Process eats tech stack for breakfast
By: Felix Beccar
Tags: Scaling, Sales, Sales Operations, Process, Technology Strategy

My favourite breakfast, FYI…

Maybe I am reading too many Marketing & Sales articles, subscribed to the wrong newsletters or in the wrong forums but, I constantly hear colleagues name dropping their vendors: we’ve got Drift for this, Outreach for that, Intercom here, Chorus, Gong, Madkudu, Marketo…and the list goes on and on.

Sure, all great tools and this technology have come a long way (disclaimer, I am a customer of many of those).

But my question to you is: so what?

I am not only talking to Sales & Marketing (S&M) professionals here: I see this more and more with this ‘consumerisation of IT’ we’ve been hearing about for more than a decade now. There are tons of tools out there all doing fancy stuff. Employee survey tools, learning management systems, compliance tools, etc.

In S&M, you can do a ton of stuff to make your dollars work for you: call it marketing automation, optimisation of ad spend, sales efficiencies, product onboarding. As an example, ‘enriching’ your leads to make your lead score algorithm to help reps focus on the most critical prospects with higher propensity to buy, is a way to make sure your reps are not digging the internet for a lead that is not worth their time. We all have plenty of examples of great pieces of tech that makes us more efficient in S&M.

Truth is that, at the end of the day, without proper execution you’ll get nowhere.

They are great tools — but what else do you need to succeed in your scaling efforts? This is my top list:

Build (and re-build) an outstanding team Ensure your Sales leadership really cares about coaching their team Map out and document meticulously your Sales Process Align your incentives: the simpler, the better Data leading the way

Feel free to drop your thoughts and more ideas in the comments!

1. Build (and re-build) an outstanding team

Sounds obvious but this is critical. Sales talent is not easy to find, and sometimes what is even harder is getting rid of bad reps! As Jack Welch says, you may be having a ‘jerk problem’ (recommended reading) if you don’t get rid of the incompetent or the jerks. A visual representation of Jack’s concept below (who doesn’t love a 2x2… 🤓):

As Netflix’s culture deck says, “the actual company values, as opposed to the nice-sounding values, are shown by who gets rewarded, promoted, or let go”. So, get rid of the jerks… Needless to say that this not only applies to the Sales team but to your entire organisation — believe it or not, there are a lot of jerks in Ops too! 😂

My favourite personal traits of exceptional reps (non-exhaustive list):

Ownership : the best reps operate as mini CEOs of their book of business. As great CEOs do, they inspire and make others want to work with them. If they need help, they don’t hesitate to seek the right stakeholder who can unlock their deal, client discussion, etc. Ownership doesn’t mean locking yourself up in a room and sorting everything by yourself…

: the best reps operate as mini CEOs of their book of business. As great CEOs do, they inspire and make others want to work with them. If they need help, they don’t hesitate to seek the right stakeholder who can unlock their deal, client discussion, etc. Ownership doesn’t mean locking yourself up in a room and sorting everything by yourself… Positive attitude : related to the above, but slightly different. Of course issues arise: Product is behind a feature release, Billing sent the wrong invoice, Support took longer than expected to close a case for your customer… but instead of moaning and complaining about it, outstanding reps are driving constructive conversations internally and externally. They are an enabler for the organisation to learn from its mistakes and move forward. Perhaps even more importantly, they set the bar for the rest of the organisation on how to deal with issues and cross-functional teams by demonstrating great leadership.

: related to the above, but slightly different. Of course issues arise: Product is behind a feature release, Billing sent the wrong invoice, Support took longer than expected to close a case for your customer… but instead of moaning and complaining about it, outstanding reps are driving constructive conversations internally and externally. They are an enabler for the organisation to learn from its mistakes and move forward. Perhaps even more importantly, they set the bar for the rest of the organisation on how to deal with issues and cross-functional teams by demonstrating great leadership. Scrappiness : they are not afraid of getting their hands dirty and crunching through data, reading reports about their target company, their sector and basically getting sh*t done. They come up with creative ideas on navigating ambiguity and are very ‘80/20’ to just focus on the stuff that matters to be able to move things forward.

: they are not afraid of getting their hands dirty and crunching through data, reading reports about their target company, their sector and basically getting sh*t done. They come up with creative ideas on navigating ambiguity and are very ‘80/20’ to just focus on the stuff that matters to be able to move things forward. Creativity: as a hiring manager, be open to new profiles who not necessarily come with a Sales background. Spicing your team up with a non-traditional profile makes the team move away from group-thinking and always solving problems in the same way. I’ve seen plenty of examples of data-driven individuals thriving in Sales — watch out for those data analysts, insights team or even ex-consultants (biased alert!).

2. Ensure your Sales leadership really cares about coaching their team

You can have all the sales activity, calls, reports and tracking mechanism you’ll ever wanted. Plenty of ‘Artificial Intelligence’/’Machine Learning’ tools out there too if you want to name-drop a few of them. Main point is though:

If you don’t have a process to learn from your behaviours, it’s pointless.

Sales leaders: I recommend making coaching part of your DNA. Block a couple of hours in your calendar each week to listen to some calls, read some emails, attend some client meetings in person. Then, make it a standing item in your 1:1s with them and in the performance review cycles (this is what I mean by process!).

Pro tip: mentor/coach other members of the org or outside your company: ~2–3 mentee coffees/meetings per quarter is probably all you need. This helps you get an external perspective and also test your coaching skills with someone who’s not on your team. It removes some of the noise you could have in the Manager-Individual Contributor relationship with pure coaching in my view.

3. Map out and document meticulously your Sales Process

What is a Sales Process? Well, of course there are plenty of articles and blogs written about this.

My personal twist: think less about your internal structure/teams and focus on the customer. Crazy, huh? But we forget that at the end of the day, our mission in sales is to be helpful: solve a pain that our customer has. So, understand that pain really well. At the end of the day, how can you help your customer be more successful?

There might be a few pains and a few ‘personas’, yeah I get it. Start with your top 2–3 use cases and ensure the whole company gets that, especially the client-facing part of your business. There are plenty of frameworks of this (e.g. Jobs To Be Done, Customer Journey). I won’t encourage the use of MURAL as a tool since it might contradict the title of the blog post, so use whatever you want! 😆

Talk to a few customers, do some user research, walk with them through their decision-making process. If you don’t have a Research/Product Marketing team already doing this, I strongly recommend you asking Marketing to own this piece.

Once the work is done and documented in your internal wiki (whatever tool you use!), share it and repeat it at least once a month in trainings, internal communications, all hands meetings etc. Use the language you get from the research team in sales stand-ups, meetings. Make it stick.

4. Align your incentives: the simpler, the better

You always hear “reps only care about their commission”. Not true. Well, the reps you should attract and retain don’t. So what do they care about? Comp is of course there but also learning, career progression, being recognised for their hard work, exposure to senior leadership, etc. Not too different from other roles actually…so think beyond commissions.

That said, your commissions scheme needs to be entirely aligned to your company’s objectives. If you want more logos, you can’t be asking for higher ACVs as well — something has to give. Look for your trade-offs and you may need to go through a number of iterations until you arrive to that North Star metric you want to go after. Break it down into levers and you get a nice driver tree (plenty of examples online, one here) to understand what you have under control vs what you don’t.

Re your incentives scheme, a couple of thoughts:

Keep it super simple : leave your complicated Excel modeling for other areas. You need to understand it and be able to explain it in less than 15 seconds. Everyone should understand it. Avoid multiple levers which will make it confusing, distracting and negatively impact their performance.

: leave your complicated Excel modeling for other areas. You need to understand it and be able to explain it in less than 15 seconds. Everyone should understand it. Avoid multiple levers which will make it confusing, distracting and negatively impact their performance. Think ROI : do some ‘unit economics’ to ensure your commission payout is fair to the company and the rep. In SaaS for instance, a 4:1 ratio is a good benchmark given the gross margin levels (i.e. all-in costs of your reps, including base, commissions, overhead & benefits, should not surpass 25% of the money they bring in).

: do some ‘unit economics’ to ensure your commission payout is fair to the company and the rep. In SaaS for instance, a 4:1 ratio is a good benchmark given the gross margin levels (i.e. all-in costs of your reps, including base, commissions, overhead & benefits, should not surpass 25% of the money they bring in). Cash is king : sounds obvious but don’t leave yourself exposed paying commissions before you get the cash through the door.

: sounds obvious but don’t leave yourself exposed paying commissions before you get the cash through the door. Share the love: if more than one function (e.g. account management, SDRs, sales engineers, etc) is contributing to a deal coming through, and therefore to revenue, they need to be sharing the upside of the commission too. At least partially, with SPIFFs or bonuses but my preference would be in a pod structure with a P&L they share as a team.

Pro tip: celebrate successes and establish a mentality of sharing learnings across the team, even when results are not there. Sales can be challenging sometimes but as long as you play the long game and reward the behaviours (not necessarily results!), the rest will follow imho. Foster collaboration and an environment where it is OK to ‘fail’. Not sure why (?) but many times in Sales stand-up meetings it feels like everyone is showing off how good they are and how bright the future looks — challenge that!

5. Data leading the way

As mentioned above, build a driver tree for your business and define your KPIs. Once you know the levers that move the needle (go as detailed as you can on the inputs of each), make sure you have ways of tracking each KPI. I’ve tried to keep the below relatively generic but you get the point (apologies for my handwriting too…):

Example of a driver tree

(Of course one thing is a B2C business with high volume and a completely different one is Enterprise Sales, long lead cycles, time to hire reps — just an example!)

Start with this exercise and then build your spreadsheet/model with this in mind, so that you can do some quick and dirty sensitivities to where you see areas of growth (don’t cheat by just increasing prices tho, that’s easy!).

Once you get your leadership team to agree on main KPIs, you’ll need a good set of reports to match that. Again, you can do this in a ~manual way with Excel/G-Docs or have fancy Business Intelligence tools. The important thing is that you understand the drivers, you measure them and you & your team act on them.

Most likely, for that last crucial point, you’ll need a set of meetings to keep the drumbeat and the pace of your goals. I know meetings don’t have the best marketing out there and you’d rather have less meetings than more. But I’d argue that if you have a good cadence, clear objectives/roles in each meeting and pre/post work clearly agreed this will save you meeting time in the long run.

I like drawing this up in a ‘roadmap’ style working backwards from quarterly board meetings:

Again, I sound like a broken record but you don’t need fancy tools to have great meetings…

Final remarks

I am a big fan of technology, don’t get me wrong. But I think we sometimes overlook the people aspect of it, i.e. how are your teams using that piece of tech?

Throwing a fancy piece of tech won’t fix all your performance or people problems, it may sound obvious but sometimes we forget what comes first. First set the foundation with the right people and behaviours and then add tech to it to make it even better: it’s a 2-step approach!

Discussion: what are your top tips for a thriving Sales Organisation? I’d love to hear them in the comments👇🏻 — thanks for reading all the way! 🤓

Original article posted on LinkedIn — link here