Want sales consistency? Try this

If you want predictable revenue, you need sales consistency. Not a "backlog" quarter where 80% of deals close in the last two weeks.

That's pretty stressful - so we decided to share 3 ways you can work towards more consistency in your sales.

We covered:

• The Unicorn of Sales: Consistency (01:47)
• The 80% of sales efficiency (05:00)
• #1 - Onboarding & offboarding (05:23)
• #2 - It's all about opportunity supply & demand (12:44)
• #3 - It's all about the mindset (24:24)
• Bonus: Fix to consistency (28:42)

Interested in the revenue letter? You can join here: https://growblocks.com/revenueletter/

Creators & Guests

Host

Mikkel Plaehn

Head of Demand at Growblocks

Host

Toni Hohlbein

CEO & Co-founder at Growblocks

What is The Revenue Formula?

This podcast is about scaling tech startups.

Hosted by Toni Hohlbein & Mikkel Plaehn, 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] Toni: this Is Toni Holbein.
[00:00:01] You are listening to the Revenue Formula. In today's episode, we are going to talk about hunting down the unicorn of sales consistency hitting every quarter, every month, every year. We're gonna present three different ways that in combination will actually help you to get there. , and a bonus one, enjoy.
[00:00:22] So what some of the folks that are just, just listening and not watching us on YouTube, uh, might missing out on is, uh, our sign works again. It's pink
[00:00:32] Mikkel: again, so I can't tell you how much stuff I'd have to fix today.
[00:00:36] Coming in, realizing that the sign was just, it just wasn't working. I, and I found the root cause implemented are fixed and it's fixed. It's running. It's
[00:00:44] Toni: Wow. Did you, did you use Growblocks to figure this out?
[00:00:46] Mikkel: I could have, but the fuse basically. Yeah, the fuse was done. Uh, so I had to swap that out. And then we had set the entire studio up and you knew what happened.
[00:00:55] We started getting, uh, technical feedback on the audio as the next thing. So I was just like, so there's so much energy and brain juice going into the production of this wonderful show, so I hope you enjoy
[00:01:08] Toni: um, I think you should write on LinkedIn about how much handyman skills you need, if you want to be Head of Demand gen somewhere.
[00:01:17] Mikkel: I'm not even kidding. I took a, I took a picture of my desk. It's, it's usually in the past it used to be just a laptop, keyboard, mouse. That's it. Now there's a CISA screwdriver. Tape, cameras. There's like, it's littered with stuff, litter with stuff.
[00:01:33] Toni: the,
[00:01:34] it's the podcast MacGyver
[00:01:35] Mikkel: Yeah, totally. But enough about the podcast MacGyvering.
[00:01:39] Uh, we're gonna talk a bit about MacGyvering sales. Yeah. Bad, bad segue. Bad segue. We're gonna talk about sales. Consistency is what we're gonna talk about.
[00:01:47] Toni: Yes. It's the unicorn of sales.
[00:01:52] Mikkel: Yeah. How, how, how was it? You put it
[00:01:54] Toni: everyone is chasing it, but, uh, no one, no one seems to be able to get it.
[00:01:58] Mikkel: No, exactly.
[00:01:59] Toni: So, just to be kind of really clear, so what, what is, what is the, the difficulty here? it's really the ability to have AEs hit their targets consistently, right? That means, you know, the opposite of choppy. So one, one quarter, 150% the next quarter, 20%, and so forth. it means that ideally, even within the quarter, that there's some consistency, right?
[00:02:25] Uh, so, you know, many folks listening probably will have that, uh, it's called Back loaded, back loaded quarters. So suddenly the whole business is closing the last two weeks of the quarter. and you know, while, while at the end of that, you as a, as a leader are like, whew. You know, that worked out the other 10 weeks leading up to this is, it's really not fun.
[00:02:44] Yeah. Uh, by the way, and so what, what do people want? Well, they want to have a consistent rate of closing and so forth. and it's, it's really difficult to come by and, and we wanted to talk about
[00:02:54] Mikkel: but the funny thing is you want hockey stick growth, just not in quarter, not in terms of sales consistency towards the
[00:02:59] target quarter. Hockey stick
[00:03:02] Toni: and hockey stick. And hockey stick. Yeah.
[00:03:05] Mikkel: So that's what we're gonna talk about today. And, and one of the reasons it's, uh, it's pretty darn and port important is because you wanna achieve a bit more predictability. Yeah. You don't want those jagged ups and downs. Yeah. Uh, you know, causing you lack of sleep and heart attacks and whatnot.
[00:03:19] You want a bit more consistency to grow consistently. So how do you actually get steady upwards growth?
[00:03:26] Toni: Yeah. And I, I think the, the usual way to go about it, and I see this like a lot of times, is really focusing in on, the, the rep.
[00:03:34] Right. It's like, okay, so what, how does the forecast look like? Yeah. Um, and you know, let's have a forecast meeting every week and let's drill into this and, you know, drill you on, you know, where Or grill you
[00:03:45] Mikkel: Yeah, yeah.
[00:03:46] Toni: You know, grill you rather on, you know, what might be wrong where, and this is how you as a manager sometimes are trying to.
[00:03:53] Try and grasp at the predictability of that, right? So if I grow you a lot and if I make this, you know, semi uncomfortable situation, you will be motivated to then next time have, you know, better news to share
[00:04:04] Mikkel: something
[00:04:05] Toni: like that, right? And that, no, I mean that's, that's, that's a totally a thing. And uh, if you, if you do this with a rep that isn't so confident, maybe it hasn't, you know, hit target in a while or it is just not that senior.
[00:04:16] They will give you all kinds of silly things that you then, you know, latch onto. It's like, oh, wow. Yes, we can, we can totally hit target, right? Yeah. and then the other piece is, okay, if, if my reps aren't sitting target, you know, more sales enablement, help them help them. Help them, yeah. Uh, give them all kinds of other things that there might be wanting to have.
[00:04:33] And it's, uh, this, this sometimes takes you down this rabbit hole of, um, idolizing the AE. Yeah. Which I see happens a lot. And then it's almost like, okay, what else do you need? You know, it's a gold plated phone. Does that make you close more? Yeah. Okay. You know what? You'll have a gold plated phone tomorrow, it's no problem.
[00:04:51] Um, and, uh, you kind of keep stacking on things because you think that's the problem that you need to fix, but it ain't. and I think that's, that's a bit the conversation today.
[00:05:00] Mikkel: Yeah. I mean, the interest for me to tee this up as an episode was we recorded the, the comp plan episode and you said, well, this is really just, you know, 20% of what drives, sales consistency at the end of the day.
[00:05:13] So we're gonna get into, I believe, three different areas. Mm-hmm. You've promised that you're gonna go into, and hopefully it's gonna be some good stuff. Yeah. So let's hop into the first of the three.
[00:05:23] Toni: Yes. So, first one, da, it's actually onboarding and offboarding. Mm-hmm. Uh, or I call it onboarding and performance management.
[00:05:32] Um,
[00:05:33] Mikkel: or pip.
[00:05:33] Yeah.
[00:05:34] Toni: Um, and then obviously kind of when you, when you add more AEs, uh, you, you obviously always need to make this decision to. Uh, you know, give them opportunities that then convert less, right? There's always that trade off. As you add someone else, you basically will, you know, be less, less so efficient, right?
[00:05:51] Um, but there are a couple of, uh, ways to, uh, try and kind of get that, try and get that thing going on the onboarding side when, and not talking specifically about. you know, the first week or what you should tell them or something like that. We don't have a clue about this, but really when you think about it, uh, ramp to a degree.
[00:06:08] Let's just say you had a AE that starts on the 1st of January, and let's just assume that all of this training thing, uh, is already has taken care, you know, has been taken care of. For some reason, person starts on the 1st of January and comes fully equipped, you know, knows the, the platform dead knows the competition, knows the talking point for some reason.
[00:06:30] All of that, you know, is already there. so how would then ramp up actually look like? Well, it probably has to do something with, uh, your sales cycles. Yeah.
[00:06:39] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:06:40] Toni: You know, thinking about it. If you have sales cycles of two weeks, smb, um, guess what? If you give that person opportunities now, um, like you would give any other person, you know, you can math it out, you probably, the ramp up will be two months and that's it, right?
[00:06:57] And then that person, uh, would have enough supply to kind of, you know, work through that stuff, close deals out and would be great. Right? If you have sales cycles that are nine month or longer, guess what? Your ramp up will probably follow the same thing, right? I think what many people sometimes misunderstand that ramp up.
[00:07:14] Not actually really, really, it also does, but doesn't really, really have to do with knowledge. It simply also has to do with, uh, sales physics, right? Kind of how many, how many sales pros can you start and how many can you expect to kind of close within that timeframe, right? and, you know, once you set someone up for success, uh, what will kick in is a bit more confidence, is a bit more understanding, is it's also not this.
[00:07:39] Feeling of back against the wall that you have, especially with a new rep kind of starting out. So this little bit, setting someone up for success, drives confidence, which then also drives longer term confidence, right? So really first step in order to get, uh, to sales consistency, obviously kind of do the, do the ramp up in the right way and think about, not in terms of.
[00:08:00] Skills also. But the other piece is really, you know, how, how many opportunities by when can they actually work through, and how long does the sales cycle take for them to actually hit right? And what you as a team then get, you know, confidence out of this is this person not ramping because he or she is not skilled?
[00:08:19] And then you go into the next conversation, or, or is that the case? And then actually we can, you know, have more conference to put more opportunities to that person and then, you know, hit those consistently over time. Yeah. Right. You remove this looking into each other's eyes and kind of, is, is that guy worth it or not?
[00:08:34] Yeah.
[00:08:34] Mikkel: Yeah. Yeah. Do I like the way he or she dresses or all those silly things.
[00:08:37] Toni: yes. Um, and then on the off-boarding side, really I think there are two pieces to it here. one is, people will leave whether or not, um, you put them on a PIP and then, you know, manage them out. Or if they got a better offer or if they say I wanna be a manager, or if, you know, whatever they wanna do, people will leave.
[00:08:58] and what's really important is to plan for that to happen. And it sounds so boring all the time. Okay. You know, just need to plan and then, you know, that's great. But yes, it has to do with, uh, you need to, when you do your, your annual check or when you do even your quarterly check and your quota on the street and, you know, stack it all up, what you should be doing consistently is take in a team of eight reps.
[00:09:20] Take one, rep out every quarter, every other quarter, and then see what happens. Yeah. Right. and then really kind of planning against that, either with additional hires or something else. There are some ways to create, um, you know, safety nets. That's basically buffers. We're gonna talk about this just in a, in, in one second.
[00:09:39] Um, but be aware people will leave and that will impact, um, your, your capacity to close, basically, right? The thing is, if someone is leaving and you're running an opportunity based approach here, Everyone, and this is a bit morbid, but everyone around that rep will basically celebrate.
[00:09:59] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:10:00] Toni: Everyone, yes.
[00:10:01] Everyone around that rep will be like, oh, Mikkel, I'm so sad to see you go.
[00:10:06] Mikkel: please
[00:10:06] put me in your will.
[00:10:07] Toni: but, uh, which, which of the ops should I be asking for? Just, just gimme, just gimme the, the rundown. and, and obviously not only what is in the current pipe. Yeah. And you can always have a conversation should you compensate that AE to give a little bit of a hand over thing, you know, depends, depends on how your part weighs.
[00:10:24] uh, much more importantly. So then all of those opportunities, this would've gone to the AE. Yeah. You know, the newly produced stuff is now being, you know, freshly reallocated. Right. Uh, and, and, and usually. Uh, that works out. And the way you make this work out is in my experience, uh, give all of your reps a 10 to 20% buffer.
[00:10:44] Yeah. You supply them with opportunities getting to 80% of their target or 70% whatever you want them to hit, and then have a expectation that another 10, 20% should be coming from self prospecting. Yeah. So if someone now leaves, you basically have to a degree excess capacity. you know, the self prospecting part and just give them opportunities instead.
[00:11:07] They will love that. They will be fantastic for them. So you basically kind of have some slack built in that then can take care of that, right? So what that now leaves you with is you have a better understanding of. Who of the new guys or, or ladies joining, is actually, executing according to ramp.
[00:11:24] So, you know, one less thing to worry about. And the other thing is then if someone then leaves either during ramp or after you have enough capacity left to, to catch those opportunities.
[00:11:34] Mikkel: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:11:34] Toni: And, and you know, if you have this under control, you have, you know, one reason for, um, the fluctuation is eliminated.
[00:11:41] Yeah. Yeah.
[00:11:43] Mikkel: I think, and I think we hear this quite often, this problem being expressed as we are hiring too late or we're too slow to hire and it's kind of a, a part of this, this realm of
[00:11:53] Toni: Yeah, the new reps bad quality and so forth. Right. It's, it's usually hear, hear all of these things being then blamed on.
[00:11:59] That's the reason why we are not
[00:12:01] Mikkel: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:12:02] Toni: And, and it's not untrue, so I don't wanna take this away, but they're clear ways to manage that.
[00:12:06] Mikkel: And you know what's really funny? I don't think. In any other department, you really effectively apply this mindset of, you know, the impact of hiring too late. Sure, people will fundamentally understand the impact, but it's not like they're gonna sit and look at, okay, if this, let's just say a product manager is arriving two months too late.
[00:12:23] What are we gonna do in the meantime? We still have, you know, stuff to ship. And I think if, if you're in revenue operations, this could be a helpful thing to consider at
[00:12:31] Toni: No, absolutely. But it's, it's the same even for someone in marketing. Oh
[00:12:35] Mikkel: Oh yeah. I mean, we've had that conversation. Yeah. It's taking longer to hire.
[00:12:38] We, let's bring in this freelance resource and do this and that. Right. And I think that's, that's the smart way to go about it.
[00:12:44] Toni: So then the next thing, and I think this is, uh, a pretty big part of, of why people have choppy sales consistency.
[00:12:52] And we have discussed this a couple of times here, and I don't think this idea is novel or anything like this, but it's really important to start executing thinking like this. Think about it in Opportunity Supply. So you, all your demand gen efforts, inbound, outbound, product led sales channels, whatever you have, that's your demand gen.
[00:13:12] and then your, you know, it's shitty, shitty naming now, but it's opportunity demand, right? Kind of how many people want an opportunity? That's really the capacity
[00:13:22] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:13:23] Toni: So, uh, you get a thousand opportunities from your demand gen. Great. How many reps do we actually need to work through this?
[00:13:29] Yeah, that, that's the question you need to ask yourself. and yes, then if you do the sales math behind it, then there's a quota and a target coming out of this. But really the capacity here is how many of the, you know, at bats. Can your, can your AE team actually take at the same time? That's really the question, right?
[00:13:47] And, if you have, if you have a, uh, sales process that is split in two, meaning demand, gen, SDRs, marketing and so forth, and then the closing part, uh, which is then AEs, if you have that split in two, what you just need to make sure is that the opportunity supply matches the amount of capacity that they have.
[00:14:06] Yeah. and that you manage those two things. Separately. So what does that mean if you have, you know, those two departments blended together in the sense of an AE is creating the predominant amount of his or her opportunities and then also closing them. What you will see a lot is that after a great quarter, You know, oh, close, closer all my pipe, you know?
[00:14:30] Um, and, uh, then they, you know, it's true and it's not true to, to certain degrees, then they need to start generating pipeline again. They need to do the reach out and so forth. And they will be busy with that four month or so, you know, what they're gonna flunk that quarter. and then next, you know, then they're gonna get a, a slap on the wrist.
[00:14:47] Like, Hey, you know, Why did you only 50%, blah, blah. What can we do? All the sales enablement is gonna, you know, come in then and then see there. Next quarter they're hitting 150%. Why? Well, because they spent three months, uh, last quarter billing pipeline to then kind of achieve this. This is the up and down that you want to escape, and the way you escape it is by managing, uh, opportunity generation.
[00:15:09] consistently, right? If you are consistent there, guess what? You're gonna be consistent on the other side as well. and you can do that by separating those roles, right? That's why many folks that have ACVs North of 10 K then add the SDR function, uh, because then you basically have that previously known as self prospecting from the AEs be covered by a different function, and as you kind of work through that and make sure that that is a nice straight line. What's gonna happen on the other side? Closing those out will be very similar. Uh, it will still be back loaded and so forth. We're gonna get to that in a second, but that's basically what you're going to, uh, creating there.
[00:15:45] Right.
[00:15:45] Mikkel: So it's kind of like having a supply plan to counter balance your capacity plan at the end of the day.
[00:15:50] Toni: Yes, that's exactly what it is. Um, then another thing to also just keep in mind, is that depending on where the, the opportunities are coming from, let's just say inbound versus outbound, they will behave differently.
[00:16:04] Right. And, that will have an impact on the choppiness of your, of, of your sales outcomes, basically. Right? If you have, uh, maybe lastly, you had 50 50 inbound to outbound. You know, that's great. But inbound, shorter sales cycles, higher conversion rate and so forth versus an outbound, longer sales cycles.
[00:16:24] Higher ACVs though, you know, lower conversion rates if you're now go into next year and you ramp up outbound, which usually people are doing. Yeah. that will have an impact on when you'll be closing what, right. Um, and you know, just having that in mind. Uh, you know, when you plan this out, you can't expect the same conversion rates and so forth.
[00:16:41] Uh, that will also then have an impact on what your reps can close in q1, q2, q3, right? At some point when you reach your new balance between inbound and outbound throughout the year, right? Because you've ramped outbound up, you'll start if you, if you don't have it, uh, if you only have it blended mm-hmm
[00:16:58] Mikkel: mm-hmm
[00:16:58] Toni: you will start, oh, this is where our conversion rates and our sales cycles are now, you know, uh, balancing out.
[00:17:04] So now we can plan again. Actually, you made a mistake there. You could have done that from day one by just being aware that inbound and outbound is, you know, uh, working through the pipeline differently. And whenever I say that on sales calls, on, you know, go to market lives, wherever it's,
[00:17:19] that's, so that's super straightforward.
[00:17:21] Uh, but really kind of planning this in and having that part, uh, enables you to kind of escape that that choppiness in, in the sales
[00:17:29] Mikkel: Yeah, and I think it's also, especially when you're dealing with a quarter where you can see you're veering off course and you need to now go and decide where you're gonna buy those opportunities, actually having them unblended is, is just key.
[00:17:41] And also understanding the velocity because you know what, maybe you can't produce those marketing ops or outbound ops depending on how they perform. Yeah. You need to do. Whatever, product led sales. And, and I think that's super important to have that
[00:17:54] Toni: Super action will take away for everyone here, and you can set this up in, uh, Salesforce or wherever or, you know, spreadsheet. Um, create a dashboard where you're tracking opportunity distributions to AEs for the last, let's say 90 days. Uh, you know, rolling 90 day window. Um, and split that into outbound and inbound.
[00:18:18] Split those two things apart. And what you're then gonna have is a really nice, you know, each column will be one account executive. Um, the, the height of the column will be determined by how many opportunities will you have given to these folks in the last 90 days. and then the, the stack, so the split of the columns gonna come from how many inbound outbounds did they receive, And, you wanna probably have one for the US team and one for the EMEA team and from the APAC team, or how you're gonna split it out because that's, That's usually how the opportunity distribution is balanced out. You know, it's difficult to take for an inbound from the US and assigning to someone in Nordics or like an outbound from Germany and assign it to someone in the US you have those little pools that are bucketed, right?
[00:18:58] So you wanna create a dashboard for each. And then, you know, number one, you can create really nice, uh, transparency and clarity for the AEs, because otherwise it'll come like, you know, someone else could, you know all the opportunities. but it's also then for you and your manager or your routing system or whatever you are using, And ability to try and, you know, keep track of things.
[00:19:17] Yeah. Right. So I, I would totally do that. And then number two, what I would do, and maybe this is something where you maybe need, uh, like a BI tool, maybe something like Growblocks, um, to set something up that basically puts that AE performance into comparison of what you would expect. Yeah. And that now means, okay, they received X amount of opportunities.
[00:19:39] Fantastic. but at the same time, you also wanna know, well, Are they actually working through them? Properly. Yeah. Right. and what did we expect actually to happen? So this is a bit, you know, more convoluted and I haven't, I don't think I've nailed the explanation yet, but basically what you can do is you can benchmark their, performance against what the model, uh, would've thought they would be doing.
[00:20:03] Yeah. Right. So let's just say someone in the last 90 days received a hundred opportunities. your model conversion rate, because that's the, the average for the last year is 12%. Whatever, uh, blended. and you know, you have certain amount of sales, uh, uh, you know, days of sales cycle in an A C V. The model end spits out based on that stuff, based on the intelligence we have.
[00:20:26] You should have closed, um, $150,000,
[00:20:29] Mikkel: Mm-hmm.
[00:20:30] Toni: whatever. but in reality, uh, the rep only closed 120,000 and now we can say, Hey, that that person is 20% behind what was
[00:20:40] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:20:41] Toni: And you will never see that if you only look at, uh, how many, you know, uh, what revenue number did that rep hit? Because what could have happened in the background that they got a lot more opportunities.
[00:20:52] Mikkel: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:20:53] Toni: Right. And so that then enables you, okay, someone got maybe, uh, everyone else gets like 80 opportunities per quarter. Someone else got 120, so what is it? 50% more than the rest? Both of them hit the exact same number at the end of the day. Well, you know, while you will pay both of them the same commission and stuff, which is right.
[00:21:11] You can clearly see that one of the two reps actually wasn't that good. Yeah. You know, there's actually a problem. And when you have that kind of a dashboard overview here, you know, it's like super simple actionable solution, you will still high five that rep and say Fantastic, you hit
[00:21:27] Mikkel: Yeah, yeah. you know,
[00:21:28] Toni: super consistent.
[00:21:29] But actually you can see that, you know, the model, uh, out of those 120 opportunities received would've expected X outcome. And he's only at Y and there's a difference and you need to actually address that, right? Super actionable. yeah.
[00:21:43] Mikkel: Do you, um, one of the things I, I was reflecting over, I had a chat with, uh, our wonderful, uh, GTM live co-host, all of who.
[00:21:50] Yep. And we talked a bit about there's usually a difference also in what rep is actually suited for what type of opp as well. And maybe this is getting too nitty gritty, but and I have worked at the same place. Uh, there were one gentleman who was really good at inbound. Turning them over super fast, just knocking them out of the park.
[00:22:08] And then there was another gentleman who was really good at, you know, the longer sales cycle. Very high touch, usually ending up at the same place in terms of how much they closed. Right. Is that something to factor in as well, or,
[00:22:19] Toni: Yeah, so I mean, this is also a little bit towards then the sales manager.
[00:22:22] I would actually advise if you're in a mid-market or enterprise motion to hand distribute those inbound opportunities. I would actually do that. It sounds always like Toni, aren't you like a rev ops
[00:22:32] Mikkel: Yeah. It should be fair.
[00:22:33] Toni: guy? And you know, no. You know, it's, it's not like you have thousand opportunities to distribute per day.
[00:22:39] It's usually 10. If you, if you even have a large team, it's a lot 10, right? Um, so, uh, the sales manager can actually make that decision, uh, and he or she can then also base it on. You know, either he needs more, you know, that that can be an okay thing to do from a, from a motivational and team management perspective.
[00:22:58] or, hey, this op looks like you would be best positioned to close it. Or it's like, you know what, this is Coca-Cola. I'm not gonna fool around my best, you know, doesn't matter where they are on Target. My best rep is gonna get
[00:23:11] Mikkel: that. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:23:12] Toni: Um, and this is kind of how you can, uh, steer a little bit here.
[00:23:16] What this ultimately means. And um, uh, had a fantastic conversation with someone about, uh, uh, you know, strategic revenue operations and he was like, well, you wanna have the planning, you wanna have the monitoring, you know, cool. And then, you know, it went into business cases and, you know what, if we were to kind of change things around, Scenario, kind of planning, you could say.
[00:23:35] And he was specifically man, man, mentioning, well you maybe wanna start, you know, as you grow, uh, RAOs maybe wants to, um, suggest, uh, some kind of split by segment and this could be one segment, one split that someone could suggest, you know, I wouldn't do it around this one rap that is good at
[00:23:53] Mikkel: this. No.
[00:23:54] Toni: but basically you could say, Is there a reason to have a team split to environment outbound?
[00:23:59] Yeah, that could be. but just as much, you could also do the split by, uh, mid-market versus enterprise or product A versus product B. Yeah. Or industry over here versus industries over there. Um, that can be something that, uh, revs should be looking into
[00:24:15] In order to basically, tangibly increase the conversion rates, right?
[00:24:18] You segment down to increase the conversion rates for each. but it has obviously, you know, uh, implications on, on the larger team.
[00:24:24] Mikkel: Okay,
[00:24:25] So that was two or out of three?
[00:24:27] That's
[00:24:27] Toni: right. So let's, uh, works out. Uh, so now the last one and this bit, you know, uh, people might be like, you know, why is Toni talking about this?
[00:24:36] It's really around, um, uh, you know, mindset in that sense. Um, and this is one of my previous, uh, VP of sales. He was kind of really strong around this, basically saying like, Hey, we need to make sure that there's a clear sense of ownership of the target for the rep in place. Which really means, number one, you need to put them into a position where they can possibly achieve it.
[00:24:58] Yeah. Aka you know, the opportunities supply. Give them, you know, the, the product needs to work, you know, all kinds of things. Maybe some pieces of bottom funnel content. but then also number two, when some of these things grew up, which there always will be in our crucial demo, last step with Coca-Cola, and, uh, you get a 500 error on the login
[00:25:18] Mikkel: page. Yeah.
[00:25:19] Toni: It's like,
[00:25:20] Mikkel: Oh,
[00:25:21] Toni: uh, or um, uh, you know, large part of your target. Hey, we have this new product, we're gonna push it out. Big marketing push, people gonna be.
[00:25:31] kicking in our door, wanting to buy from us, and then crickets. Yeah. Um, and the list goes on. Or, you know, this SDR that was supposed to happen, uh, supposed to start, started late and then turned out to be a dud.
[00:25:43] So, you know how, you know, building, building around that. And what's really important is that despite all of these setbacks, uh, despite all of these things that arguably math wise, basically, make it impossible for you to hit, You need to, you know, find ways to make sure that the rep isn't auto giving up here.
[00:26:00] Yeah. Yeah. Um, and, and that's, that's really kind of the, the, the really, the really important piece here. Again, you can use the self prospecting to a degree, right? You can say, well, yes. SDRs didn't, you know, deliver enough opportunities. Marketing screwed up here. All of these other things, you can, you still have the destiny in your own hands.
[00:26:19] You can still go out and, you know, do more self prospecting. You
[00:26:21] Mikkel: Mm-hmm.
[00:26:22] Toni: sit on your closing calls or just after call up, you know, your new best friend and say like, Hey, do you have some other folks who might use this? Right? Do like a referral thing. There's all kinds of things that he can install for the sales rep.
[00:26:33] To, you know, in a negative scenario, stop having all of those fucking excuses. Yeah. Right. So kind of, you want to kind of present it like that, but also, and this is really helpful when you have this, um, SDR AE pairing. Yeah. Right. It might not be a part, might be kind of a, a, a pairing, to then say, well, the SDR isn't performing.
[00:26:50] Why don't you spend some time with that, with the SDR and try and get that person to
[00:26:54] Mikkel: perform? Yeah,
[00:26:54] Toni: right. Kind of really open up some ways to make it clear, Hey man, you can, you can jump in and fix that yourself. You, you just shouldn't, you know, sit in the corner and give up. and that also that, that's my other VPO sales from, from back then basic kind of creating a, a almost a culture of, Nothing is impossible or impossible is nothing or something like that.
[00:27:14] So really going in that direction, it's like, you know, screw all the numbers we are gonna, we are gonna nail that target, you know, one way or the other.
[00:27:20] Mikkel: Right? Yeah.
[00:27:21] Toni: And I think we had, you know, around this, you can try and help and support some of this through some incentive schemes and so forth, but incentives largely, it's like, again, it's like 20% or something like this.
[00:27:31] and the consistency here then comes in, uh, trying, uh, you know, if you have a back loaded quarter, Pay more for some of the deals that are hitting earlier in the quarter, right? We have this pacing, uh, example in another, uh, episode, optimize for the year by having, uh, a fifth quarter bonus. So if you hit the year 110% or something like that, you get a full fifth quarter paid out and we added one or two kind of of these other things, right?
[00:27:56] But it's really important to, to create ways. where it's increasingly so difficult for the account executive to sit there and his or her chair and be like, that's impossible to do. Can't. and if you take all of these things combined and together, you know, with, if there's a rep that's struggling, you send an inbound, his or her way, Try and get 'em out of this groove if you do this really well.
[00:28:21] and you obviously execute well on the demand gen side and on the onboarding and off onboarding side, you know, getting closer to this consistency of hitting, you know, between 80, a hundred percent, 20% of your target, which means your reps hit between 80, a hundred percent of the target. getting there, that's like extremely, extremely useful.
[00:28:42] You know what? I have a bonus one.
[00:28:44] Mikkel: You have a bonus one.
[00:28:44] Toni: have a bonus
[00:28:45] Mikkel: oh. thought about this.
[00:28:46] I don't have any sound effects right now. I can play
[00:28:48] Toni: Okay. Well then can we do, we can't do it. get this ask lot. What's the, you know, how do you manage a board target versus the on the floor target? the way we've been doing this, Is, uh, the board target is what the effing board target is.
[00:29:02] You can't do anything about that. The target that the floor knows is the number that you're most likely to hit
[00:29:08] Mikkel: Mm-hmm.
[00:29:09] Toni: to create, you know, positivity and you know, we can get there. And then what you want to have between the sales manager, all the sales managers, In combination carry the target that's on the, on the dashboard for the, for the floor.
[00:29:22] Uh, but then there's a gap, a buffer between these summed up targets of the direct reports. So AEs to the direct manager. Yeah. Uh, and that's, you know, that's how you also create a little bit more of, not everyone needs to a hundred percent for the company to hit a hundred percent. Everyone actually, you know, only needs to hit 85% in order for the company to hit.
[00:29:43] Right. You kind of created a little bit of. buffers, uh, way. Well,
[00:29:47] Mikkel: Okay. Nice. With the bonus, we need to do that a bit more often.
[00:29:53] No,
[00:29:55] no.
[00:29:55] I try to position you best to the best of my knowledge, you know, but so, uh, you are actually smart because you send out an email every week.
[00:30:04] Where you, I mean,
[00:30:04] Toni: you, you transitions, you segues. It's just next level stuff.
[00:30:08] Mikkel: So,
[00:30:09] Toni: yes, we kind of transitioned the Rev letter into a weekly one now, actually. Uh, and it's pretty cool. Uh, gotta say it's a lot of fun writing it and it's a lot of fun reading the responses from people that either call out my BS or have a follow up question.
[00:30:21] Uh, the rev letter going out this week will actually be an answer to a follow up question.
[00:30:25] Mikkel: Mm.
[00:30:26] Toni: Uh, so it's pretty cool. Uh, sign up on the website. It's, you know, grow blogs.com/revenue letter, I think, right?
[00:30:32] Mikkel: Yes. And the subject line is gonna be, this is not bs, it's an actual No. Oh, and by the way, we we're bringing on a guest soon.
[00:30:41] Almost forgot. Yeah. But this is,
[00:30:44] Toni: I feel like we're graduating now from you and I having a semi monologue for half an hour to, um, I don't know, having like a fun ping pong game maybe with, you know, one or two, by the
[00:30:57] Mikkel: So what you're really saying,
[00:30:58] amazing guest coming. What you're really saying is it, it's gonna be nice for you to have another intellectual person on the show, not just me
[00:31:04] Toni: Hey, you said it, it was again, you segueway.
[00:31:06] Mikkel: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:31:07] No, it's, uh, you can check it out. Uh, it's, uh, Leah, Tharin Hope I'm pronouncing it correct. I need to check up on that. Um, we're gonna talk about something plg, there's a vote out on LinkedIn exactly what we're gonna cover, so that's gonna be pretty cool. And, uh, I think that's about it for now.
[00:31:23] Toni: That's it.
[00:31:23] Thank you everyone. Thanks
[00:31:25] Mikkel: Thank you Toni. Bye-bye. Take care. Bye.