Transcription
[Music] Good morning everybody and welcome to this leadership episode of 30 minutes to president's Club. My name is Arman Fro, and I'm here with my co-host Mark Costlo. And today, we have the best-looking guest we've ever had of all time on 30 minutes to president's Club. It's me. You. It's me. Well, Mark, this is a little bit weird. So, I I don't want to gas myself up, but maybe could explain why should people listen? I thought we were going with the best-looking interviewer of all time. Here's why you should do this. Typically, after every single episode, Mondo and I sit down and we talk about what was going on. And I'd say for the last month, there's been a constant theme about meetings, rhythms, and how do you organize some of the basic communication of your team. And I think he was about ready to pop. Y'all, after the last one, so we finally decided, let's just let him let it all out. And this episode is about how to do rhythms inside your sales team that really start to get people into the mode of what you want to be doing as a sales leader. Welcome everybody to another episode of 30 minutes to president's Club leadership Edition. As always, we start every podcast with your three most actionable takeaways. Arman, give me those three. What's number one?
Number one, the Monday morning meeting. Most Monday morning meetings put your sales team to sleep. And I I'm here to throw your melatonin in the trash and give you a better formula for a Monday morning meeting. There are four parts of it, and it runs top to bottom. Part number one is get all of the organizational nonsense out of the way first. So if marketing needs to make an announcement, if product needs to make an announcement, that is time-bound to five minutes upfront. Get the PSA out of the way. That's part number one. Part number two, it's your job as the VP of sales or the CRO to take the mic. What whatever you need to do to remind your team that their job is important is what you do in the next five minutes. So for me, oftentimes that meant reminding my team, this is where the forecast stands, here's where the goal stands, this is the gap, and this is what every single one of you needs to do individually to help us close that gap, including a highlight of key deals. Number three, it goes from myself to the managers. Now, the managers go and they're calling out their teams' prospecting activity numbers. So we're focusing on top funnel. And each of the managers will nominate a rep of the week who had the strongest prospecting week. And then the meeting ends with number four, the reps in what's called the five-minute squeeze, where we pick one topic and the reps send us out, and one top rep breaks down one topic for five minutes while I take live notes in front of the entire team. That is your 30-minute Monday morning meeting. I'm not asleep right now. My melatonin levels are low. Hit me with number two, Arman.
Number two, the Tuesday top 10 deal reviews. Every single Tuesday, if the Monday morning meeting was reinforcing prospecting, the Tuesday top 10 deal reviews reinforce process. I'm going to take the top 10 deals that I deem to be most important on the team and I'm going to put them on a board. And every single rep is responsible for giving a one-sentence, stage-by-stage recap of the exit criteria they've achieved, and then a one-sentence summary of how they plan to get the next exit criteria. In other words, it is a semi-public pipeline review. And the reason that you do this is you want everyone to see how the number one rep manages their deals with public accountability. From there, you have the rep read out the deal update, and then you have the entire team ask the questions instead of you as the manager normally asking the questions in a pipeline review. That's number two. Gotcha. I'm going to ask you one question. What's number three?
Number three, if Monday was prospecting, Tuesday was process, Friday is discovery and other forms of skill building. So we call it the Friday sales builders. These ones will always happen on Fridays at noon during lunch. On the first Friday of every month, I pick one topic to train my team on for an hour straight. For the remaining three Fridays in the month, we will pick a tape that reinforces that topic and review that topic together. So let's say, for example, I really want to focus on getting to level two or level three problems. I might run a training in week one around the situation, problem, impact framework. And then the next three tapes I will review will focus on discovery tapes that did that particularly well, or maybe even stopped short of the impact level to reinforce those concepts with my team every single week over lunch. That's number three. Awesome. So let's dig into the Monday morning meeting. Honestly, Monday morning meetings are the most useless meetings in almost every sales org. There is nobody's paying attention. Half the people don't show up. Nobody can tell you after the meeting happened what was in the meeting. It sounds like you're trying to crack the nut here and make Mondays about prospecting. So why start the week with prospecting versus deals versus skill review? Help me understand that.
So I'm a big believer in rhythms for your team. And you'll notice that each of my takeaways was one of my core three rhythms as a sales leader. And the reason for that is if I have my rhythms done correctly, then I should never have to schedule an unsolicited meeting with my team. And so then it's just a matter of plotting the right types of skill development in the right places. The reason the Monday morning meeting is structured as it is is I want prospecting to be reinforced first thing in the morning on a Monday. That is the moment when you are going to make the decision on whether or not you plan to make cold calls that day, whether you plan to fall behind on your commitment on Tuesday, on Wednesday, on Thursday. If I ran the prospecting meeting on Thursday, it's too late. The week is already gone. So the Monday morning meeting is a forcing function for you to publicly, one, look back at the numbers that you put up last week and put them on a public leaderboard spreadsheet, and then two, look forward and publicly commit to your team in terms of what you are going to do this week.
You're using this term rhythm. Break it down for me. What is a rhythm versus just a weekly meeting?
A rhythm is a type of weekly meeting. That said, there are many weekly meetings that are useless. The intention of a rhythm is to catch common problems or things that you would need to manage on an ongoing basis. So, for example, if I don't have a rhythm to manage prospecting, now what I have to do is I need to set reminders for myself to look at the prospecting dashboards and react to prospecting falling behind. If I don't have a rhythm for process, now what I need to do is I need to chase deals after they've slipped. This is why pipeline reviews also happen on a weekly basis. If I don't have a rhythm for professional development and getting my reps better at discovery, I'm waiting to see the deal slip because there wasn't a real problem, and then I'm running and chasing my tail. I'm trying to do a reactive training to fix a problem that already happened. And so, in other words, it's sort of like the "apple a day keeps the doctor away" kind of thing. I want to use my rhythms to constantly dose all of these problems out of our systems so that my team is never getting caught off guard with any of these things, and I'm not managing by convenience or managing by reaction. It's, to me, a meeting is just this disjointed thing that just happens that nobody really wants to do. A rhythm is I'm setting the expectations that there is consistent follow-up and accountability and communication about this because it's so important. Right? So getting people to dream force would never have a rhythm because it's not consistent. It's just a point-in-time thing. But prospecting never ends. As a leader, you're setting the drumbeat, and your troops are marching with you, and that's the rhythm, right?
Exactly. And the way that you know a rhythm has gone well is when your team can start to complete your sentences for you. And what that means is, outside of the rhythm, they're going to be able to do their job without you coaching them every second. So, for example, if I'm in a top 10 deal review and we're reviewing a stage three deal, and if stage three is multi-threading and stage four is proposal, I've asked my team, "What does it take to get into the stage four question?" for the last 52 weeks straight. And so the moment I open my mouth, one of my reps is going, "No, no, no, no, I got this one first." And that's how I know the rhythm is working. If it's in a Monday morning meeting, the moment I pull up the leaderboard, every other rep can say, "That's the rep of the week," because Arman's called the rep of the week 17 other times, which means you know how to do your job. If I get run over by a car.
So let's dig into the Monday morning meeting. I have each of the areas that you do, and I want to discuss each one. So the first is announcements. Five minutes. Dude, I don't believe that you kept the announcements to five minutes. The announcements go for 37 of the 30 minutes of the meeting. So help me, how do you contain it into five minutes?
Yeah, so the first piece is, look, I had some sharp elbows as a leader. I wasn't always perfect. But the first piece is I would limit it to one announcement per meeting, one external announcement. So if product and marketing wanted to say something on the exact same day, I would be like, "Great, you're week one, you're week two. You can fight over that slot." That's number one. Number two is, if it was going to be a longer announcement, I would ask them to send a pre-read. And so I want a lot of the digesting to be done before the meeting. A lot of these announcements are frankly things that could have been 80% digested over an email and then 20% clarified with questions. That's number two. Number three, I put the person on a timer. And this is a little bit of a cheeky me thing, but I tell them that, look, you're joining a sales team, and the way that you can prove that you're a kick-ass marketer, a kick-ass product person, is showing that you get sales people and you value the ability to manage a clock. And so I would gamify it with my fellow executives. And they would come in, they'd be like, "Alright, Arman, start the five-minute timer." I'd be like, "I'm on you." And look, were there sometimes when it slipped to 10? Sure. But I would hard cut at 10. And the key is I set the expectation upfront that pre-reads need to happen beforehand, and they should be managing this to be a five-minute presentation. And look, there are going to be sometimes where you have a longer product launch and you have to go through that for 30 minutes because you're literally covering an entire new demo flow. That I would argue may need to take place in the Friday sales builder slot when we have a full hour on a Friday afternoon scheduled.
So the second piece is this. I will call it a sitrep, a situational report. This is the state of the company, of our team, of what we're doing. And there seems like you're coupling that with a reminder of, "This is what the focus is right now. This is what we need to be doing." So how would you determine what that is? Because there's always 10 things going on.
Yeah, I'll give you a couple of examples, and there will be some SDRs who are listening to me say this right now, and they are going to complete my sentence. So one example rhythm that I always had was the week before the last week of the month. I would always say, "Alrighty folks, it is the second to last week of the month. For every single account executive in this room, so for my wonderful SDRs, what does that mean for you?" And every single SDR would say, in unison, "That means it's the last week of the month for us." And I would act really confused and I'd be like, "Antoine, I've never heard this before." And I had obviously said this 17 times in the last 17 months. Like, "Antoine, could you please explain to me why is this the last week of the month for SDRs?" And then Antoine would say, "Well, the reason it's the last week of the month for the SDRs is because any meetings that we set this week are pretty much the last meetings that can be taken next week." Great. So that's an example of a rhythm that would happen two weeks out from the end of the month. And so you can apply this to different weeks or different months within the quarter. In general, at the beginning parts of the month, I'm focusing a lot on pipeline building. Or the beginning parts of the quarter, I'm focusing on the things that we need to be doing for deals at that point in the month. In other words, if you're not at power yet, you better start asking for power in week two. Toward the back half, I would always say, at the 15th of the month, I would be like, "If you do not have a deal in red lines right now, what does that mean?" That means it's not a commit deal. And so you find these little clock markers within the month, and your team again starts to get addicted to these things, and you get sort of cheeky with it, and they start to complete your sentences. But what this does is it starts to program your weekly clock with your monthly clock, with your quarterly clock, and that will obviously dictate how you run your deals throughout the any given quarter.
Do you do things like, in this part, "Hey, it's Arman's birthday on Friday. Everybody say happy birthday." Or, "Hey, Arman just closed the biggest deal in company history." Do you do those sorts of things here? Like that kind of, the more people-centric stuff versus the business? Or are you doing that somewhere else?
So when you're a second-line leader, I often times find that relationship or that message comes back from the manager. So when I pass the torch to the manager, and they're doing the rep-by-rep readouts of their activity numbers, and they're nominating a rep of the week, I also ask them to shout out any particularly spectacular or unique things. Sometimes that means someone got engaged, other times that means someone closed the biggest deal ever. But the reps are so much closer to that action, and obviously, it is my job to reinforce and publicly praise there as well. But I like to give managers the ability to surface that themselves because they're the ones who are actually doing that work and getting to know the reps on a deep interpersonal level more than I am.
So that that leads us to that kind of the third step of the meeting, which is these manager, my manager prospecting. I'm going to guess you add three to four or five managers at Pave. How do I do that if at 15 or 20, everybody can't have a turn? What are you trying to do in that section and how do I do it if I have more than just two or three people and I don't have like more than 10 minutes to do that part?
I will admit, I haven't had a team team of 15, 20 different managers. But what I have seen is the rhythms just cascade upward. So, for example, if I was going to take this to the extreme and I was running an organization where there were 50 managers or a 100 managers, my guess is you're not doing a weekly Monday morning meeting with activity commitments. You are probably not even doing a weekly meeting. What's happening is that meeting is actually getting delegated downward to the RVP level or the director level or whatever it is. Right? And so you can take the atomic units of each of these meetings and roll them up. So the smallest atomic unit is a manager in their pod. And oftentimes a manager in their pod would meet with their team for 15 minutes before the Monday morning meeting, and that's when they would review just with their team the rep-by-rep commitments, and they would dig in on certain reps' numbers, and they would nominate a rep of the week. They then bring that information up to the next team meeting, which is where the managers share the rep of the week inside of the Monday morning meeting. But they're not going rep by rep because we had 30 reps plus 20 SDRs on any given team. And then the next layer up that I saw at Carta was our CRO would typically do updates on a more monthly. CRO would be applying pressure on the different directors to make sure that we were doing the SMB organization Monday morning meetings or the mid-market Monday morning meetings. And so it just cascades upwards as you get in higher levels of seniority. So if you're a second-line leader and you only have first-line, you're probably having them talk to the team. If you're third-line and you have second-line and first-line, maybe that happens at your second-line level. And then at the third-line level, you're doing more of a summary of what happened versus the individual stuff.
Do you think that a company with 20, 30 managers should have a weekly Monday meeting led by the head of revenue, or do you think that they should just do it at a like a VP or a director level?
The way that I answer that question is as follows: Do you have the ability to make it real on the rep level on a weekly basis? If the answer is no, then that means the altitude of the meeting is far too high. So, for example, I remember there was a point where we were shifting from weekly to monthly meetings, and it was about as far as you could carry a weekly meeting with a sales organization. And so there are something like 100 reps in the room, and we would see this target and it'd be like, "Great, the big number this quarter is $10 million." And great, I have a $75,000 quota, and I have no idea what that means to me. Hearing that on a weekly basis is not particularly useful. I would much rather have the directors run a meeting where they can say, "The SMB number is this, and that means if every single one of you hits your 75k number, that rolls up to 10% of our total number." I would rather have that meeting happen there, and then have the CRO and the director have a conversation behind closed doors and have that pressure applied on the second-line leaders, not on the fourth-line leaders or on the third-line leaders. But I'm curious what your perspective is on this too.
Yeah, I ran it like you did. I let my VPs run their own weekly team meetings, and then I would show up randomly to different ones or if they requested me. I ran a worldwide meeting once a quarter where we would have the 25 managers, the four VPs, all the directors, and the 160 or 70 Harmony reps would show up to once a quarter. But that was to like recap what happened in the previous quarter. It was to talk about what the goal was in the next quarter. It was to really shout out and celebrate, and I'd have each of the VPs do their own little shout out and celebration. And it was to set a theme for what we were going to do so people could feel like a little bit more prepped going in. But I found if I tried to do it monthly, and what I found was is now you start stacking meetings. You got your team meeting every week, you got your one-on-one every week, you got your pipeline review every week, you got your VP meeting every week, you got your director meeting every month, you got your CRO meeting. And by the time you're doing it, wait, if somebody's in meetings is like 12 or 14 hours a week and not doing their job, I just was started slashing it because I was like, "If you're in more than three or four hours of meetings a week, you don't have time to work."
I agree. And that's where at Carta, for example, we did the org-wide meeting on on a monthly basis, but that's because we were on monthly quotas, and the monthly intensity was really, really important. But the two most important Monday morning meeting rhythms, in my opinion, are the first-line and the second-line leader. And so that first-line rhythm happens for 15 minutes before, and they roll right into the more departmental or the director-level Monday morning meeting. And then anything beyond that, I find that you need to decrease the cadence pretty significantly, just because it gets a little bit removed in the clouds.
So a lot of people, they wait to train their team until they have a perfect sales deck, or until the thoughts are perfectly baked, or until an enablement has sat for three months and interviewed every single seller in your organization. And I prefer to create an environment where velocity training and high-pace speed sharing of insights is perfectly fine. In other words, it's actually encouraged. And the way that I do that is I really lower the bar for how structured I expect a rep to be when they come into these things. So here's what happens. In the previous week's five-minute squeeze, I have a docket. And at the end of the five-minute squeeze, I always say, "Are there other topics or things that people are struggling with right now?" And reps will start shouting out ideas. And I'll always say, "Hey, here's the next five-minute squeeze that's coming up." And sometimes I will let the next rep know that they're on deck. So, for example, if I know that Morgan Melo is killer at negotiation, and someone is asking for help on negotiation, I will usually say, "Hey, Morgan, I know you're really good at this. Could you handle this?" But sometimes I don't know the best person to do that. And so I'll either ask for a volunteer or I'll say, "Hey, next week it's going to be a surprise, and that's going to be fine." And so when I pass the topic to any given rep, here's what happens. Number one, I say, "First thing you do, I just want you to like, do a little bit of brain dump. Just explain how you actually send a recap email, for example, or pull up a copy of your last recap email and walk me through what was going on." From there, I'm going to take live notes and almost do a mini podcast interview and ask questions where there might be gaps. And then from there, you're allowed to phone a friend. And so you can phone a friend to help you fill in those gaps. And so it's meant to be purposely unstructured information that we all learn to structure together live. And I think that in its own right, one makes it so that you're not going and preparing for all of these trainings, but then two, it makes it clear that this isn't supposed to be perfect. This is just a sharing of information across people.
Let's go to the Top 10 Tuesday meeting. So this is where you help people understand top deals. But the purpose isn't to do deal strategy. It doesn't sound like the purpose of it is to help people see how the top reps do their process. So explain to me how do you get out of, "Hey, let's do deal strategy on a call in front of everybody," versus, "Show everybody how you're doing things so that they can learn and watch the best do it."
So the pipeline reviews are going to happen in one-on-one sessions on Wednesdays and Thursdays. The goal of this is not to go through 20 opportunities and pressure test our forecast. Do not turn this into a forecast meeting. That is a miserable way to run this meeting. The goal of this is to do what's called a tear down of a deal. In other words, oftentimes you'll do a tear down of manufacturing equipment where you will literally break apart the piece of manufacturing equipment and try to rebuild it a different way, or you'll try to find different ways to attack the piece of manufacturing equipment, right? And that's essentially what we're doing with this deal review. Is inevitably, you end up getting through five deals. I just call it top 10 deals because it sounds sort of buzzy. You end up going through five deals total. And what happens is it begins the same way that a pipeline review begins, where a rep will basically give their one-sentence exit criteria for each deal in the pipeline. But then from there, there's far more discussion on what happens next. So, for example, going back to that previous example of, let's say someone is in multi-threading phase and they need to get sign-off from power, and they're going into this big team demo where they're going into the meeting with power. We're going to beat up all the different ways that we can win that meeting with power. Whereas in a pipeline review, the rep might say, "This is how I plan to approach the meeting." We might give one or two quick pointers, ask one or two quick questions, but we're not going to delve deep into that meeting itself. If we get the sense that there's some risk in that pipeline review, we're going to say, "Hey, let's schedule 30 minutes to prep for this meeting specifically because it sounds like there's some risk in it." And this top 10 or top five deal review is frankly where a lot more of that deal strategy is happening. And the purpose of doing this in public forum is again to give you a sense of one, all the creative ways you can attack a deal, two, show you how the top reps are doing it, and then three, use the collective brain power of every seller in the room to attack deals creatively.
So Arman, listen, I got a deal with Zenes. It's a $50,000 deal. It should be closing next month. I'm in stage two right now. What I'm trying to do is make sure that I quantify what the business initiatives are, and I'm also trying to get them to decide on a timeline of when they need this implemented by. Those are my two exit criteria. And my next step is I'm trying to book a meeting right now to talk through with the decision-maker what the date that they need this implemented by, because in order to get the value and time for the business, right? So where does it that there's my little quick sentence recap? Great. And what I may ask you to do if this were an actual session is I might say, "Mark, could you go back to stages zero, one, and explain to me in discovery stage, what was the problem that they agreed that they wanted to solve? And then in the solution exploration or the demo phase, what was the solution to the problem that your prospect agreed to?" Those would be the first two questions that I would ask. So go back and actually really check off those exit criteria for me.
Yeah, so I did quantify the, I did identify business initiative, Arman. Like, they're having really bad outbound results and they're trying to find a way to increase pipeline coverage and inbound. They don't have any more money to spend on inbound, so this is like a pure outbound play. That's the problem that they said that they wanted to solve. And I talked to their director of sales development, who owns the outbound number, and I talked to their VP of sales in a call to.
Great. So they have bad outbound results and they can't spend money on inbound, and you've got the right people in the room. And now what you need to do is you need to put numbers behind the problems, right? So first thing, before it goes out to the room, Mark, how do you plan to put numbers behind the problem? Because you might have the right number in the first place. So this is where I'm going to share this is what I would do, and then you're going to then release it to the room, and other people be like, "Well, what about this? Try this. Have you ever tried this?" And now I got some different bullets that I can shoot to in order to get that done.
Exactly. So the first question I'm going to pose is always back to the rep, because I don't want you to hear advice that you already took from yourself. It's the most aggravating thing in the world. So I'm going to give you the chance to be correct first. Then the second question I'm going to ask is back to the room. I'm going to go to the room. I would say, "Let's not add any new strategies here. Is there anything wrong with the way that, or anything different that you might do differently in the way that Mark is approaching the business case?" Yes, no, maybe, etc. Great. All right, let's talk about ways to get creative. Creative. Now, what are some of the other things we might do? Maybe we bring in product, maybe we bring in our sales engineer, maybe we try to do groundswell on the account. So once we've established that the right thing to do is a business case, then we add the creative ideas. If you just say, "R team, what should we do?" then it just starts with all kinds of nonsense without focusing on the first, right, fundamental thing to do. And so first thing, again, to recap, is let the rep say what they think they should do next. Have the team validate it, and then pour any creative ideas that happen from that point on.
So I have one addition to your list. I think that I found super valuable, which is, "Why don't you think you'll be able to do this using your tactic?" And that's where you get into, "Well, this person really is, we're in bed with this competitor. They used them in their previous company." And now we can start to put in some of the roadblocks that need to be considered in how we're approaching that account. That's been a huge question for me. Most good reps can figure out the next steps, but most good reps don't think about why they won't. Like, "Let me think of a few scenarios where this doesn't go the way I think it's going to go," and so I can prep for those.
Great reps always are ready to do that. Bingo. So the question that we would oftentimes ask in addition is, "Let's pretend that you had to write up a closed loss report right now. What would be the reason that you close loss this deal today?" And it removes all of the defensiveness and the pressure. Instead of going and poking all the holes, you get the rep to say, "Hey, let's just pretend you had to chalk up your own loss right now. Why would that happen?" And you get them owning that and them coming to the answer, instead of them feeling like someone else is attacking the holes in their deal.
Yeah, yeah. Attacking holes always feels mean-spirited versus, "Tell me the holes that you have, and let's figure out how we can plug them together." That's a much, I think, approach that people are much more open to.
Correct. Especially with these public type of reviews. It's one thing to do this in a pipeline review, but the number one thing that you got to do is you got to give your reps the chance to be right first. And a lot of times, just because they didn't explain the hole in their deals in the recap doesn't mean that they're not aware of them. And so if you didn't hear the hole in the deal and you're like, "Oh my God, they're not thinking about this," take a deep breath, pause for a second, and ask them to explain some of the holes in the deals before you just put them on blast in front of the entire team. That is not what the session is supposed to be.
All right, last meeting. It's Friday. Nobody wants to after lunch. You're doing a freaking meeting on Fridays at lunchtime. How we understand the timing seems like weird timing to do that kind of a meeting.
So look, to your point, how many people you see hitting the phones Friday afternoon? The good ones. Don't get me wrong, there's a good buzz. And sometimes I would schedule Friday at 3 dial blitzes with my team because I'm a little bit sadistic in that regard. And that's when I would cold call with them for fun, book some great meetings Friday at 3. But the reality is, Friday is a lot of time when people are doing the lunch, they're relaxing a little bit more, they're talking about the weekend. And that, in my mind, is a great time when people are less wondering, "Oh my God, what's going on in my inbox?" It's a Monday. People tend to be a little bit more relaxed and not worried about the meeting that's right behind the next meeting. And that is oftentimes the state that you want people in to focus on learning. You also get the benefit of you have a couple nights over the weekend to let reps sit and marinate on a concept after delivering the training versus giving them a training and then pounding them with four days of prospecting, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.
I do a one-by-three rhythm in that Friday slot. So I always try to pick one concept to train for an entire month. So that first sales builder, we call it First Fridays, is always my job, or a rep's job, or a manager's job to deliver a pretty well-structured training. And those ones are planned in advance based on the problems that we're identifying in our org. We run that one-hour training, and ideally, that one-hour training is 30 minutes of sitting and learning, 30 minutes of roleplay, some sort of practical application. We break. And then the next three weeks, we reinforce that concept over and over and over, typically in form of a tape review.
Are reps volunteering calls, or are you picking calls at random?
So I don't have the time to go and look through every single call that could possibly come through whatever sales conversation St recording platform you're using. So what I do is I set criteria for different types of calls that I want within each week. So, for example, I might say, "In week two, I want the call where you slam-dunked all the way down to impact. I want literally like the perfect call to see what good looks like." Then in week three, I want to see a call where you felt like you could have gotten all the way there, but you stopped short, and that's okay. And I'm going to praise you in public for recognizing and bringing forward a call-up that you know is not perfect. That's number two. And then number three, usually in the last week, I like to do some sort of curveball where I'll be like, "Show me this, but show me it in a competitive deal, for example." So let's talk about how to get to impact, but in the presence of three other competitors. So if you do this in three different cuts, I'm a big fan of not starting with the bad stuff because people should usually see the good habit first, and then see how to turn the bad habit into the good habit. And then from there, through all the weird situations and them in the last week, it makes a ton of sense. And I think that the a missing piece is you got to pick and commit to one thing a month, and then you actually have to a program to drive the change of behavior. Like a single training, a single conversation doesn't do it. It's the reintroduction and the reinforcement of that uh every week that gets people to start changing.
Are you just using reps to help pick those topics? Is that something that you're like, at your, you're panned on the pulse of what's going on and you're deciding it? Like, how do you pick and commit to those topics every month?
Depending on the stage of your sales organization, it can come from a number of different places. I find that reps tend to struggle with self-diagnosing at times. And so if I'm in a super early stage sales organization, I'm often times looking at the places where deals are falling short because I'm outside in and I'm noticing problems across all of my reps where they self-diagnose might be wrong, right? I'm going to validate that with the reps. But then when I'm a second-line sales leader, I tend to get information from a couple of different places. So number one, I'll get that diagnosis from the managers. And then two, I will usually use a minimum viable amount of reporting to validate that hypothesis. So let's just pretend that my managers tell me, "Hey, we're really struggling with negotiation on deals with procurement, for example." What I might do is I might do a basic report that shows me, "Okay, what's happening to deals in stages three and four? Are we seeing deflation in our ACV there?" Right? Or for example, if people are saying, "Hey, we're really struggling with multi-threading." I'm probably going to believe them. But then what I'm going to want to do is I want to see, "Okay, how many deals are dropping off in the multi-threading stage, for instance? Are we really losing a lot of these deals?" Or I might say, "Hey, for all the deals we've won, what percentage of them did we not have to get to power?" Just to make sure that this is really the important thing for us to be focusing on. And so I tend to use the managers for the hypothesis, and then I try to validate the hypothesis with some form of data.
And is this an enablement meeting, or is this just you and your squad?
I have an interesting perspective on enablement. So I love enablement people. My enablement person at Pave was a total ace. I believe that the best enablement people realize that no matter how many hours you spend studying the craft of sales, you are not in the craft of sales. Your superpower as an enablement person is your ability to structure information and extract greatness. And so what that means is, if I want to teach a negotiation training, this is the role of the enablement person. You need to find the five best negotiators on the team, and you need to take all of the training deck load off of their plate, okay? So let them spew information at you, and you go and structure their information in a way that the team can digest. But then you pass the deck back to them and you say, "Hey, number one rep, you deliver the training." That is how the team is ultimately going to actually believe the advice is when it's coming from the top reps, the manager that everyone looks up to. It's got to come from those people. I'll be honest, Mark, often times even it coming from me, I think I know my stuff pretty well. There's just something about having it come from the mouth of your number one performer instead of from a sales leader, and definitely from an enablement person. That's what I think the role of enablement is.
All right, Mondo, great stuff. But we end every episode the exact same way. I need to ask you, if there's one thing that sales managers could stop doing to make the world a better place, what would it be?
So many leaders do training when it's too late. And my goal is, you should not be working out for the first time when you're about to have a heart attack. Back, you should probably start working out before. And that is how I approach training with all of my teams. Is I'm going to dose it every single week. If I see a problem, I'm going to put it in the next one-by-three set. I'm going to cover it in the next Monday morning meeting. I'm going to cover it in the top 10 deal review. I don't want to be reacting to professional development because at that point, it's too late. And then if I try to train my team in retrospect, it feels punitive. It feels like I'm punishing them with training for the mistakes that they already made, versus preparing them for the mistakes that they can prevent in the future. That's the worst habit.
Thanks so much, Arman. Maybe we'll invite you back to this again. But this was a great interview. Thanks so much for joining us this time.
Good. All righty, Mark. It is time for a two-by-two recap email from this episode with yours truly. What are your two?
First of all, it was a delight to interview you, Arman. We can do this anytime you want to. I know this is your podcast. I thought it was pretty dope.
I appreciate that, man. All right, number one is the one-by-three. I think this is a very under-understood. It's just not well used, or people aren't putting it in the right perspective. When you do a training, the training isn't actually where change happens. What happens is what you do after the training. And that one-by-three format of, "I'm going to introduce a topic, and now I'm going to do three meetings where we're going to listen to calls throughout the month to do it," that's genius. And then number two, you might have changed my mind on Fridays, man. I was a, "Don't do meetings on Fridays" person. I could see why Friday afternoon training now might work. So I thought that was another interesting takeaway for me is Fridays do have a vibe for training. If it's valuable and interesting and entertaining, might be a really great time to do it because there are less distractions on Friday from the business, maybe more personally. But I think if you give people really good stuff on Fridays, I can see them paying attention. Boom.
Number three, the mantras of the Monday morning meeting. If it's the beginning of the month, you're focusing on top of funnel. If it's the middle of the month, you're focusing on getting to power. If it's the end of the month, you're focused on vendor review. And the second to last week of the month is always the SDRs last week of the month. And then lastly, number four, let the reps be right first. Whether you're doing a five-minute squeeze, give the rep the chance to explain how they would approach it first. If you're doing a deal review, let the rep explain what they plan to do first before you poke a hole in a tape review, ask the team what question do you think the rep should ask first before you go and tell the rep what they missed.
All righty folks, if you liked what you got in this one, a couple weeks back, I did a full newsletter write-up on the four parts of a Monday morning meeting and how to run each of those. If you like what you got here, you can go check that out in the show notes. And it would mean a ton to me if you subscribe to the 30 MPC newsletter because the first newsletter of every single month is solely focused on sales leadership. All righty folks, catch you soon. Peace out.
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