McMahon Qualified Sales Leader

Proven Lessons from a Five Time CRO
1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-0-578-89505-5
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 348 Seiten

'The Qualified Sales Leader: Proven Lessons from a Five Time CRO' shares valuable lessons for sales leaders and sales reps selling enterprise software solutions. In a conversational and easy to read narrative style, this must-read book provides learnings on how sales leaders can help their reps sell more for higher average deal sizes to executive level buyers. Written by the top sales leader at five public software companies, this is a powerful book that helps optimize sales and business performance.

Autoren/Hrsg.

McMahon, John

Leseproben

8

Meeting with the CEO

E

leven weeks passed by, and Forego’s QBR left my mind. I’d seen many forecast session debacles before, so what occurred at Forego didn’t seem all that surprising.

Then I got a phone call.

“John,” said a crisp voice. “It’s Raj from Forego. I need your help. You saw my QBR at the beginning of the quarter. I need you to help advise my sales force on how to sell accounts more effectively. I want the people on my sales force to be become better salespeople and better forecasters.”

Right away, I recognized him. Not only his voice, but the sense of urgency behind his words.

“Raj,” I said. “Good to hear from you. How did your quarter end?”

He scoffed. “Terribly. John, you watched my sales team during the QBR and my sales management team as they rolled up the forecast, which met our plan number. They seemed confident in their forecasting abilities. Unfortunately, we fell far short of the company plan.”

No real surprise there.

The session had lacked any form of structure or methodology to establish forecast accuracy. His managers instinctively knew they lacked line of sight to the number. They’d had a moment of insanity or reckless courage, thrown caution to the wind, and forecasted the quarterly plan number. Maybe because they’d known what Raj wanted to hear but the managers had fallen far short of their forecast.

“How did some of the reps finish?”

“Shannon only closed $150,000, although she forecasted $250,000, with a potential for $300,000. Carlos jumped his forecast by $75,000 and closed $250,000 instead of $175,000. Kathleen, who forecasted to close $350,000 quota, wound up at only $150,000. The Thompson deal from the prior quarter slipped again. Hannlin, who forecasted $400,000, came in just shy of $50,000, closing only two of the eight deals he forecasted. No one seems to know how to forecast. No one is in control of their deals.”

That’s an understatement.

Certainly, that was a rough distinction between forecast and reality. Raj was a first-time CEO. Despite being a super-intelligent technologist, Raj was learning the ropes as the operator of a SaaS company.

But he knew what he didn’t know . . . sales.

Raj was born and raised in Mumbai. He’d attended the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, where he’d earned a Master of Science degree in Computer Science. After graduation, he immigrated to the US with only a suitcase and $150. Once there, he found a job working for Google in Mountain View, California, but transferred to their New York City office in Chelsea for a promotion.

A few years later, he decided to start his own SaaS company, named Forego. He initially raised ten million dollars from Joe Veesey at Seed Round Ventures in Palo Alto, California. Later, Gina Growth at Startup Ventures in Boston, Massachusetts led a follow-on round, and one additional round gave Forego the distinction of a unicorn and a market cap over one billion dollars.

“I’m an engineer,” he went on to say. “I’ll never understand the art involved in a sale, but I know everything is a process. And there’s a science to every process. And every step can be measured in order to understand and control a process. My sales leaders lack an understanding of process and measurement, which means they can’t control their accounts.”

“Raj, in the words of James Harrington,” I began.

Measurement is the first step that leads to control and eventually to improvement.

If you can’t measure something, you can’t understand it.

If you can’t understand it, you can’t control it.

If you can’t control it, you can’t improve it.

“It’s time for my company to understand how to gain control of deals using a sales process and find ways to constantly improve, John,” said Raj.

Raj instinctively knew what so many CEOs, sales managers, and reps don’t—a sales force needs to implement foundational methods and realize specific metrics before they can scale:

1. A measurable sales process
2. A means to analyze the sales process and effectiveness of the sales force
3. Consistency and repeatability in rep performance across the salesforce with:
4. An increasing average new deal size
5. An expanding up-sell deal size from existing customers
6. A measurable improvement in quarter-to-quarter average sales productivity

Raj knew that in order to scale, he’d have to give his sales force structure, so they could communicate and operate effectively as a unit.

Like a professional orchestra.

Music is codified around the world. The musical notes: A, B, C, D, E, F, and G represent the pitch and length of a sound, and those sounds are set in an arrangement for a composition. Those basic notes represent the fundamental structure of written music and allow for the understanding, playing, and analysis of music for the conductor and every musician in an orchestra.

Raj’s sales force was like an orchestra playing music with no fundamental structure; nothing was codified, and nothing could be analyzed. So, his leaders had no understanding of what was going right, what was going wrong, or what to change.

Raj needed to codify his sales process, selling motions, and the analysis of sales issues into a systematic, structural arrangement.

Of course, I knew that was where I wanted to take him next, but I wanted to understand his level of awareness.

“What do you think is the cause of these issues?” I asked.

“We grew rapidly as a company, which caused an obvious knowledge and skill gap. The gap exists between what made a rep successful two years ago and what makes a rep successful now. Two years ago, we were a startup, selling small deals to low levels within accounts.

“This is very common, Raj. Your reps are activity machines, selling features and functions at a high rate and pace. Show up and throw up. Vending. Not selling. Their efforts brought you deals and got you to this point, but things changed.”

“Yes, our product line has expanded, matured, and is competitively differentiated. Now, we’re selling a platform of multiple software products, which are all tightly integrated.”

“That’s right Raj, your software platform appeals to a higher-level buyer. Your sales force needs to advance up market as well as move up within organizations if you’re to sell to larger companies—where there are more experienced and sophisticated buyers that care about business value. You’ve shifted from a single-stakeholder sale in small companies to a multi-stakeholder, multi-level sale in large companies. From low-level product sales to high-level business sales.”

“Agreed,” he said with some relief.

“Your reps and managers need to learn how to speak to different buyers at different levels of organizations. They need to understand how to effectively message to each buying persona and specific use cases. They’ll need to learn how to qualify different types of opportunities at multiple levels of larger accounts. What worked before isn’t working now.”

“Precisely.”

The biggest issue Raj faced wasn’t with a changing product or market. It was with his sales managers. The first-line sales leader has the most profound effect on the recruitment of reps and the overall success or failure of sales reps.

His first-line sales leaders were reps when Forego had a simple product and sold product features in small accounts to a single, low-level stakeholder. His managers had generated business off of sheer activity when they sold: making more calls, sending more emails and video links, connecting to more people on LinkedIn.

Now, that was the only way they knew to manage reps who were currently trying to sell a more complex product to a more sophisticated business buyer in large accounts.

His managers only wanted to drive and measure activity. If they wanted to be successful as a company, the managers had a list of things to change:

• Stop confusing activities with accomplishment.
• Stop pushing reps to rush through the sales process.
• Master the customer conversation with specific personas and use cases.
• Understand how to sell business value, using a repeatable process.
• Learn to qualify deal advancement issues in account situations.
• Coach reps on how to control an opportunity.
• Understand how to forecast accurately.

Raj stated the obvious. “If I can’t get my managers to learn new ways and adapt appropriately,” he said, “then they’ll never be able to train and coach the reps on how to analyze deals and sell effectively.”

I worried that Raj didn’t know what “good” looked like.

Forego, like so many other startup SaaS companies, had a broken system from the beginning. From the ground up, no one in the company knew what good looked like. They didn’t know what to change or how to change their current processes and methods. I thought back to the reps at the QBR.

“Is there any formal onboarding or ongoing development training for your sales force?” I asked.

“All we have is a two-day orientation for all new employees. We also host a formal two-day training for the reps after their first month, but it’s all product training, no sales training.”

“And managers?”

“There hasn’t been any training for the managers.”

No surprise there. Companies regularly spend millions of dollars training sales reps and little-to-nothing training their leaders.

“How does the current situation...