I was consulting with a B2B organization the other day on the growth of their Sales Team and eventually reached an impasse that I’ve come to realize is a pervasive misconception about growth of a team.
This organization presented situational impacts of management assistance to their Sales team and asked what the most impacted metric of an sales rep’s performance would be. One of the situations involved the management team doing proper corporate research for the outbound clients and uploading it into the CRM for the reps to have on hand, rather than them doing the research themselves. The impact this was supposed to have is that the rep would be able to make more calls and in this I recognized something I identify as a core issue in philosophy of team growth.
When an organization is growing a greener sales team through SDR’s the end-all-be-all is in optimizing the number of calls that an individual rep can make to the detriment of all else. In the modern age I find this to be outdated, and harmful to anyone joining that system.
At one point in my career I was that green SDR asked to focus on making 100 calls and 100 emails a day no matter what, or else I had “failed” in my daily duties at this SaaS company. When I asked for support, advice, direction, etc. the company and management were grossly negligent which led to me developing my own style, but also to extremely rapid burnout. All of the snacks and bean bag chairs in the world were not going to replace the genuine mentorship that I was seeking.
I received a negative response from this organization when i said that the real benefit of proper background research input into the CRM is allowing the “green” rep to truly focus on the calls they take, and provide them with the best in depth intel to prepare them for that call so they can focus on growing their abilities. I was focusing on the wrong detail despite the fact that this would inevitably result in growth in precision skills and a better close rate, and a better trained Sales team.
If you are an organization looking to manage a Sales team and you only focus on call/email metrics then you are failing your employees. If that is the only thing you want there is a rapid growth in the evolution of AI, and you can use MailChimp for Email Campaigns. If you are looking for a human element in your Sales process then focus on that employee as a person and not a computer. That means fostering growth, listening to what they need to feel supported, tuning the system to their skill set (if a SDR makes 50 calls and gets 45 appointments I couldn’t care less about the number of calls they make), and treating them like someone with real emotions.
Organizations with that philosophy thrive based on a community growth through empathetic management. This may be something that being in Real Estate has taught me as I was thrown into a sink-or-swim ocean filled with Great White Sharks, but the 90% drop out rate taught me that while I may have succeed against all odds it is not a way to approach traditional in-house teams, and it is now the first thing I will bring up in any consultation in my future.
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