Dan Martell - May 28, 2018


How To Run Effective Weekly Sync Meetings For Startups


Episode Stats

Length

7 minutes

Words per Minute

186.86194

Word Count

1,446

Sentence Count

55


Summary

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

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
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.