Dan Martell - May 28, 2018


How To Run Effective Weekly Sync Meetings For Startups

Hosted by
Dan Martell
Mentioned
Cameron Harreld Top Challenger Ryan Holiday
THE INTEGRATED LIFE ｜ Dan Martell Original (Micro-Doc) How To Run a Great SaaS Customer Conference

Episode Stats


Length

7 minutes

Words per minute

186.86

Word count

1,446

Sentence count

55


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

When I was building my last company, Clarityfm, one of the biggest challenges I had with a global team was running a weekly team meeting. I had to go on a journey to design a very effective, fun and productive meeting. In this episode, I talk about how to leverage weekly team meetings to get the most out of your team.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hi, I'm Dan Martell, serial entrepreneur, investor and
00:00:02.400 creator of SaaS Academy and in this video I'm gonna teach you
00:00:05.100 how to run your weekly leadership teams easy, fast and
00:00:10.300 super productive and be sure to stay to the end where I'm gonna
00:00:12.800 share with you an exclusive download to get my weekly sync
00:00:16.700 structure on how I coach my SaaS companies to run their weekly
00:00:22.100 meetings.
00:00:30.000 When I was building my last company, Clarity.fm,
00:00:38.800 one of the biggest challenge I had with a global team,
00:00:41.840 we had people that led product and support all over the world
00:00:46.600 because we were a marketplace for entrepreneurs to get access
00:00:49.400 to advice over the phone and I had to go on a journey to design
00:00:55.020 a very effective, fun and productive meeting.
00:00:58.260 One of the things that I hate the most in the world is going to
00:01:02.540 a meeting where there's no clear outcome,
00:01:04.340 there's no clear structure and people just because they have an
00:01:08.080 hour for it, they take the whole hour when it could have been
00:01:10.240 done in 15 minutes.
00:01:11.500 You know, there's an incredible book that'll go even deeper on
00:01:14.240 this called Meeting Suck by my good buddy Cameron Herald.
00:01:18.420 So be sure to pick that up.
00:01:19.820 This structure and format is very much focused for B2B SaaS
00:01:23.860 companies that have a very unique aspect to their business
00:01:27.620 It's a subscription.
00:01:29.280 They have different things to talk about and I want to share
00:01:32.120 with you the five steps to leverage meetings to get the
00:01:36.260 most out of your team.
00:01:37.760 Step number one, time to celebrate.
00:01:40.460 One of the most important things that I think from a culture
00:01:43.460 point of view is to celebrate the wins with your team.
00:01:46.980 So having a quick three minute window to just prompt everybody
00:01:50.840 on the meeting to share some wins over the previous week is an
00:01:53.580 incredible opportunity to just build awareness of what's going
00:01:56.780 on that's great in the company and also have an opportunity
00:02:00.920 to share customer headlines.
00:02:02.320 If you're the CEO or maybe you have somebody in sales or in
00:02:05.420 customer success and they're talking to the customer,
00:02:07.700 they're frontline and they're not reporting back some of the
00:02:10.560 incredible wins that your clients and your customers are
00:02:13.640 having, then you're missing an opportunity to really engage and
00:02:16.940 accelerate and ignite the passion amongst your team before
00:02:21.180 you even get in to the hard stuff.
00:02:23.640 Step number two, measure to manage.
00:02:26.280 One of the lacking indicators in most weekly team meetings
00:02:31.280 is some level of a scoreboard or scorecards or whatever.
00:02:34.580 I just call it the funnel metrics.
00:02:36.160 Every business follows some level of lead generation,
00:02:40.160 lead nurturing, conversion, delivery, and expansion.
00:02:44.300 So upsells, cross-sells, especially in SaaS.
00:02:46.300 And if you don't have those defined and assigned to somebody,
00:02:50.100 I call it LMA, leads, manages, and accountable
00:02:52.780 for that specific metric, then you're just having
00:02:55.380 meetings to talk about projects and to-do lists
00:02:57.480 and you're not actually producing results.
00:02:59.620 So use those funnel metrics to manage the team.
00:03:03.120 Don't manage the projects.
00:03:04.560 Look at the numbers, ask people to be accountable for them
00:03:07.500 and week to week make small improvements.
00:03:10.460 Step number three, focus on the few.
00:03:13.200 One of the Achilles heels of every entrepreneur
00:03:16.300 is choosing to do way too many things in a year
00:03:20.180 and honestly teaching your team that it's okay to lose.
00:03:23.680 I can't tell you how many times I've been on a coaching call
00:03:26.080 and I ask my client what their goal is for the year
00:03:28.620 and they're like 10x growth and I'm like,
00:03:30.680 look, I'm super excited for your passion and energy
00:03:33.760 and confidence around that goal
00:03:36.860 but how many times have you pulled that off?
00:03:39.200 The better question is how many times have you set a goal
00:03:42.800 that was audacious in a 12 month period and not hit it?
00:03:45.900 And what do you think that teaches your team?
00:03:47.780 How do you think they feel?
00:03:49.080 What I try to do amongst my clients is help them win
00:03:52.980 week, by month, by quarter, by year so that they can build
00:03:56.580 predictability into their business.
00:03:58.360 Their goals are still ambitious but they're within a strategic
00:04:02.580 band of opportunity that they can hit and the way to do that is
00:04:06.000 to focus on a few big rocks, big projects that strategically if
00:04:10.660 you look at them on a quarter by quarter basis,
00:04:13.040 they compound over the year to allow strategically those goals
00:04:17.800 to be hit.
00:04:18.600 So don't allow your team member to come with a laundry list of
00:04:21.540 projects and big rocks they want to accomplish
00:04:23.580 and don't do it to yourself.
00:04:24.980 Pick the three that if executed at a level of excellence
00:04:29.120 will move the needle forward.
00:04:31.280 Step number four, the obstacle is the way.
00:04:34.880 Yes, I'm quoting the book by Ryan Holiday
00:04:37.920 and the reason why I say that is because I think that
00:04:40.960 too many teams shy away from challenges
00:04:43.760 and what I've learned over the years building
00:04:45.440 and scaling companies is it's in those moments
00:04:48.300 of pushback, of friction, of challenges
00:04:50.980 that if you make it through those areas,
00:04:54.080 maybe it's product development, maybe it's marketing,
00:04:56.020 maybe it's in sales, that's why you're gonna win
00:04:59.060 because everybody else, when they kind of hit that resistance,
00:05:02.360 they decided to step back their ambitions,
00:05:04.420 pull back from that potential outcome
00:05:06.320 and decide not to pursue it.
00:05:07.660 And I think that it's in those moments
00:05:09.360 that you gotta move forward.
00:05:10.640 And what you gotta do in your meeting
00:05:12.140 is create an opportunity to talk about those top challenges.
00:05:15.180 So we have a standing agenda that anybody can add to
00:05:19.000 called Top Challenges and it's a laundry list.
00:05:21.440 And they can add it to it throughout the week
00:05:23.080 so that when we get to it, we prioritize it
00:05:24.900 and we tackle them one by one to make sure
00:05:27.140 we have those tough conversations
00:05:29.240 so that these known challenges that might be,
00:05:32.140 you know, four or six weeks out in the future
00:05:33.940 don't surprise anybody else on the team.
00:05:36.160 There's an opportunity for anybody
00:05:37.460 to raise awareness around them
00:05:38.980 and have a really productive discussion to overcome them.
00:05:41.860 Step number five, give it a score.
00:05:44.220 Now this may sound crazy.
00:05:46.360 What I've learned is that if you measure things,
00:05:48.460 It manages itself and if you ask everybody on the call at the
00:05:52.000 end of the meeting on one to ten how is it for you and if they
00:05:54.500 score anything less than a ten provide feedback on how the
00:05:58.440 meeting could have been better then you will ensure even if
00:06:01.700 you're not present or anybody else.
00:06:03.400 This is a strategy for all meetings but specifically for
00:06:06.140 the weekly team meeting that it's going to get better and if
00:06:09.520 you ever get you know an average score of six or seven and
00:06:12.620 everybody's giving you feedback on what it would need to be
00:06:14.460 better you can tweak it and make it that way and I just think
00:06:17.260 that that is the best way to end your weekly meeting,
00:06:20.220 to get everybody on the same page.
00:06:21.860 Know that it was never time not well invested
00:06:25.040 and to make sure that you're getting the ROI.
00:06:27.340 When you think about all the people on the meeting
00:06:29.140 and the investment of their time
00:06:31.640 and their cost to the company,
00:06:33.600 that's a huge ROI that needs to be generated
00:06:35.520 so you gotta make sure everybody feels
00:06:36.940 like they should have been there,
00:06:38.140 that it was productive and fun.
00:06:40.340 So quick recap, step number one, time to celebrate.
00:06:44.080 Step number two, measure to manage.
00:06:46.880 Step number three, focus on the few.
00:06:50.380 Step number four, the obstacle is the freaking way
00:06:54.260 and five, give it a score.
00:06:57.060 As I mentioned at the beginning of this video,
00:06:58.300 I want to share with you an exclusive download.
00:07:00.660 It's called the Weekly Sync.
00:07:02.460 It's my structure for executing very productive meetings.
00:07:06.440 If you're doing 90 minute, two hour meetings,
00:07:08.940 I've seen some of my clients go from that to 30 minutes
00:07:12.540 and making everybody feel like not only do they are aware
00:07:15.800 of everything going on in the company.
00:07:17.140 They're excited to execute.
00:07:18.500 They're reconnected with the vision of the company
00:07:21.100 and they've had their opportunity to share challenges.
00:07:23.300 You can click the link below to download that
00:07:25.600 and if you like this video, be sure to click the like button,
00:07:28.500 hit the subscribe and if there's somebody you know
00:07:31.140 could benefit from this video, be sure to share it with them.
00:07:33.800 Thanks for watchin' and I'll see you next week.
00:07:36.800 All right.
00:07:40.300 And what am I giving away?
00:07:41.500 Oh, my weekly sync worksheet.
00:07:43.800 design.