. It's, it's, that's why we're doing it.
[00:02:46] Toni: That's, that's it. I mean, there's maybe a little bit of like, hanging out together and kind of just hitting record, but otherwise it's it's a sad, it's a sad reality here, you know?
[00:02:55] Mikkel: Well, at one point we had good old Bart good old Bart who helped produce the show in the background. He did, like, what would this show look like with ai? And it was basically two, the two of us sitting at a bar with a beer, which is just encapsulated perfect. And I think you're right. This is like a reason to catch up.
[00:03:12] That's, that's kinda what it's, and speaking of catching up, one of the things we wanted to catch up was actually, self prospecting. We've talked a bit about this in the past. We've had some, let's say, opinions and feelings about this whether AE should do it or not, and all this stuff. I think one of the interesting pieces at the moment is there's so much transformation happening, right?
[00:03:33] There's so much transformation happening with all these AI tech going on. I think that the dream you and I discussed briefly that everyone is salivating over is can we get rid of the SDR team now and just not need to spend. Payroll anymore and you know, just have the AEs. What do you,
[00:03:49] what do you think there?
[00:03:50] Toni: And the answer is no. No,
[00:03:53] Mikkel: Damnit?
[00:03:54] Toni: no. Doesn't work. And, and you know, let me, let me rephrase this a little bit. There was a lot of hype around Theis SDRs. I think they've largely squandered that hype.
[00:04:04] I think people are more and more waking up and saying, it doesn't work out. I'm sorry. It just doesn't.
[00:04:08] And you know, while, while we all had this idea's like, oh wow, if we, if we get the pipeline, you know, delivered to us. Maybe the e can just do the full sales cycle and maybe the E can even do, you know, onboarding and support because hey, we have AI for that. And, and so far the true reality is like, eh, none of that.
[00:04:27] None of that actually kind of turns out to be
[00:04:29] Mikkel: So what you're saying, nothing. Nothing truly comes easy in life. There's no like passive pipeline gen
[00:04:34] happening
[00:04:35] Toni: So, I mean, you know, this is, this is what we've all been trying to sell each other. It's like, hey, you know what, this AI thing is just going to completely revolutionize everything. And in 2025, 70% of the go-to market is gonna be you know, AI not to JA is also gonna be done on the show soon again, I think, right?
[00:04:52] Mikkel: yeah, yeah. He is coming back. He's
[00:04:53] coming back. And I think we're gonna talk a bit with him on this stuff because I think one of the interesting pieces is, funny enough, I think even though there's gonna be tech that reduces the need for. Sellers, like the amount of sellers you need. It's also just going to increase the amount of salespeople on the team in a happy coincidence.
[00:05:12] I do believe to a degree, if we as an in industry can square this thing where you don't really need sdr, you can have AEs with technology that a go-to market engineer provides, by the way have them actually build the pipeline. I think that would be pretty awesome, to be honest,
[00:05:28] not not having that SDR team, having someone own the full customer journey until closed.
[00:05:32] That would be cool.
[00:05:33] Toni: absolutely. And for everyone that's not able to live in this pipe dream yet. We were thinking to maybe do an episode on.
[00:05:41] Okay, what are some really good old tested things that just work? And what's the problem with those?
[00:05:49] And the one that we sunk our teeth into is self prospecting, right?
[00:05:55] It's the bane of every ae.
[00:05:57] It's the dream of every CEO. But those two things usually never come together. You know, the, I've asked this question, my VP of sales so many times, like, why? Why aren't they just, you know.
[00:06:08] Mikkel: Yeah, they should be
[00:06:09] Toni: sitting there chatting. I see them. I see them. Why can't they do some self prospecting now? And then it's always very complicated reasons why it doesn't work.
[00:06:18] Then I addressed this issue, obviously with my Rev ops team and they came out with like, whatever, whatever, you know, whatever the f they came out with and, and none of it worked like zilch,
[00:06:27] Mikkel: No, we haven't. We haven't trained the guys in SalesLoft.
[00:06:31] Toni: Oh yeah.
[00:06:31] That's, that's what it
[00:06:32] Mikkel: We can't do it but yeah. But it is funny why they're not motivated to just self-motivated to go and do this. Right. I wonder, I wonder why they aren't just doing that actually.
[00:06:42] Toni: Yeah, I mean the, the, the obvious answer is like, it sucks,
[00:06:45] Mikkel: Yeah,
[00:06:46] Toni: Building pipeline sucks really hard and no one wants to do it. And especially when you have an SDR team on the on, you know, on payroll, I. Like that's the moment where all ais stopped. So I rolled out an SDR team to a team once. And it was a healthy self prospecting culture.
[00:07:01] And guess what stopped with the first SDR joining on the first day Gone.
[00:07:06] Mikkel: my job anymore. I'm not
[00:07:07] gonna
[00:07:07] Toni: You know, we have now a shrub that does that for us. And and you know, we were kind of trying to think and, you know, we scout the web. We talked to some people, we saw some stuff on LinkedIn. We were like, Hey, those are some good examples.
[00:07:21] On maybe how you can finally get the self prospecting thing done.
[00:07:24] Mikkel: I was just gonna say it by the way, just interjecting a kid story here, because it's the equivalent of my oldest son who's still like, can you, can you make me a sandwich? And it's like, well, you can, you, you are old enough to make it yourself now it's like that kind of like I've been used to, you always feeding me.
[00:07:41] Now I have to do it myself. What the, what the heck is going on here? So what we wanted to do with, I guess, we wanted to look at some of the incentives
[00:07:48] that folks can create in order to finally, finally get those AEs to self prospect.
[00:07:54] And what is like the the number one incentive we're gonna go for
[00:07:57] here?
[00:07:58]
[00:07:58] Toni: So let's start with the realization that people really don't wanna do it. Like, kind of that's clear.
[00:08:04] Number two, you know, reps are incentivized on closed one business doing pipe gen that sometimes three to six months before they see money from that. It's difficult, like humanity wise, it's difficult to kind of get this in.
[00:08:21] And then let's also appreciate the other thing that they're kind of in charge of the pipeline itself and there's some gamification they can very easily do, right? So let's just keep those things in mind and kind of bring them up when they are, when they're applicable. But the first one, super simple stuff to simply give them a higher commission rate for self source deals.
[00:08:42] Very straightforward, right? So you kind of have your pipeline generated by inbound and SDRs and maybe your commission is at the normal rate, I don't know, eight, nine, 10% or something like this. And for everything that is self sourced, you give a commission that is considered to be higher than that, maybe 12, 13, 14, 15, 16%.
[00:09:01] So kind of almost double up the commission on these things, right? There are also tricks here where you can basically say, we'll give you maybe bigger quota relief, right? So let's just say you close a deal for a hundred K, maybe that's 10% of your target for the quarter. If you self source it, maybe you get a quarter leave of 150 K and so forth, right?
[00:09:20] Kind of you can play with those things. You know, some of that gets a little bit math, so let's, let's not go into the details, into the weeds of this, but what I've seen is reps have like two different levers to pull sometimes, and the quota relief one feels better to them, very often feels much better to them actually, right?
[00:09:38] So kind of consider this,
[00:09:40] but
[00:09:40] that's kind of the very easy, straightforward one. Sorry,
[00:09:43] Michael.
[00:09:43] Mikkel: And it's because it's reducing risk for them
[00:09:45] Toni: Yeah, absolutely. I, I, I think a lot of motivation for 80% of the reps out there is, is hitting target. Like yes, it's, it's connected to, to, you know, money in the bank account, but it's also connected to not getting fired.
[00:09:59] So it's downside protection basically. Right? So if you give a little bit more quota relief for self source stuff that will help you, you know, you need to watch out because suddenly you have. Oh, you know, let me, you know, close, loose this inbound and open it tomorrow again as a self prospected deal. And then see there, I have now a self prospected deal so that you need to watch out with the gaming.
[00:10:21] And then you also, especially if you go into the quota relief stuff. You need to, like, you need to do the math a little bit because what you don't wanna have is everyone is hitting Target but the company, you know,
[00:10:33] and so you need to be a bit careful with these things. But generally speaking, those two items, like higher commission or quarter relief on self prospected stuff money, that, that's something these guys like.
[00:10:45] Mikkel: I think it's like always been the case with incentives. Like you shouldn't build them with the fear of folks gaming it, it gonna, it's gonna happen no matter how you build them. I think these kind of incentives and that at the end of the day, I. One of the points that do matter, a great deal other than than obviously monitoring it is also that it's kind of simple. Like it has to be kind of simple for people to understand and they can feel that they can actually impact it. And I think one of the interesting pieces you said is like it, well, if you have a sales cycle of just three months and then you also need to book it yourself, you're looking at six months. That is a long time. That is a very long time for
[00:11:20] someone. And I think there's like been psychological studies that just show human are really terrible at this stuff. If you look at, they have one that's classic, I think with kids where they ask them, Hey, do you wanna have the candy now? Or do you wanna have two pieces of candy in an hour?
[00:11:34] And
[00:11:34] most of them, they're like, oh, I'll take the candy now. Thank you very much. Right. And it's, it's the same dynamic here.
[00:11:39] Toni: Which is, which is exactly the, the next point actually. Right.
[00:11:43] Kind of try and build some incentives around pipeline generation instead of only on close winning the deal, but also on pipe gen. And the idea here could be that, I dunno, maybe, maybe you have a million dollar target and maybe you need to have two or $3 million of pipeline for that, or, you know, equivalents of right.
[00:12:03] You could basically say, okay, a decent portion of that 10%, 20%, 30% that should be the self gen target. Right? And based on that target being reached, you can then pay out a bonus. Yeah. You would basically say, okay, if you reach 30% self gen of your, of your pipeline that you generate to kind of get to, you know, your target, and you get a bonus of $5,000.
[00:12:28] If you get to even more than that, maybe 50%, you get a bonus of $15,000 in top right? Kind of. Those can very quickly be very considerable numbers. And what that does is it turns the focus a little bit away from reps saying like, Hey, I only wanna source the deals that will close. And no one is really an expert in that.
[00:12:47] And then kind of moves it towards a. Let's just source deals and create pipeline and create more ABAs and kind of get me, get me in front of, you know, folks more often so I can try and kind of win those deals, right? And it also creates a more consistent behavior, right? Kind of where you really try every quarter again and again and again, try and unlock that additional you know, spiff basically, or money piece.
[00:13:09] And then kind of sets you up, you know, in six months down the line when those deals actually materialize, that you actually have a nice you know, pipeline going for you.
[00:13:17] Mikkel: Yeah, it's a little bit of a, almost gamification to a degree. Right? You have those different kind of incentives you can unlock if you do the right work. Right. How do you maybe this is off track and, and maybe this is one of those we do cut out, but I. How do you build this into the process of the ae?
[00:13:34] And maybe this is like a follow-up episode we need to do once you get them self prospecting. Because I guess the overriding directive number one is close deals, period, end of story. If they're not closing deals, company dies. Right. So that's the number one priority. And then number two will be book more opportunities.
[00:13:53] Right. So how, how, how, how do you, how do you structure this best? Is there like a rule of thumb or anything?
[00:13:58] Toni: So I'm not sure about the rule of thumb, but if you think about it, and he actually walks around with a tremendous amount of knowledge about you know, his or her old deals. And, and we know like maybe you have a 20% close rate, meaning every quarter you have 8% deals that. Close loss.
[00:14:13] But those deals are not, throw them out the window style, those deals have value, right?
[00:14:18] So, if you have a stronger self prospecting culture in the AE team, what will happen is that they're like, oh no, actually this deal over there, they close loss in Q1, I. I, I know there's gonna be something in Q3, so let me kind of reach out and kind of book something in Q2, right? Instead of hoping or waiting that some SDR picks this up.
[00:14:37] Another one is like, oh, look at this. This guy jumped over to another company. I had a really great connection with him. Let me ping him and just catch up and let's see what's going on, and then try and build something out of this, right? And then the last one I would say is, you know, when you close win a deal ask for a referral.
[00:14:55] Like ask them, right? You can even do this on deals that you're losing for the right reasons. You can ask them like, Hey, do you know anyone else? I would be interested. Right? And if you, you know, if you have a strong self prospecting culture, those are many tactics that can deploy. I. They are hurtful still, right?
[00:15:13] It's, you need to ask and someone will say no and so forth, and it takes time. So in order to get them to be incentivized to kind of take that time and take that effort, that's kind of where the incentives come in. Right. And kind of almost jumping into the next one, which is a little bit in connection to some of the pipeline sourcing stuff.
[00:15:30] You can also, you know, refine this a little bit more and you know, create some kind of a payment, a payout that is structured around. Those deals progressing, right? So let's just say you, you not only get the first meeting, but maybe you get them to discovery done or kind of negotiate and so forth.
[00:15:46] So even before they are done in terms of, you know, signature signed and so forth, you can think about paying some kind of commission on those deals as they progress through the funnel, right? Again, it would only be on sales source deals. And you know, this can be a. Small amount, like a percentage or something like this that you pay already as those deals progress.
[00:16:09] Now what do you need to have in place for that? Is a very strong pipeline process, right? Kind of it, it doesn't work that people can put all the self prospected deal into negotiation immediately after they book them. You know, that that would be gaming the system kind of too much. You need to have a good process that, you know, polices this and safeguards us to a degree.
[00:16:29] And, but again, why would you do it while you're doing it? Because you want to create an incentive that hits earlier
[00:16:35] than when they close win the deal, right? You wanna find those ways to kind of get that. Benefit faster than at the end of the full deal cycle.
[00:16:43] Mikkel: The thing is, the questions I have, and the question I have now is kind of going off script again. Like
[00:16:48] all of all of a sudden you have. Look, these are great incentives.
[00:16:53] Hands down, and I think we're gonna cover a few more before this episode is obviously done, but it also created some kind of competition between the SDI and ae, right?
[00:17:01] Those tactics you listed out of the AE, reaching out to previous closed lost deals, closed one deals, et cetera. Those will be plays SDRs used to do. So how's that gonna work out? Are you potentially, in some cases gonna kneecap the STS a bit? There's something internally to navigate, I guess, here on who, who does what.
[00:17:21] I guess for me by the way, it makes complete sense. You have someone who had maybe a demo, spend an hour on a call with someone and follow-ups that they are the ones reaching out again and not someone new. I think for the. Let's say for the buyer in that situation, it makes a lot of sense. It also makes sense that it's not a, oh, marketing needs to get the credit.
[00:17:38] So they're sending an email and doing all kinds of things. It's like, no, no. Try and get on the phone. Try and get a hold of them.
[00:17:43] Toni: So, so what it, what it's going to create is. Basically, yes, the upper performance will go down because in many, many organizations, or will be more real, let's just call it like it is, it will be more real in many organizations where you have kind of strong also connections between the SDI and the ae.
[00:18:00] You will have situations where the AE is like, Hey, you know, call this guy.
[00:18:04] I know they're ready. Just call 'em up and then, you know, hit them over to me.
[00:18:07] Those deals suddenly will be self prospecting, right? So there will be, to a degree, some deals that the organization net, net wise won't gain, right?
[00:18:15] Because they're now just attributed to the other person.
[00:18:18] But what does really happen here, number one the SDR, now it's like, oh shit. I'm two deals behind target. Now I need to push now as to kind of get those two deals. So that's where you kind of have the net gain again. And the other piece is like, well now that the year is starting to think in this realm.
[00:18:33] Kind of let's, let's keep thinking, keep executing in this realm, then you will have a net gain overall, right?
[00:18:39] But yeah, you will have I don't wanna say sharper elbows, but you will have, let's less grease between the, the, the SDR and the but going maybe with the next one here which I think is really interesting.
[00:18:50] So basically tie the incentive around hitting a prospecting target. That then creates a commission boost for all the deals in that pipeline. Yeah. Meaning yes, you need to get to 20, 30% self prospecting with your pipeline. Or you can tie it to closed one deals from self prospecting. And if you hit that.
[00:19:12] If the AE actually hits that milestone he will get an accelerator on all deals that he or she has closed. Right? Kind of really making this really interesting, and you can even do it as a, not only a, a, a, a kicker kind of a, a bum. You can also do it as a ding that activates in the other direction if they only achieve.
[00:19:31] You know, less than the target.
[00:19:33] This might actually then generate a, a, a drop across all the different deals that they have done. Right. Kind of really, really upping the stakes for them. And I think, and this is a dangerous one to play with, but it's the more powerful one is taking stuff away. I. Taking stuff away kind of creates all kinds of upsets.
[00:19:49] But it's also the way more powerful you know, motivator in many cases, and this is proven by psychology, right? Kind of the, you know, gaining a hundred dollars gives you way less pleasure than losing a hundred dollars hurts you. Right? And kind of tapping into that, that would be something like this here.
[00:20:06] Mikkel: Yeah. I think we also covered pieces of this in the past, past with with comp plans as well. It is super important to think about the dynamics and just the quite frankly, the experience that the seller is gonna have as they go through some of these situations. And I think playing through the. Hey, what would it look like if someone, if Greg has a tough quarter with this new model, what will that look like? And what's gonna happen potentially versus what if he has a great quarter, what does that look like? I think part of that also matters a great deal for sure.
[00:20:36] Toni: No, absolutely another one. And you know, again, we, we are playing with the same levers, but like in different tricky, nice ways of kind of thinking about it. So if you, for example, give them a self sourcing pipeline target you can use it to adjust their target in general. So let's just say someone was self sourcing 50% of their pipeline, maybe their target stays at a million.
[00:21:01] Right? And this makes sense. If you're spending so much time on self gen maybe you, you don't have so many deals. Maybe you kind of, that's, that's the reason, by the way, as a unit and as unit economics kind of around this. This will be so much more efficient than any, any of the other things that can happen around like hands down.
[00:21:19] Right? So taking the quota down for this wrap, if they kind of self source so much is. Making you lots of money actually thinking about it. And then the reverse can also be true. If that person doesn't hit that self gen target, you can actually increase the pipeline. Which also makes sense because they, these guys rely a lot more on SDRs, rely a lot more on inbounds.
[00:21:40] They consume a lot more resources that are basically coming into that, you know, into that p and l, that individual p and l of an ae. And in order for that p and l to work out and be positive, c payback positive, so to speak. They actually need to hit higher. Right. And again, the logic here is, you know, you can also reverse it.
[00:21:58] And it's like, well, you know, if you do self prospecting, we take down your quota. This one is actually more powerful. And more will be more accepted, I think because you basically can do the math with them on a, on a sheet of paper and say like, well, if you rely on so many outside help, so much outside help, and you burn through all of those resources, your target has to go up for this to work out.
[00:22:18] Right.
[00:22:19] Mikkel: would you actually let them choose? Like, would you have a mix of AEs, some that do self prospecting and some that don't with variants in, in their quota?
[00:22:27] Toni: I, I think you can set it up like this, but the way this is here being thought of is. You have all these AEs going into one direction, but then there are different accelerators that they individually can opt into, for example. Right. And by the way, I wouldn't recommend using all of them. I think that's too, just like that.
[00:22:43] I wouldn't do that. But you know, some of them might kind of ring. Very, very true for you guys.
[00:22:48] Mikkel: Yeah. Yeah. It's like making a pizza and it's like, so there's ham, tuna, cheese, butter, chili. Yeah, it's a lot. It's nasty.
[00:22:56] It's not gonna work.
[00:22:58] So
[00:22:58] do you have more do you have another incentive for us?
[00:23:00] Toni: I, I have more man. I have more.
[00:23:01] So another one is think about it as team-based incentives, right? So, you don't have a round robin, so round robin is, you have a team of 10 sts. They book meetings that throw over into an E and then they do stuff. I think that works in some instances it doesn't work in many others.
[00:23:17] So I really like a pairing or parting kind of approach where this is a little bit more intimate, kind of, you know, each other. And here it could be that an account is being sourced by an AE because maybe they know kind of who that is and so forth, right? But the deal is being booked by an STR and this is how we get around this, you know, previous issue that we kind of mentioned, where kind of suddenly you start to have the elbows come out.
[00:23:39] Here you actually encourage this kind of working together and basically say, well, the A and SD are working together on those set of accounts and both get a benefit from doing this in the first place. Right? And then you would basically say like, if this then kind of turns into a deal. Then maybe both into, into an opportunity, both the A and the SDR get a benefit from that, like a cash benefit kind of directly there, right?
[00:24:03] Again, you know, you need to police and look at this and make sure it's not being gamed, but ultimately what you want. What do you wanna incentivize here? Is this, is this team thinking, right? Because many, many times it is also very time consuming to. the reach out and do all of that work. And I think it makes sense if you have like, Hey Gary, I know him.
[00:24:24] He's not this new geek. I just need to kind of ping him once and have a meeting set up. And then there might be a couple of other accounts where like, hey, we would be a good fit, but all the legwork and you know, figuring out who to call and you know whom to send what and so forth, that still needs to be done.
[00:24:38] That part of the work, you would basically kind of rely more on an STR and then having this collaboration of like a shared account list almost. That is then, then the behavior you wanna incentivize.
[00:24:49] Mikkel: So I actually have a few questions that I think maybe we need to cover them. Also, just before we potentially run out of time, because you have a lot of great potential incentives. I'm betting you have more on the list. I just, I just gotta ask on behalf of the listener, right? Let's say there's a scenario now where they're like, okay, yes, we should look at some incentives for these AEs to start self prospecting.
[00:25:09] We have a pod. With two SDRs and one ae collectively they're booking, let's keep it simple. 10 ops per SDR. So that's 20, 20 a month. And now we want to encourage self prospecting. How do you figure out what the numbers should then be? Because it's, obviously meetings booked a degree, matters a great deal here.
[00:25:26] How much time should the AEs potentially be sinking into this? Do you have any kind of reflections on this?
[00:25:33] Toni: So there are a couple of. Ways to kind of look at this, the, the best case and the, you know, the, the luxury problem cases. Like, oh, you not only have 20, you know, SDR meetings, but suddenly you have maybe another 10 or 15 being sourced by the a's. Like, who's gonna take all those demos? Like best, best, best case problem, by the way.
[00:25:50] And I can tell you as much that I've never met an AE that says like, you know what, don't send me more meetings. Like,
[00:25:56] just don't do it
[00:25:57] Mikkel: They'll just work overtime.
[00:25:58] Toni: it basically never happens, right? So kind of having too many meetings is great thing. What should you be putting into your Excel spreadsheet from day one?
[00:26:06] Well, maybe nothing. Just leave this as a play, as a tactic. And, and what does help, and we've been tracking this a lot you know, previously is just have a line item for what self prospecting looks like. Then just, just pull this forward. Just take the average of that and keep expecting this going forward.
[00:26:23] And he might be wrong, he might be right with this, right? There might be some outliers that are doing this a lot, and then maybe that person leaves and suddenly it completely breaks away.
[00:26:30] But this will be your best indication there.
[00:26:33]
[00:26:33] Mikkel: but you wouldn't consider doing almost a let's say proof of concept test with a pod and say, Hey, now we're gonna let you do pro self prospect. We want you to self prospect. You're gonna get these incentives in order to do so. And then kind of monitor and see, hey, what can we realistically expect?
[00:26:47] Because it's also adding additional costs with the incentives.
[00:26:50] Toni: So the, that's, so, that's right. I, I think if, if what you're rolling out fundamentally changes behavior like changes the process and so forth. You're not quite sure if the pros is gonna be right for you or if it's gonna break things, try and test it out. Many of those, you know, incentives we are going through, you can just throw them in there for a quarter, make a big thing out of it, see what happens, and then take it from there.
[00:27:13] Right? I think some of them are very low commitment actually. but.
[00:27:16] Mikkel: just wondering, sorry to cut you off again, but I'm just wondering when you're testing also this stuff, it's like you're testing. Basically my commission, my income now. How, how, how do you manage testing on the, on the commission level? So it's, it's kind of, let's say, I, I guess you wanna take some risk off of the AEs to be honest.
[00:27:33] Toni: So as long as you're testing, and this is from an E perspective, because you're asking a question like this, as long as you're testing in the positive realm, only
[00:27:43] everyone will be
[00:27:44] Mikkel: yeah, yeah. They would love it. It's
[00:27:46] like
[00:27:46] Toni: Ah, okay. I have the chance to get more, and my only downside is to get the same. I'm okay with that.
[00:27:52] I think where it gets way more tricky is when you do some of the negative accelerators, like, oh, you didn't hit this, and therefore that I.
[00:28:00] I think what you, the way you would do it actually is you would start incentivizing behavior in a positive way where basic is a net gain for everyone. And then once you start seeing, okay, this is working, or this is the baseline we can expect from people that are really picking this up,
[00:28:15] then it can start like, okay, well if you don't do it all, you get an efficacy and then next quarter if you don't do 10%, you get an activity and then like you kind of ramp it in there.
[00:28:23] And then the conversation with the AEs is pretty straightforward. It's like, well, everyone else around here is doing this stuff. You are the only one not doing it. So, you know, it's up to you, my friend. Right.
[00:28:33] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:28:34] Toni: I think another very simple one, and I've done this myself actually many times, is to, you know, keep it.
[00:28:40] Really simple and just pay like a, a, you know, a fee, a bonus for a new opportunity generator. Like, just, just do that. And we've, we've done this in terms of spiffs and sprints and the last month of the quarter. Maybe, maybe, maybe that's a bad idea for an, a spiff, but like, you know, in the first month or second month of the quarter, just kind of, you know, hey, you know, book a meeting, you get some money.
[00:29:02] Again, you need to watch out because, you know, they're, they're all fully in charge of what is a meeting, you know, what is a pipeline? And you wanna make sure that they're not completely gaming the system for you. Right. And I would even say like, maybe cap it, cap it at four to five meetings a quarter.
[00:29:17] If they had reached 10, great. Give them another thing on top, but don't make it like an endless thing because otherwise you know, you can make a lot of money just from that. And, and what is messy is. And it's happened to me already. You know, people are really gaming this.
[00:29:33] and then almost like having legally speaking everything on their side, it's like, no, this was a meeting, it was booked by me.
[00:29:38] You know, it qualifies as
[00:29:40] Mikkel: yeah, yeah,
[00:29:40] yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
[00:29:43] Toni: And now, now, now, now try and fuck with me. You know, and so you wanna be careful around this. And you wanna have some you know, some language around protecting yourself maybe from that.
[00:29:52] Mikkel: I think a cool thing I saw, by the way on these almost spiffs, it's a while back, I gotta say. But someone took, I think it was the founder took a picture of like a regional SDR team and they were like, I wanna say 10 people or something, sitting in an island together, booking meetings and above them from the ceiling were hanging three things.
[00:30:10] I forget all of them, but one of them was like a I wanna say a $5,000. Gift certificate for travel. Like, so they could buy a holiday
[00:30:19] and it's, you know, they clearly had a spiff where it's like they could sit and watch those gifts as they came into office and sat down to hustle and work. And it's just, you know, one thing is just, it's also more motivating to a degree that it's a, a physical thing versus money sometimes
[00:30:34] changes the dynamic
[00:30:35] a little bit.
[00:30:35] I mean, this is its own episode, but I was just like, dang, that was a cool
[00:30:39] incentive as
[00:30:39] well
[00:30:39] to
[00:30:39] Toni: I, I know of a team, I know of a team out of Berlin, actually. Berlin is like actually more sales world wild West than many people think.
[00:30:47] Mikkel: So what sausages they had hanging? No.
[00:30:48] Toni: That's what it was. Or insert other German
[00:30:51] Mikkel: Yeah, yeah,
[00:30:52] Toni: No, but no. What they actually had was you know, in squid games there's this bowl of money that kind of hangs in the
[00:30:58] ceiling.
[00:30:59] Mikkel: No way. They didn't do
[00:31:00] Toni: They had a, they had a bowl, but like there was a, was a, was a sphere kind of a, a plexiglass sphere. Not with cash, like that's, ah, it's maybe a little bit too dicey, but with with smaller like, items like an iPhone, ear, ear, pods you know, stuff like that. It was basically kind of in there.
[00:31:17] Then whenever, you know, someone kind of achieves something, he'll just grab it and take some and, you know, walk away with it. So, you know, visualizing some of these things Also, that's very old school,
[00:31:26] by the way, but who would've thought? But I mean, for all the cool hipsters out there, you would need an office first for that because it doesn't, doesn't jive that well.
[00:31:35] Just as a,
[00:31:36] Mikkel: Oh, guys, if you look, if you squint your eye or zoom in on the
[00:31:39] screen here in a Zoom call, you can see yeah,
[00:31:41] Toni: Yes.
[00:31:42] And maybe then the last one, so this is really is going out to you know, especially bigger deals. I've seen it's, you know, the AE cell sourcing that stuff is actually just more viable, right? And I think some SDR trying to call into, I don't know, VP or big organization.
[00:31:58] Sometimes you need the gravitate, well gravitas, but like a bit more experience and being a grownup and like,
[00:32:04] you know, that, that appearance as an AE in order to even get the first meeting, right? Even make this phone call, this cold call work out. It might not be the person that is know out of uni for two years or something like this.
[00:32:16] It might be someone else. And then basically the incentive here is to say like, Hey, if you close big sell source deals. Just double your commission. Just double it. Like, right. Kind of. And and that obviously has two really cool in, you know, incentives for the, for the rep. It's like, well it's not only a, you know, it's only for the big deals
[00:32:36] and it doubles the commission, you know, so it's, it's, it's double plus plus, right?
[00:32:41] Kind of. It's like, yeah, it's totally fucking do that. So, and I think and we're coming to the end of my list here. Those are things I feel where, if, if you mix and match, take some of these things in, you need some policing in place. I'm sorry. Right. You have to but also to a degree, you need to kind of trust the process.
[00:32:58] If you put some of these things together and this is like real world stuff then I think it's it's gonna be possible for you to change some to drive some change in behavior because that's all what it is. It doesn't, you know, there's no much. Like training and coaching. And so no, they just need to actually do it.
[00:33:15] They know exactly what to do because they've been in SDR before and they just don't wanna do it anymore. And you just need to give them compelling reasons why to do it. And those compelling reasons, they're just so many of them. One is more commission s smaller target and or money earlier.
[00:33:32] Like those, those, you know, those are, those are the three basically.
[00:33:35] And we kind of had a couple of mixing and matching of those to make it more tangible for everyone.
[00:33:39] Mikkel: yeah. I mean, I wrote down in my notes, so how would Toni and Mikkel finally get AEs to self prospects and it's Money. This has money here. That's basically what it says. It's, but it's true. It's kind of also, it's a big part of the sales Ram always has been. And probably will be for a while until the
[00:33:54] Toni: Speaking of self prospecting if you are trying to reach an audience that is go-to market leaders in like Europe and the US kind of companies usually five, 10 million plus in ar, you know, we might be a great sponsorship partner for you. So if you hear this and want to maybe explore this, kick this over to your marketing guy or lady, and then let's have that conversation.
[00:34:16] Otherwise hit subscribe, like, and everything else. Send it maybe to a friend of yours if they're already currently struggling with this. And thank you Michel so much for today's episode.
[00:34:25] Mikkel: Thank you, Toni. Take care.
[00:34:27] Toni: Have a good one. Bye-Bye.