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What else can I be doing to drive revenue? How do I optimize our go-to-market strategies to ensure effectiveness and ROI? If questions like these keep you up at night and occupy your thoughts by day, have we got a podcast for you.
Welcome to Market Mastery presented by The Bridge Group, the podcast where sales professionals learn to advance their careers. Join host and revenue expert Kyle Smith as he talks to elite B2B sales and revenue experts about the strategies they're using to win in the market.
From cultivating a killer company culture to navigating compensation questions, we'll provide you with the insights, education, and strategies you need to thrive.
For more from The Bridge Group, visit www.bridgegroupinc.com.
Kyle Smith [00:00:00]:
This is like a super, super important step in this process is making sure that we clearly disposition the result of a completed meeting. And this is making us more aware of what is actually happening in these SDR meetings, which helps the SDR leadership with closed loop feedback and coaching and then also ultimately creates enhanced accountability. Welcome to Market Mastery, the podcast dedicated to uncovering revenue driving strategies for sales leaders in B2B tech. All right, I'm Kyle Smith, managing partner of The Bridge Group sales consulting firm that helps SDR AE CSM leaders to build, expand, optimize their sales function. And I'm joined by Jesse, CEO of Cloud Pathfinder Consulting. Jesse, want to do an intro?
Jesse Grothaus [00:00:47]:
Hi, my name is Jesse Grothaus. I'm the CEO and founder of Cloud Pathfinder Consulting. And we help sales and revenue teams use Salesforce better.
Kyle Smith [00:00:56]:
Great. Yeah, so really we're just merging like strategy and process with operational support. And so where we both engage with sales, marketing and rev ops leaders on a consistent basis. One of the things that made Jesse and I come together is a consistent question that was popping up across client bases, which is the tracking of SDR really comp triggers. And so that largely centers around meetings and pipeline creation. And so what we're going to talk through is how do we effectively track the SDR meeting's set, completed, converted and contribution to pipeline. And so we'll talk about where SDR leadership can focus in to make sure that they are coaching their team to improve performance and then also ensuring that operations is providing effective support to allow that reporting to be a lot easier and not have a 300 row g sheet with a lot of manual tracking and effort to see what is the SDR's contribution, how are you going to pay them so on and so forth. And so if we dive into really the first step in the process, SDR is engaged with the prospect.
Kyle Smith [00:02:00]:
They have some level of qualifying information obtained and they're scheduling a meeting for their account executive counterpart. And so Jesse, from your perspective, like what's a way or one of the better ways that the SDR can go about tracking that first step in the process?
Jesse Grothaus [00:02:13]:
That first step being that the meeting is scheduled, you're going to want to use some custom fields on and Salesforce to help accomplish this. And we're going to be using a process called automated stamping that. We'll get into the technicals here in a little bit, but you're going to want to track dates in particular of when these meetings were scheduled and then when they were occurred also.
Kyle Smith [00:02:33]:
Okay, great. And so what does that look like?
Jesse Grothaus [00:02:36]:
So we're going to be making some customizations to Salesforce here. So the first thing that we're going to do is click on this cog here and click setup which will bring you to this screen right here. And we are now in the setup screen. And from here we're going to click on this tab called object manager and we're going to quick find here opportunity or op for short and go ahead and click on the opportunity object here. From here we'll be diving into the fields and relationships on the left and we'll use the quick find for stage. And go ahead then and click on the opportunity stage right here. So these are the opportunity stage values that come out of the box with Salesforce. You may have customized these already or what we're going to be doing is changing a few of these around so that we can track these SDR meetings better.
Kyle Smith [00:03:32]:
And if we pause here, why the opportunity objects? Like some clients will use event objects, some would use just tasks. From your perspective, I have my own opinions, but from your perspective, what's the value of leveraging the opportunity object to track SDR meetings?
Jesse Grothaus [00:03:48]:
The value of using the opportunity object in particular to track meetings is that it's going to be the easiest in terms of reporting and it's going to also be the easiest in terms of compliance and adoption for both your sdrs AE's sales managers. It's just easier overall for everyone to get on board with this process and much easier to report on than events or activities.
Kyle Smith [00:04:11]:
Yeah, I would agree. And then the attribution becomes a lot easier. So if possible, selling Rev ops and sales on opportunity utilization to track the SDR meeting. This is the way to go.
Jesse Grothaus [00:04:23]:
So if we have sales processes listed below, what we will want to do here is we're going to create a new opportunity stage that is going to be called SDR meeting and this is going to really help with reporting. And you can either edit an existing opportunity stage, but typically if what we've seen in these engagements is that you're going to want to create a new stage and it's going to go before all these other ones with a probability of zero just to take it out of overall pipeline reporting. So we'll go through what that looks like technically here. So with the opportunity stages, pick list values, go ahead and click new. And for the stage name we're going to give it SDR meeting leave type is open, probability as 0%. Anything with these red bars are going to be mandatory to fill in forecast category you could do pipeline or omitted depending on how your has forecast categories set up. We're going to keep it on omitted or, sorry, pipeline.
Kyle Smith [00:05:24]:
Yep. The one thing would be like if you're feeling friction or resistance to this, 0% usually gets you over the hurdle. If you have a sales leader who doesn't want SDR meeting showing up in pipeline or forecasting, but omitted if you go 0% omitted, that might be one way, like if you are feeling resistance there to get it actually approved to do it this way if you don't currently, but as Jesse said, could default to pipeline or omitted, but just an option there if you're facing pushback.
Jesse Grothaus [00:05:53]:
So we'll keep it on pipeline for the purpose of this and of course always as a good rev ops or sales ops, you're going to give it a description which is stage zero for tracking SDR meetings and go ahead and click save. So once we have created this new stage, what we will then want to do is come down to our opportunity stage pick list values. After we've created the stage, you can see that SDR meeting is now at the very bottom of this list, which means that it's not going to show up first. This is the order that when a rep clicks on the stage when they're creating an opportunity, this is the order that those pick list values will appear. So we want this to reflect our actual process. So in order to do that, we're going to click reorder. So we'll highlight SDR meeting by clicking on it. And then if we want it at the very top, you can just click this top button here or individually go up and down one with these buttons here and we'll save it.
Jesse Grothaus [00:06:54]:
And coming back down here, we can now see that when the rep opens up the stage list, the dropdown, they're going to see that SDR meeting is the very first thing they can choose.
Kyle Smith [00:07:04]:
Great. And so essentially the action would be, I'm the SDR, I have my qualification call. I've gathered some basic information. They have a pain. I think that there's a potential up there. I've met the qualification threshold required to book a meeting for my account executive once I have that. Now, essentially I'm creating an opportunity at this new stage that you've created, which is SDR meeting stage 0%. I think then the beauty is, for me, from a reporting perspective, if you're ever trying to understand how many meetings were scheduled, because this is happening at the scheduled stage, you ideally, if you have role based reporting built out, you say user role equals sales development or SDR, and opportunity created.
Kyle Smith [00:07:46]:
Date equals whatever timeframe you're evaluating, probably like the month prior. And then you have all the opportunities created by the SDRs in your organization, which is how many meetings they've scheduled. Now you have the raw number of all the meetings scheduled broken down by rep. So great starting point.
Jesse Grothaus [00:08:02]:
Exactly. Now that we have our SDR meeting stage name created, we don't yet have a good way to report on the dates of when these meetings actually occurred and how the meeting actually resulted in. So we're going to create a few more fields to help us track that. So still being on the object opportunity manager, we're going to come back over to fields and relationships and we're going to be creating four new fields. So the first one that we're going to be creating is we'll click new over here and I'll just walk through and you can slow the video down or pause it or take it step by step. I'll just go through here. The first one that we're going to be creating is the meeting status pick list. So first we're picking what type of field this is.
Jesse Grothaus [00:08:49]:
It's a pick list. Make sure you do not select picklist multiselect, just picklist, click next field label. This one is going to be called meeting status and we're going to enter values here. And these are just some standard ones we have created. I don't see a reason to really deviate from these ones in particular, but we have that the meeting needs to be scheduled, that it has been scheduled, and that it has been completed. I like to click this one using the first value as the default value, but it doesn't quite necessarily need to be in here. For this one, always give it a good description such as SDR meeting status and the help text here. If you want a help text, show up for the users as they are hovering over the fields.
Jesse Grothaus [00:09:36]:
This will give them information where they can get a little bit of help to remember what to do here. So remember to select this when booking a meeting, click next. Depending on the individual profiles that you're using, let's say that it's standard user. You want to make sure that both boxes are checked here or, sorry, visible. You want to make sure that the visible one is checked for whichever profile your sales users are using. So for us in this, it's going to be the standard user or possibly the custom sales profile that makes sure that they can see it. And then now we're going to be adding it onto the page layouts. So let's say we don't need marketing to see it, but we do definitely want sales to see it.
Jesse Grothaus [00:10:21]:
We don't need support to see it. Or you can just add it all, not to worry about it. Then we're going to do save and new coming to our second field. The second one is also going to be a pick list. This field label is going to be meeting results and we have some standard values to add in here. And this tells you how the meeting went. So once the meeting has occurred, we're going to basically track to see if it's converting or not converting.
Kyle Smith [00:10:49]:
And then for the most part, this is like a super, super important step in this process is making sure that we clearly disposition the result of a completed meeting. And I think we see a lot of inefficiencies or flaws make their way into the process is the meeting date has passed and we don't have clarity over whether or not it was completed, which Jesse talked about in the previous step. But then even if we do, we know that it has been completed and the opportunity hasn't progressed. We have no idea what's going on with it. Was that a positive meeting? Did it meet all the criteria for conversion? Was it negative? If it was negative, why? Right. So there's information gaps that exist here and this is making us more aware of what is actually happening in these SDR meetings, which helps the SDR leadership with closed loop feedback and coaching and then also ultimately creates enhanced accountability for the account executives who are the recipients of these meetings.
Jesse Grothaus [00:11:43]:
Yep. So as we continue the setup of this field, in particular on this one, I would not recommend checking that use first value as a default value. By rule of thumb, whenever you have this checked, consider that your users are just, some of the time are just going to let this default to whatever is picked. And if you want them to actually make a decision on which one it was, then you need to uncheck this box so that this field is blank when their user goes to click on it. Otherwise, if you're okay with them being on the standard default first value, then you'll want to check this box. But for this, when you need to know yes or no, did this occur or did it? Nothing, you'll want to make sure that this box is unchecked here. I would also recommend checking this box and all of them, which is restricting pick lists to the values defined in the value set. Otherwise it's going to give them the opportunity to create their own values in here.
Jesse Grothaus [00:12:38]:
And if you give them that option, they will take it and that's going to start making reporting very difficult when you're trying to learn how a dozen different sdrs are making their own tracking system.
Kyle Smith [00:12:47]:
Yeah.
Jesse Grothaus [00:12:48]:
So for sake of time, we'll just say good description, good help for user and we'll go down to next and we'll make sure that our custom sales profile is checked here and our standard user or whichever profiles you're using for your sales reps. It's good. We'll go ahead and save it. Everybody gets to see this on the page layouts. That's fine. Save and new. Now we want to make sure for our third field that we're able to take some notes on the meeting itself so that when we pull up and report on these meetings we're able to get a short description and understand what happened a bit more outside of just these pick list values. So to do that, we're going to have a freeform text and if it's short, like just a, just a single line of text, it's going to be looking a lot cleaner on the page layout.
Jesse Grothaus [00:13:42]:
I'd recommend just this text box if you want it to go longer, then you can experiment with these other different ones which would be a text area, a long text area. I don't think you'll need to be doing a rich text area that gets them up to 130,000 characters with formatted text, images, links. So either text area or a long text area. For the sake of this demonstration, we'll just do the single text.
Kyle Smith [00:14:04]:
And basically what we're talking about here is a summary. Like that long form, fully detailed, is going to be somewhere else, either notes or activities, correct?
Jesse Grothaus [00:14:13]:
Correct. Yeah. I wouldn't recommend trying to get all of your notes in on this particular field regardless. So I'd probably just go with the short line text.
Kyle Smith [00:14:21]:
Yeah. Lean and mean summary and we'll give.
Jesse Grothaus [00:14:24]:
This one a name. Meeting results, notes for the length, you get to choose how long you want these characters to be. Let's give it 50. That's usually a good one. Good description for admins to remember what this does and very helpful text for users. And we'll go ahead and click next assuming that our profile visibility is all good to go and we want this on all the page layouts as well. Save it new so that we can do our fourth and final field, which is the date that this meeting occurred. So for the data type, we'll scroll down, we will select date.
Jesse Grothaus [00:15:05]:
This is going to allow users to enter a date or pick a date from a pop up calendar so it's standardized. Click next and we're going to call this one meeting date. Helpful backend description. Not much configuration we have to do on this one. So it's going to be a standard calendar pop up helpful end user description. We don't need to give it a default value so we'll click next assuming our profiles are all set up correctly and we're going to add it to all the relevant page layouts. And from now we're going to click save and we are done adding fields. So we've now just added four fields to the opportunity records.
Jesse Grothaus [00:15:47]:
So if we come over to an opportunity, let's say we're going to create a new one. So when you go to create a new opportunity, if this is our fields, we can see that fields have just been added without any real order. So we want to make sure that we're organizing this a bit further. So we're going to be editing the opportunity page layout. So coming back over into our setup where we're in the object manager and opportunity, we'll go down to page layouts on the left here and you'll need to know which page layout is being used by your users. So you'll want to double check that with your profiles. But we'll just go ahead and edit the standard. You can do that in the page layout assignment button over here and you can double check which users are using which page layout.
Jesse Grothaus [00:16:36]:
But to start, we'll just go ahead and edit the opportunity layout. And we can see here a preview of what our fields are going to look like on the page layout. So we can see that our four meeting fields have been added to the bottom here and we want to separate them out and give them their own little section. So from here we're going to find section and drag it down. Let's put it right down here and we'll give this section a name like initial meeting information. And we'll go ahead and leave these boxes checked. Two column left right looks good. And then from here we will just drag our fields down so that they show up in the order that we desire in our new section.
Jesse Grothaus [00:17:21]:
From here we'll click quick save and let's come over to our opportunities again. So after we have saved, do a refresh again. Sometimes you'll need to do a hard reset. So I know if I'm on Mac and on a chrome, let's shift command r. I'm not quite sure what it is on windows. I think it's the same in Safari but it's a hard reset on your browser and if that doesn't work you can also log out and log back in if you're not seeing the changes. But once we have done that hard reset, we're going to come into new. So I've created an opportunity and now I can see that the initial meeting information has its own section over here.
Jesse Grothaus [00:18:04]:
It's got its collapsible menu, which is nice. I do see that I have other fields that snuck in. So coming back to the page layout, I can see why we have the initial meeting section here and it has the fields here. And then for additional information, the header is only visible when you're editing. So from here you can just drag a blank space. Okay, picking back up, we have already modified the page layout and what we're going to go do now is test things out as our end user and make sure that everything is looking good. Good. So from the sales home screen, let's say we're going to create a new opportunity and whatever fields are mandatory to fill out.
Jesse Grothaus [00:18:47]:
Let's give this one some names here. Needs a close date stage. We're going to say, hey, this SDR meeting, we're seeing that it's popping up first in this list like we asked it to and it's going to give that default probability of zero there. And we see now that we have our own nice little section for all those initial meeting informations that we created. So let's say this one needs to be scheduled. There are no results yet from it. Here are our helpful text box that came up. And there's what the calendar is gonna look like for the users because we select that date field and we're good to go.
Jesse Grothaus [00:19:28]:
So we'll go ahead and click save and here's what it looks like once that opportunity has been created. You can see down here. So scroll down, here's that initial meeting information, its own separate section here. You can collapse it in, collapse it out, and you can now report on all these fields as they happen.
Kyle Smith [00:19:48]:
Great. And so now we know the SDR scheduled the meeting when the meeting is scheduled for. And then once it is completed, then we have to populate meeting results so we know it was completed and have opportunities to know essentially what happened in that meeting. Short, lean and mean description, 50 characters or less so that anyone could see at a glance or really in a report view is where the 50 characters become really nice. So you can see at a glance what happened across all SDR meetings. And then what about conversion? So if this converts and let's say we create at 0% STR meeting and then the second comp trigger would be an actual conversion to stage one. I think default is prospecting 10% where it actually gets assigned at a dollar value and that's how we track SDR pipeline contribution.
Jesse Grothaus [00:20:41]:
Okay, so we're saying the meeting has occurred and is now moving into the next stage and we want to see what that looks like. Yeah, let's do it. So we're going to click edit, advancing it in the stage or another way. Can we mark this stage as complete? So we're now in the next stage which is prospecting. Got that automatic change to that 10% and we're going to come down here to our meeting information. So we had already scheduled it. We skipped that step. But we're now going to say it's completed meeting results.
Jesse Grothaus [00:21:13]:
It is converting. That's why we're moving into the next stage. Great meeting. Wants to learn more about x and this meeting happened today. This process is moving fast. So go ahead and click save and there's our new information about this meeting and we can report on it as well if we'd like to walk through that.
Kyle Smith [00:21:39]:
Yeah, that'd be great.
Jesse Grothaus [00:21:40]:
Great. So we'll come over to reports and we're going to click new report and from here we're going to be reporting on opportunities. So we'll select op in there and start report from here. You may or may not be familiar with reporting in Salesforce but we're going to add a column over here and all of our fields that we created have the word meeting in them. So we can search for meeting or just meeze. We can see our four here. So we're going to go through and click them all one by one. And as they get added you'll see that they populate down at the bottom here.
Jesse Grothaus [00:22:30]:
And we now have all these meetings and we're going to run it now. So when we run this report we can now see that we have these fields here and if we wanted to report by filter we can now then say all right, show me all opportunities in the current fiscal quarter, any opportunity status, but I want to see where the meeting results were converted. So we type in meeting results into that filter and then we'll say the operator equals in the value. We can then select from our pick list here to say converting apply and we'll run it there. And we can now see our opportunities report where we have that opportunity test name stage, all the other fields that we wanted to see and here's our meeting result notes and the date that that meeting happened.
Kyle Smith [00:23:26]:
Is it possible to make the amount field required only on certain stages so the SDR could create at 0% $0 because they don't really, they haven't scoped a project at that point. And then once the account executive has the meeting, they converted to the 10% stage one or whatever prospecting stage. Then at that point when they're converting, they have to add a value.
Jesse Grothaus [00:23:49]:
Yeah, you can do that. You can say, hey, the amount field needs to be filled in before this opportunity can progress. View that through a validation rule.
Kyle Smith [00:23:58]:
Yeah. And then here, I mean, my recommendation here, if you're thinking SDR leader perspective, be the rows would be created by. So then you have a summary report of all the meetings by which SDR actually set them up, which would be who created them. And then you can see totals for them by the disposition, essentially how many need to be scheduled, how many are actively scheduled with future dates, how many have been completed, and what's the result of those that have been completed? All by rep and a nice lean to me clean view.
Jesse Grothaus [00:24:31]:
That sounds good. Here's walking through that a little bit here. Go to the outline and add group rows. We don't have too many because this is a developer.org, but yeah, there you go.
Kyle Smith [00:24:41]:
Then you'd see Jesse has one and then you can tell by the actual details on meeting results. Jesse had one meeting scheduled which is completed and converting. That's the full process. So now you can easily measure what your SDR's contribution is to pipeline with the sum of the amounts on anything that's been converted, how many meetings that they're scheduled, how many really on the negative side were completed and aren't converting so that you can, those are the ones that, from an SDR leader perspective that you want to spend more time diagnosing. We got somebody to say yes to a meeting, but it did not progress. Is that natural? Reasons like the wasn't a good fit after all, through further evaluation, or they lost interest, they went with a competitor, whatever. Or is it that we booked bad meetings and those are the ones that you want to try to solve for coach the reps up and get them to book less of those. So thank you, Jesse.
Kyle Smith [00:25:38]:
If people want to learn more about how to do this themselves or actually want assistance doing something like this, or really customizing their sales force to meet the needs of their sales team and their go to market team, how can they get in contact with you or learn more about Cloud Pathfinder yeah, I'd.
Jesse Grothaus [00:25:53]:
Say find me on LinkedIn, Jesse Grothaus, or visit our company page, cloud Pathfinder Consulting, or our website@cloudpathfinderconsulting.com, dot.
Kyle Smith [00:26:03]:
Great. All right, thanks, Jesse. Really appreciate it.
Jesse Grothaus [00:26:06]:
Thanks for having me, Kyle.
Kyle Smith [00:26:08]:
Thanks for listening to this episode of Market Mastery brought to you by The Bridge Group. If you're a revenue leader in the B2B sales space or know someone who is, connect with me on LinkedIn. Don't forget to subscribe to stay updated on future episodes.