Streamline the marketing sales cycle in employment contracts

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all right cool so we're gonna talk a little bit about sales metrics this is usually I probably shouldn't do this after lunch because you're really gonna want to fall asleep probably but but it's just important I'm just gonna cover them it's gonna spend maybe like thirty minutes on this because sales isn't as complicated as we try to make it like if you know what to track and you know the things that matter to inflect sales like it becomes more of a math equation than it does this like I don't know sales many times I think feels like it's like all gut driven or all we're figuring it out but really there's a way to run your sales work by the numbers right and so I'm gonna try to give you guys some kpi's and some numbers that actually matter scale up C be a couple people on that nice okay why do they matter right as your company's scale you can't forecast in a room anymore right as you have more than three four or five people you can't just all look at each other and say what are you gonna close what are you gonna close what are you gonna close and as a CEO when your company's growing as well - you don't have time to track people down you need a more methodical way to do it right so the more that you can have basic rigor very early on the better off you are the other place is you're not tracking things how do you know how to get better you know what I mean if you're not tracking specific parts of your sales process step one to step two step two - step three how can you get better how do you know what's broke how do you know it's not working it's all gut based right so the goal of this is I'm just gonna walk you through like how to think about this this may be applicable to some of you now some of you in six months or 12 months but in this link if you guys remember yesterday I showed you that excel sheet that had a bunch of colors and it said like MQL the SQL calculator we've included a link to it but it basically just tries to show you hey how many bodies are we gonna need how many leads do we need to be able to hit our sales numbers and what's the conversion percentage and it's like a really good kind of summation of a lot of this so we'll keep that in in there for you the other thing is this don't track too many things right you also I'm sure maybe some of you if you work for a CEO or have done this you don't need to track everything you know 5 to 10 metrics tops because again you don't want to have analysis far alysus paralysis yeah okay all right so let's ask first what metrics are you guys tracking today obviously you're tracking closed deals right what are other sales metrics that you're tracking today or are starting to track or want to track what proposals number of proposals yep what else what do you mean number of touch points against an account or a person or okay activities meetings yep what else connected right yep how do you define connect okay got it and is that early in the funnel or is that after the first call first of all is that inbounder is would that be similar like a proposal I'll call it like negotiation what but meeting set and meetings ran like meetings / demo okay what else okay he said MQL to SQL conversion so I'm gonna I'll try to define this and you different people are gonna have different definitions MQL is somebody who looks good on paper right based on again we talked about the ICP stuff and mql is like this person looks like a buyer a sales qualified lead is and they match this criteria so do you guys have a qualification criteria like Bant or something like that that user no no how do you judge the difference between MQL SQL okay okay all right that's loose but we can talk about it like usually to get to here you've crossed some hurdle meaning like cool on paper your VP of Operations at a target whatever we have you're in marketing qualified it starts marketing qualified lead mark based on paper you should be a fit sales qualified lead is then I have a conversation based on that conversation you crossed whatever my first hurdle is which is timing meaning you're looking to make by the way for all of you what that hurdle looks like maybe a little bit different but your classics Bant is a classic budget Authority need time that's a very classic there's an 'm which is like authority need urgency in I can't remember it I think medic there's a whole bunch of different methodologies that different sales leaders deploy but usually it doesn't mean you've done like a full Bant to get them to SQL but it might be that timing is right and I verified that they verified the decision-making process cool now they're a sales qualified leader right so that's kind of like the start of the funnel right marketing's job is usually to get them to here or to here and then that's kind of when sales takes over right I'm gonna show you some examples of this live but this is just the language for those of you in b2b sales if any of you aren't well most of you and b2b sales and even again like a b2b that or b2c that looks like me to be if you're meeting with an investor and you don't know what this means like you know what I mean especially as you go to raise like your Series A or series B there's no planet it's gonna happen because at that level is what I need you to know your business I'm gonna deploy ten million dollars twenty million dollars of capital like I need you to give me the equation for what that's gonna get me so these are Lang like MQL to SQL especially as a CEO like and for those of you that are starting this is just is what it is how many leads actually turn into sales out like opportunities kind of some people would say that's even earlier okay good these are all good anything else any other metrics for tracking new yep yeah and I'm sure some of you want to track this stuff first are tracking it these are all good these are all like good metrics I'm gonna talk talk through it a little bit further here okay so these are again these are just like different ways to think about it usually the way that you think about it is you have leads or contacts which are kind of like the masses and then opportunities are again like once they cross some type of threshold all right so an opportunity means you have now crossed a threshold agreeing to meet is not crossing a threshold usually some companies will start their sales funnel at meeting set it's not usually what we want to do because I don't know if you're a fit or not like I haven't even talked to you you might not have budget you might not have a need you might not be the right person and timing might suck like therefore you're not qualified you're not an opportunity right an opportunity is somebody who crosses some type of sales threshold it's not everybody who could be doing business with us right so I think a lot of companies again early on they start the funnel maybe too early and again I would argue that that's like still marketing's job so again I talked about this leads and you know some people use contacts instead to are kind of the unhulled masses and then you become an opportunity once you flip let's you go to the first step right and I'm gonna talk to you about the different stages your as well does that resonate this concept of like leads here opportunities yeah go ahead I'll tell you afterwards measure the efforts of a salesperson or the results or all you have to see like do you ever have to look and see how many calls or make how many mails going to you measure their activity it's a great yeah and that's what I mean he was mentioned in activities you know I tell you what man it's yeah the answer has always historically been absolutely how many calls how many emails to generate how many meetings to generate how many opportunities to generate how many proposals - how many negotiation - how many closed deals the tough part is and again each industry is a little bit different if you're in a very transactional sale I think activities can still be a really good indicator that the problem can be is if you have to do enterprise sale if you're an enterprise and then we're doing account based marketing for example right and we're doing that I care more about like connect rate like how many people like did you have a week we would call this sometimes meaningful conversations as the first leading indicator I don't give you how many calls you make I care about the first leading indicator right and we're kind of moving more toward that it used to be as a Sales Leader man that's all you preached calls email call email email and it was primarily just calls even you know it's like call call call call call but more and more we're moving to like how many can meaningfully conversations and we define meaningful conversation as again they agreed to a next step or they got you to the right person so instead of saying did you make a hundred calls today or send out 50 emails did you have four meaningful conversations today so we're actually moving a lot of our clients away from activities like email number of emails and calls because salespeople it like if you give salespeople a target you gotta make a hundred cold calls a day I promise you 10 to 20 percent of those will be faking man I used to find lists of phone numbers with fax machines because we used to require people you had to have an a hundred calls every day and two and a half hours of talk time if you ran for meetings that day didn't matter one hundred cold calls two and a half hours of talk time right that's how we've used that's how you run your sale I mean like that's normal right but more and more we're moving to this like connect rate instead of measuring true activities because activities are so easy to right and who cares I care about that first step and again how do a lot of the stuff I was telling you guys about earlier LinkedIn how do I measure the influence of that connection that you did but I didn't count it as your activity so I don't know ma'am there's certain I think each business is different some I can see a world where measuring the amount of activities would be valuable I more and more we're becoming the kind of this school of thought that we want to measure the step right after which would be like meaningful conversation meaningful conversation or connect rate but why is that the raw thing why is an email or call the raw thing why isn't the connector ate the raw thing but what's the point of doing calls and emails yeah yeah look I'm not totally opposed to measuring and not measuring activities we're having thresholds of like making twenty calls a day or something I just think you're incentivizing the wrong thing you're paying too much attention to the wrong thing right I think we sometimes over-index on volume verse quality are you doing the volume of things where are you doing it correctly I can go and pound I can do a number of activities all day but at the end of the day if I'm not connecting with anyone who cares well I go back and look so I'm not connecting is my data bad do I have bad email addresses oh man my bounce rate is 25% okay that I don't think I need calls or emails to go back and diagnose like I could look at yeah bounce rate voicemail rate you know like there's other things that I could look at that would be like leading indicators that calls and emails wouldn't necessarily tell me either no no no salespersons not doing anything I tell the salesperson your job is to make five have five meaningful conversations or connects a day this is the definition of that now go do it I don't care if you get that cool dude you got there before lunch great now go ahead and try to get eight right you know like I just think I think in sales for too long we've over rewarded volume versus quality of activity yeah and getting away from the activities we were really based on looking at the activities but right now what we've done we've got a team of seven and we've looked at the hired connectedly on the team which right now we have someone who's ending a 40% connected rate and someone with a 60% rate and their sales are generally high remove someone on the team of 20% connected great they're not they're not consistent but we recently started using the craft which we talked about some sales like internalization software and refract has been really good in helping us understand a little bit more how to gain some of the individuals they're boys and those are way too long they're voicemails are so monotone when people are not calling back whereas the working connected rate that are higher the voicemails are shorter they're more intriguing have a few questions for you give me a call back so things like that so that's what we're diving into so just some things to look into area codes as well so we have a rock out in Toronto her working corrector 865 percent who she deals with specific Toronto so her working connected rates so high whereas we're calling from Nova Scotia we call out of the states and are working back to rates and lowers we're looking at again okay let's get an American zero no today we've come on yeah it depends on how transactional your sale is if it's if it's a more enterprise sale than it's probably a more of the month if it's a medium velocity that it's weekly yeah I think I'm gonna talk about some of those for sure yeah refract is the one that you are using great yeah there's there's a lot of tools that can help with like this type of like productivity measuring okay awesome yeah so again like it's I think there's a right way you can do activities right and I'm not totally opposed to it but I just think again connect your meaningful conversations are important what I also want to talk about is the importance of having defined sales stages right this is the other big issue that a lot of companies have they do a really poor job of defining the steps of the sale if I go to your reps you have seven reps and again it sounds like they're working on this I asked any of them what's engaged mean I bet I get seven different definitions most of you don't do a very good job of defining your steps to where I ask one rep every single rep if something's in proposal phase that means I've verified budget for people involved in the sale this has happened this has happened it's the only way to have a clean pipeline as you scale you have to have clear definitions of each step of the scale so this is like leads not contact lead hasn't been touched shocking right working we've reached out actively attempting to bring them the sales funnel engaged the prospect has responded to one of the touch points we're trying to schedule a meeting right and then accepted would be that it moved disqualified doesn't meet our qualification nurture no interest nurture future interest it's cool right now I know if you're working leads we're all talking about the exact same thing right and this would be another way that I would track outcomes like these are like these are kind of those the lead status is also another early indicator of like where we're at I talked about Bant you know bants interesting there's a lot of different qualification metrics really it's just to make sure that leads cross some type of threshold that we agree that hey someone has some of these you don't know nearly half - on your very first call if you sell a $2,500 sale you better get bant on your first call do they have the budget is this the right person is there a real need and is the timing right like I better get all that on the first call if I'm selling a product that's $2,500 one-time but if I'm selling a four hundred five hundred thousand dollar it might be weird if I if I try to like qualify you as opposed to continuing to generate interest so maybe the only thing I need on the first call to get to that first hurdle to qualify someone is timing and budget yes this is something that we're looking at doing in the next three to four months whatever that timeframe is for you yes we've allocated resources and budget for this project cool right good maybe that's enough each company will have different criteria that are more critical to your sales so it's important to think about the deals that actually close what were the things that they actually like crossed like okay those people were looking to make a decision in 60 days cool right so 60 days or sooner is a qualification criteria for us right and it doesn't mean I just qualify them forever it's just for now so this is the same thing on the opportunity stages so qualification completed Iran meeting one the prospect is qualified need and buying process are identified that everyone in my organization now knows that if it is in step one that need and buying process have already been identified we've identified one need it's a required field in Salesforce for you to be able to move it to this stage you cannot move an opportunity to the next stage if you haven't filled out the fields like you can't do it I'll just create a validation rule that says like if this is here do not do it right and so you want to be very careful you don't want to have a ton of sales people hate required fields hate hate hate them so they will revolt if you make too many fields required but it's okay you should make like the core ones what's the need what are we all aiming toward like on our deal here what's the timeline look like again to flip it to the next one initial evaluation demo additional stakeholders have invited to the process decision-making process budget confirm timeline confirm which in the next 90 days you cannot move it to the next step if I don't have those four things why you're not qualified right so again each one of these has very defined stages and I want all of you to think as your team's grow in scale that's why this is really important if it's just two dudes forecasting like this is less important but as the team grows in scales having uniform definitions of you know where someone is from a qualified standpoint is critical it's really critical so here's all the different definitions and you can see like it's not Superman what we're talking two sentences here right it's not a ton of stuff but it gets everyone aligned unlike forecasting cuz again as your companies start to grow forecasting becomes everything right so this helps us to create a uniform forecast all right so cool so I was really happy to see a lot of you guys talked about these metrics so I'm not gonna spend too much time talking about them what's really important especially as the team grows is macro straight lines hide micro issues meaning in sales we love to look at these very straight lines which are an aggregate of 15 or 20 reps or whatever it is but then when you dig into the micro each rep is completely different which is why in sales you know I managed to each individual each individual has their own strengths their own weaknesses and their own conversion percentages etc so I'm just gonna talk about this this idea of macro and micro that again as your teams get to 10 15 20 people in the sales word you're gonna have to look at the micro not just the straight line okay so I'm gonna actually I'm gonna rephrase this question later just so we can get through the boring the KPI stuff but it's but it's important okay so this is a funnel conversion so this is a tool called insight squared they basically sucks your data out of Salesforce and just visualizes it and much more beautiful platform how the spot has like some of this stuff too so again the first thing I want understand is what is our company's conversion percentage I see it let's see did someone have time yeah no one had percentages this is critical I need to know what percent so again try know where the bottlenecks are in the process okay we have 70% of people that go from stage 1 to stage 2 and then only half of those move forward from there that's so I would look at that and then it's like 79-83 and I'm like okay like that's kind of a good funnel your funnel should look like that whatever your first stage it should go like I don't know what that thing if you'd go like this like an I'm sorry it's a nail it should be you're a good pipeline looks more like a nail than it does a funnel I disqualify the wrong people real early and then I just drive the rest of the people in right as opposed to a funnel that's like we have drop-off and drop-off and drop-off it's like nope I qualified at the beginning and then we move those people through right as opposed to like this is actually like a relatively healthy funnel like I would then go and look what I would look at I don't have a pointer I would see like okay well well why are so many people getting to that second that third stage like why is it going from 704 to 314 is like why are we letting so many people through to the second or third meeting like I would look at their they see if there's something there but this isn't like a terribly unhealthy funnel again think nail if your funnel looks like a nail it's it's a good funnel because that means you're doing a great job of qualifying people out your funnel should not look like this that means each step you're losing people yep yeah yeah yeah yeah exactly or we yeah but again each of these is gonna show a different trend so yeah that would be the first thing that's exactly where my brain would go in the very beginning is I would think okay what are we doing why are so many people getting through but not getting through the next stage but maybe that's okay for my sale maybe it's to maybe I can't disqualify that hard in the beginning because it'll be off-putting or something okay this is the exact same funnel broken out by rep so what I want to show you here is the macro and the micro we as a company have this Johnny and Susie suck at different things right and so again I'm coaching to the rep individually here we're again like this reppin like the teal color look at their trial to security and PR they go from ninety-eight percent to forty five percent so they let all those people get through and then it falls off a cliff right look at all these people you know look at this dude look at the dude in green right eighty percent he loses you know almost 1000 gosh not ten I mean he lose almost 20 percent of people at the last step like that means those weren't real deals like they weren't real deals in the first place that deed should have been disqualifying those people out it cetera then you look at that guy up at the very top like this like in between green like doo-doo-doo again you look at the guy in the orange massive drop-off so the point is to show you that the one in red is I think that's like a brand new rep but the point is to show you man your sales org is got every sale or it looks like this everyone is not this your reps are all going to look like this so you need to have this data so I can coach to the individual reps Johnny let's too many people into trial Susan sucks at the clothes you know what I mean like you're gonna have different reps and this is when you go about like inspection this is what I look at it I look at conversion percentage along the path and like where we either being too stringent or not stringent enough and again each person's gonna have their own thing right so I want you guys to think about that as your team's grow and you start to get these nice little funnel metrics this is what you're gonna show to the board they're gonna say oh this is the really great but then on the micro your coaching to the different reps differently right and the same thing goes for sales cycle so again somebody mentioned sales cycle up here yeah time from contact to close sales length how much time again on the macro it's like okay cool sit 20 days etc this is the average stage duration how long are they in each stage so think about on the micro right for a rep I'm looking at all these different reps I'm looking at their clothes per there's percentage from step to step and duration from step to step and that's the I mean to me those are the some of the most important metrics if you tell me how long your sales cycle is how long each step is I can immediately diagnose a problem I'm like oh your trial suck for whatever reason here's your timeline it's 45 days thirty two of those days are in this step oh that's your problem you know like once they get into the funnel right and you can see I mean here's this is like the blended of all the wraps here and then this is that so look at my man up here Kevin right Kevin puts everyone in a trial that's what that tells me every opportunity Kevin moves him in a trial so I got to go and work with Kevin and be like Kevin what are you doing like Kevin Dwyer said why is your trial dude look how long your trials are compared to Peter Peter on the other hand puts nobody but then he lets PA maybe people go a little bit long in the negotiation so again these are all different reps with kind of like different issues so you might say I have a 45 you know at 45 day sales cycle you as a company do none of your rep 745 days sales cycle they all are good or worse or good or better at different parts of the sales process which is why you need like the micro data because each reps gonna be totally different and you can get this data out of Salesforce - this is insight squared but Salesforce you can get this out of the reports and you can get some of this out of HubSpot - but yeah Salesforce and I'm sure a fractal pull some of this out - maybe so those are like my two big sticking points like if you want to know what's wrong what's broken in your sales process you have to understand the stage durations how long we're taking and then the conversion percentages at each day you feed me that data I immediately know what's wrong with your sales process and all of you will as well too and yes this is the data you give to your reps Johnny like it is what it is no like we've got to work on this over the next whatever months this is just pipeline there's nothing like super interesting here this is just what stages are pipelines in which is important the other thing that companies do a really terrible job of early on tracking is the reason loft right we love to look at closed one we love to look at why we won deals not enough companies do a great job of tracking closed lost we're closed loss tells me everything great not a right fit not a right fit oh that vertical I thought was a good fit oh man look at everyone's clothes lost like timing timing timing timing timing or whatever it is so for those of you who aren't tracking clothes lost again what we do is we make clothes loss it's a required field you have to put the reason of why it clothes lost in order to move it to stage clothes lost like in our sales order she literally cannot clothes you can't close out an opportunity without putting why because you guys need that at product needs that information more than anybody product needs to know like why aren't people buying and then I can go and pull from a pick list that's the other thing never make clothes lost a free-form field always make it a pick list toward then I can run reports against it as opposed to like freeform texts so I can just pick what the reasons were this is again this is a really cool one for this is like a good insight squared report this is our win ratio by app by average deal size right so if I look at this man if we quote between five to ten we win every deal we went like seventy percent of the deals so with my reps here though look as soon as we quote thirty thousand our Ren rate falls off a cliff so I know if I'm talking to my rep I'm like if we're quoting thirty five thousand there better be a good reason for it because guess what we only win twenty two percent of those deals but I know if we quote you know twenty thousand we wouldn't forty five percent so again this is why having metrics and having sales data is so important is to understand you will never your gut is not gonna tell you this maybe kind of over the course of three or four years but literally for those of you who have any data I can just plug this in and this thing just like will light up which is why again running your sales team like with numbers and metrics is so important from like day one you know again invest in HubSpot pipedrive there's a whole bunch of these like really lightweight crms that can get you some of this data retention rate turn again I didn't see anyone talk about this a lot of you might be too early to calculate churn you know it's like what real churn looks like or might not even have it as a number but it's gonna be important as those of you who are going out and raising money churn is gonna be one of the most important questions investors ask you along the path that's great what's your turn right like if your turn looks like like no one's gonna invest in you right unless you've got a really good story about why that negative churn is like a very basic concept of like we might have lost X but we made up for it in Y upsells so it's like in my net negative turns like 110 percent so I lost some but I gained some and upsells you know so that's gonna be that's a very common investor number what's your net negative churn like these are just terms that like as you guys raise money like just is what it is like these are the questions they're gonna be asking you at that series B level in particular somewhat Series A but it turns kind of obvious like how many accounts sure and how many revenue churn excetra so again I just want all of you to just think about starting to run your teams by the numbers I know a lot of you are really early and don't have a lot of data like that's totally cool I just want to put this in your guys's head that you're gonna have these these reports you're gonna have this data that looks really good at the macro but you also have to make sure that you're looking at the individual right and I think that's the sales teams that win they have really good leadership that coach to the individual as opposed to why aren't you doing 40 foot why isn't your sales cycle this or why isn't this the coach to like the individual as well too so all these metrics that you all talked about we're literally spot-on it's that funnel metrics of you know how many net new leads do we have at the top how many activities do we have how many meaningful connects do we have how many opportunities were created how many proposals were generated that's like your classic kind of fun but then looking at the conversion percentage and the time like those are the two that not enough sales leaders pay enough attention to we always look at like I guess like the the percentages but sometimes we don't look at the stage duration how long we spend where there's just so much like really really rich data there so insight squared is that the tool that I was showing there that's it's a tool called insight squared clary was another one that I showed you all CL a RI that has it but only integrates with Salesforce refract I guess is one of the data tool that you all use yeah HubSpot has some basic stuff too cool questions before we dive into sales process about metrics does this intuitively make sense like some of these yeah