Beasthouse

Corporate trainer

Let's talk about time wasters, Directors, Managers, AE's SDRs, SE

in the hopes of planting seeds to increase automation and reduce drag over the next 6 months, i would like to ask different personas for their personal experiences.

if you are one of the following please leave a comment about the number 1 necessary task that you have noticed your teammates waste their time on. and how much time do you think you think they waste a week on that task.

let's keep it actual work-based. not social media, youtube or gossip.

Directors, what do managers waste their time on?

Managers, what do your AE's waste their time on?

SDR's what do your managers waste their time on?

SE's what do the SDR's and managers waste their time on?

👑 Sales Strategy

🧢 Sales Management

🏡 WFH

46 comments

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SaaSsy

Politicker

Mangers - Constant conference calls to just discuss metrics (everyone can just read the reports). This has become a much bigger focus during WFH and it takes time away from training new folks and continuous learning.

Beasthouse

Opinionated

Corporate trainer

tootaalllyyy i have seen this delay processes over and over again... maybe some guidelines or rules around what deserves a meeting and what should be a chat chain. how have you guys tried to change that?

FlintIronstag

Notorious Answer

Chief Marketing Officer

Am a CMO. Directors & Managers waste their time avoiding work.

Easiest way to get fired is if you think you’re on easy street now that you don’t own accounts personally. Reporting is so easy and automated that it doesn’t even require a person to compile. If someone reports to me and their entire experience is having soft skills, they’re fired.

Directors & Managers should be helping build lead lists, opening accounts, moving leads forward, picking up the slack and sending commish to the rep who owns the account, closing deals & keeping customers happy by empowering their reps. Not letting clients go around them.

Don’t know if that helps any but wanted to chime in. Never let someone stick around who pushes e-mails and moves invisible work from one desk to another. Kick their ass so far out of the building they change careers. It's rampant in sales and I hate it.

FailingUptheLadder

Personal Narrative

Senior Account Executive

Ooof this. I had a sales director who spent every week updating the CRM out loud during our 1:1. Or telling me to go to someone else with the question. I eventually cut him out of the process and then he would ask “do you have any big deals that you want me to jump in on?” No but I have some smaller stalled out ones that I do.

FlintIronstag

Notorious Answer

Chief Marketing Officer

I have a sword I want you to fall on. Does that count?

JC10X

Politicker

Senior Sales Manager

Wow I thought I was the only one that saw it this way..

goose

Politicker

Sales Executive

Marketing shitting on sales. Go figure.

FlintIronstag

Notorious Answer

Chief Marketing Officer

Reread @goose. Marketing (who oversees sales in my role) saying no free loaders taking advantage of the people underneath them.

goose

Politicker

Sales Executive

Ooh. Touched a nerve. Should have used the winky face icon to share my intent.

Beasthouse

Opinionated

Corporate trainer

yea we have been discussing this recently, as we tried to reduce micro managing and empower self starters it has been a slow shift from that old employee mindset. i love that you drew a line in the sand and said fuck it. that's a great focus on you ideal rep profile .... we need that kind of dedication for sure

LordBusiness

Politicker

Chief Revenue Officer

Everyone, and I mean everyone wastes the majority of their time on 1) meetings so folks can feel valuable and important 2) over thinking shit (messaging, worried about shit you can’t control, etc)

Beasthouse

Opinionated

Corporate trainer

uff that's so true making people feel the value is such a critical but costly task. have you guys taken steps to change that or just powering through

Calico

Celebrated Contributor

Corporate Trainer

The managers I talk to often complain that their SDRs spend most of their time over-researching their leads, which leads to fewer calls per day. The new SDRs tend to also get a bit of analysis paralysis.

Beasthouse

Opinionated

Corporate trainer

thats huge for sure gotta find ways to standardize that process

RedLightning

Politicker

Mid-Market AE

AE: Some of our sales processes, while necessary could be automated a bit. We also have some weird salesforce quirks where we have to enter way too much info for really early stage stuff - like contract terms when we create opps.

MCP

Valued Contributor

Sales Director

Those are validation rules that can be changed. They’re probably there because of prior lazy reps not filling things in.

RedLightning

Politicker

Mid-Market AE

Yeah and they should be there, but it's forces me to do it pre discovery call

Beasthouse

Opinionated

Corporate trainer

yea we see alloott of time wasted on salesforce when we promised them less work ... ugh I hate implementation stages. makes me appreciate the refined machine that yellow pages.ca had perfected

RedLightning

Politicker

Mid-Market AE

What did they do at YP? I've heard their sales processes were not the greatest from others

Beasthouse

Opinionated

Corporate trainer

yp usa was brutal yp.ca was great they ran a custom Salesforce UI with their own intranet for a crm they used a branded redailer that is the same as sales lofts systems. everything was nice and organized. plus the 58 k salary starting wasn't bad either but with my books and cadences i avged 110 take home. most of it was upselling but still was a great system. if I hadn't opened my own company I would have stayed with them

alecabral

Arsonist

Director - Digital Sales Transformation

I'd say internal meetings are the #1 reason for most roles. At director/manager level it just gets worse.

Beasthouse

Opinionated

Corporate trainer

1000 percent its our biggest time waster. i want to try a tweet law where the instructions are sent out in a tweet style 140 character limit. then we can expand from there... it feels like its helping but now managers waste time trying to reduce their ideas to a tweet lol

alecabral

Arsonist

Director - Digital Sales Transformation

ha, that would drive them crazy lol

HindsightHarry

Praised Answer

Account Executive

Nothing wastes my time more than an SDR who isn’t DTF and just wants me to move their opp to qualified

Hoopnip

Politicker

Commercial AE

Now that’s fucking funny.

Beasthouse

Opinionated

Corporate trainer

bahahahaha damn gold diggers

Beasthouse

Opinionated

Corporate trainer

this does make me wonder if that's a cultural issue? is there nothing benefiting them from the sale? do they only get paid for the demo?

pretengineer

Politicker

Head of the crumpets

SE here.

Managers --> Communication. The biggest time waste is when managers don't set clear expectations of how they can or want to actually help you. This leads to a lack of clarity in where/when to tap your manager in.

This can look like one of a few things:
- Promising to help you go on calls and bailing last minute
- Being asked for help and then asked to go "figure it out" (say this is a new AE)
- Being a mouthpiece for leadership (e.g. here's the Tableau report) without understanding the context leading to lots of confusion

BDR / SDR / ISR etc:
- Not qualifying for needs

Beasthouse

Opinionated

Corporate trainer

i love the clarity you have you should defs report that to the chiefs.

" - Being a mouthpiece for leadership (e.g. here's the Tableau report) without understanding the context leading to lots of confusion"

bammm that's sooo trueee it kills me that half our marketing department has 0 sales exp and just don't get it

Beasthouse

Opinionated

Corporate trainer

BDR / SDR / ISR etc:
- Not qualifying for needs

this is the biggest struggle of all sales period imho we now training reps to disqualify before qualifying its made a big difference

UrAssIsSaaS

Arsonist

SaaS Eater

As a manager ive noticed my team wastes a ton of time drafting emails that dont get opened or responded to. Our current email automation and ABM is pretty lackluster so it falls on our reps to create their own email campaigns that suck a ton of time and arent effective enough.

MCP

Valued Contributor

Sales Director

Sounds like you know what to do for them then.

Beasthouse

Opinionated

Corporate trainer

yup we gave up on it we treat emails as a reference to get a call and that's it. then live on the call get them to look at the email with a case study. automated it all. even our best reps never got enough increase in email opens to be worth it so we reversed the expectations. It's been working a lot better too soon to tell the results yet.

goose

Politicker

Sales Executive

Treat it like a law firm, where they bill everything to a client. Make a copy? Bill a client. Make a phone call? Bill a client. Go to lunch? Bill a client.

I'm not saying sales people bill clients for everything but if you do any task and a client is impacted in some way you are wasting your time.

Updating your pipeline and closed lost report should be done on your own time.

Beasthouse

Opinionated

Corporate trainer

that's a great point I can definitely see the difference in a couple of our managers and how they approach this has for sure influenced their position. and peace of mind come to think of it

Beasthouse

Opinionated

Corporate trainer

Thanks, guys I appreciate the responses going to look into setting:

-better guidelines for what deserves a meeting vs a recorded message.
-iterating how we track tasks and billables

and thanks @FlintIronstag gunna have a meeting discussing your points I think that will open some doors that were welded shut before hahaha

FlintIronstag

Notorious Answer

Chief Marketing Officer

conf me in

Beasthouse

Opinionated

Corporate trainer

its all spanish hahaha

FlintIronstag

Notorious Answer

Chief Marketing Officer

Yo soy fiesta

cw95

Politicker

Head of SDR

Manager wastes time in constant internal and 'Reoccuring prospect meetings' in which he doesn't need to be there for. This is frustrating for everyone as 9-5:30 his diary is full yet expects more meetings to be put in...

Beasthouse

Opinionated

Corporate trainer

i see this every day and i also hate it.... gotta be boundaries and rules for whats a meeting and whats an email or a video even

cw95

Politicker

Head of SDR

Sometimes the day is 'Busy' from 9 Am to 5PM but then it turns out whatever was 'busy' was cancelled yet still in the calendar so it's like...why are you telling me off...it's simply someone that can't manage their calendar properly!

Beasthouse

Opinionated

Corporate trainer

super good point people hid behind their crap calanders all the time

Blackwargreymon

Politicker

MDR

Am a CMO. Directors & Managers waste their time avoiding work.

Error32

Politicker

ISR

If your training modules are anything like this post, aka complex and overly communicative, then we need to have an overhaul discussion.