Dan Martell - August 10, 2020


The Perfect Weekly SaaS Sales Meeting Agenda


Episode Stats


Length

10 minutes

Words per minute

183.5548

Word count

1,957

Sentence count

96


Summary

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

In this episode, Dan Martell shares the agenda structure he uses to manage his sales team meetings so that they can hit their quotas and hit their targets on a weekly basis. He talks about why this is so important and why you should implement it in your sales team.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 Hey there, Dan Martell here,
00:00:01.220 serial entrepreneur, investor, and creator of SaaS Academy.
00:00:03.340 In this episode, I'm gonna share with you
00:00:05.520 the agenda structure to manage your weekly sales meeting.
00:00:10.440 If you're like me and you started off
00:00:12.440 and you hired a salesperson,
00:00:13.960 you use this kind of approach of like hire
00:00:16.020 and hopefully they figure it out, that doesn't work.
00:00:20.100 And what we need is a cadence and a structure
00:00:21.880 and I'll give you all the different agenda items
00:00:24.420 that I use in my weekly sales team meetings
00:00:26.720 to manage millions of dollars of pipeline.
00:00:29.560 I coach literally 100 plus SaaS founders,
00:00:33.640 build their sales team.
00:00:35.100 One of my largest clients have 150 salespeople.
00:00:37.600 They use this exact same format
00:00:39.300 to make sure we create rhythm, routine,
00:00:41.540 and most importantly, revenue.
00:00:43.380 And at the end, I'm gonna share with you
00:00:44.380 how to get access to my Rocket Demo Builder,
00:00:47.420 which is gonna allow you to close deals
00:00:48.820 in half the time at twice the size.
00:00:51.380 Let's get into it.
00:00:59.560 So when I was building my company, Flowtown,
00:01:06.940 we were a venture-backed tech startup out of San Francisco.
00:01:10.300 It was an email marketing application for small businesses.
00:01:13.240 And we decided we're gonna hire some people
00:01:15.200 to talk to customers.
00:01:16.400 It wasn't like a sales process.
00:01:18.800 It was really more of a,
00:01:21.000 hey, we can either just let people go through their trials
00:01:23.900 or just buy our product,
00:01:25.140 but maybe it'd be a good idea
00:01:26.340 if we have a conversation with these people.
00:01:28.460 And it turned out, just by having the conversation,
00:01:31.500 literally my sales training back then as a,
00:01:35.100 you know, I was a 28 when I started that company,
00:01:36.860 was, hey, when they hang up the phone,
00:01:39.920 make sure that they have a better day
00:01:42.100 because you called them.
00:01:43.500 That was like the sales training.
00:01:45.420 And over time, I realized there needs to be more structure,
00:01:48.500 there needs to be talk tracks, there needs to be a flow.
00:01:51.040 And the most important thing I could do for my sales team
00:01:53.920 was to introduce a weekly cadence and structure.
00:01:57.080 Since then, I've built my personal sales teams
00:02:00.060 to incredible efficiency,
00:02:02.620 literally getting them from zero revenue
00:02:05.000 to hitting quota within six to eight weeks.
00:02:07.460 And I use this specific structure
00:02:09.360 to help them nail that every week,
00:02:12.520 including not having to do the meeting anymore,
00:02:14.560 which is the best part.
00:02:15.860 So if you wanna learn to do that, let's get into it.
00:02:17.920 Number one, wins.
00:02:19.320 My favorite thing.
00:02:20.300 All my meetings pretty much start with wins
00:02:21.820 because it's a way to create momentum.
00:02:23.920 It's a way for people to reset the perspective.
00:02:25.980 I think that in life and in business,
00:02:29.080 we can ask ourselves one of two questions.
00:02:31.340 We could say, one, what's right about this situation?
00:02:33.800 Or two, what's wrong about this situation?
00:02:36.560 And I've discovered is if you wanna hire great people
00:02:39.520 that are performers, we wanna let them share
00:02:41.880 what's winning in their world.
00:02:43.880 Because if somebody's not, it's gonna want them
00:02:46.220 to elevate their output to meet that standard of the team.
00:02:51.520 So start off by just saying like three minutes of
00:02:54.240 who's got some wins to share.
00:02:55.980 Number two, pipeline.
00:02:57.620 It is the most important thing that you have some tool.
00:03:00.400 A lot of my clients use HubSpot.
00:03:02.020 Others that are selling more enterprise-y
00:03:04.500 or higher volume or bigger teams will use Salesforce.
00:03:07.200 But I would say a large portion use either a spreadsheet,
00:03:11.420 a whiteboard, or a tool like Pipedrive
00:03:13.620 or even Trello can work.
00:03:15.540 But regardless, you need some tool
00:03:16.860 and you need to review the specific pipeline of stages
00:03:20.820 and deals and value of those stages with your team.
00:03:24.480 And most importantly for me,
00:03:25.680 What I'm looking for, and the tool should do this,
00:03:28.240 is to show who's behind on their follow-up
00:03:30.560 or the amount of activities they should be doing
00:03:32.800 for each stage of those deals.
00:03:35.400 Because to me, if I can just quickly
00:03:37.360 kind of red, green, or yellow know who's on top of it,
00:03:40.260 who's or not, we can address it in the meeting,
00:03:42.020 get them back to a state of higher performance
00:03:44.660 so that they can start hitting their quota.
00:03:47.640 Sales, to me, is very simple.
00:03:49.220 It's activities.
00:03:50.480 It's not having world-class salesmanship.
00:03:53.660 It's literally following a process,
00:03:55.840 being consistent with that process
00:03:57.280 and you will get the results.
00:03:58.680 So we have to manage pipeline.
00:03:59.960 Number three, roadblocks.
00:04:02.180 I think it's important before the meeting starts
00:04:04.520 that you invite everybody on your team
00:04:06.760 to open up the standard.
00:04:08.600 I use a Google Doc with all these agenda items in it
00:04:10.860 and add a list, a bulleted list of roadblocks
00:04:14.400 that they wanna discuss or have questions around
00:04:16.660 so that as a sales manager,
00:04:18.700 I know it's a big question
00:04:19.600 because it's probably just you as the CEO
00:04:21.040 and you're wearing many different hats,
00:04:22.460 but as somebody's leading the sales team,
00:04:24.960 maybe you're doing sales calls
00:04:25.840 and other people are a part of that team,
00:04:27.860 you wanna unblock them.
00:04:29.140 So any roadblocks that might come up,
00:04:30.720 you want them to list them
00:04:32.240 and then provide either some suggestions
00:04:35.240 or some tweaks to your playbook
00:04:37.060 or some recommendations to help them overcome that,
00:04:39.460 some books, ideas, some training
00:04:41.240 that you might've already purchased, et cetera.
00:04:43.340 But have that part of the rhythm.
00:04:45.080 Number four, buyer feedback.
00:04:47.040 I don't like calling clients prospects.
00:04:49.500 I think the word buyer is more interesting.
00:04:52.000 It's somebody, it just, I don't know, I use the word buyer.
00:04:54.920 So buyer feedback is part of our agenda
00:04:56.880 and it's really about asking the sales team
00:04:59.680 who's talking to people, literally three, four, five,
00:05:02.420 six calls a day, doing product demos, discovery calls,
00:05:05.400 making sure that we're incorporating that feedback
00:05:07.760 into our sales process, into our competition battle cards,
00:05:12.480 into the product roadmap,
00:05:14.620 but making sure that there's an item
00:05:16.440 to source that feedback, part of the agenda
00:05:19.420 is gonna transform the value of your sales weekly meetings.
00:05:23.840 Number five, sales metrics.
00:05:25.740 So the metrics are important
00:05:27.220 in regards to individual sales team members' quota.
00:05:31.600 What are their weekly, monthly, and quarterly goals?
00:05:35.200 Are they on track?
00:05:36.220 Where are they at?
00:05:37.060 Ensuring that you look at capacity
00:05:39.820 and your calendar and schedule and follow-up numbers.
00:05:43.340 So whatever the metrics are for your sales motion,
00:05:46.180 because if you have an SMB product,
00:05:47.920 maybe you have a very light touch sales process
00:05:51.160 to a mid-market or an enterprise sales motion,
00:05:55.420 you wanna make sure that you throttle your metrics
00:05:57.560 to match those different sales motions.
00:05:59.560 I have some videos on my YouTube channel
00:06:01.140 if you wanna go search around sales metrics,
00:06:03.880 but having that scorecard, I call it a precision scorecard,
00:06:08.280 where you have the five key metrics for your sales team
00:06:11.260 and maybe individual data points
00:06:13.440 that you're looking per sales rep,
00:06:15.440 it's really gonna allow you to cut through the noise,
00:06:17.660 help people understand if they're on track or not
00:06:19.660 to hit the quota or hit their pipeline goals
00:06:22.100 for the week and the month
00:06:23.660 so that you can make sure you hit your quarterly numbers.
00:06:26.240 Number six, announcements.
00:06:28.060 This is your opportunity to have anything
00:06:31.340 about the sales team or the product roadmap
00:06:34.640 or even your customer success managers
00:06:36.660 announce things to the whole sales team.
00:06:39.120 So for what I like to do is I like to actually invite
00:06:41.680 my CSM to our sales meeting, our customer success manager.
00:06:45.240 That way, if there's any issues,
00:06:47.260 especially around roadblocks or announcements,
00:06:51.180 they can share that directly with the sales team.
00:06:53.740 I never wanna create a situation
00:06:55.860 where marketing and the customer success managers
00:07:00.360 feel like sales is this like rogue team of, you know,
00:07:05.460 hunters and they're out there
00:07:06.780 and they don't really care about systems
00:07:08.460 or process or feedback and you wanna invite them.
00:07:11.220 So I have my marketing lead and my customer success lead
00:07:14.440 on the sales weekly meeting
00:07:16.180 so that they have a voice at the table
00:07:18.460 and they can hear kind of what's being brought up
00:07:21.040 by the team sales reps
00:07:23.140 and also just broadcast announcements
00:07:25.720 on what's going on in the business
00:07:26.880 because often salespeople are just,
00:07:28.960 they're hungry, they're pounding,
00:07:31.000 they're doing the emails, they're dialing for dollars,
00:07:33.580 they're not really paying attention
00:07:35.120 to what's going on in the organization.
00:07:36.900 Number seven, competitors.
00:07:38.760 I think it's important to understand
00:07:40.720 that most people actually don't know what they're doing
00:07:43.120 in their own business strategy.
00:07:44.860 So you shouldn't like monitor your competitors
00:07:47.020 for anything that they're doing
00:07:49.260 and think that they're doing something better.
00:07:50.980 I think you use the competitor feedback
00:07:54.620 to at least be able to bring it up to your team
00:07:57.500 to teach them how to overcome, you know, objections.
00:08:00.680 So if your competitor launches this new module
00:08:02.680 that solves a key issue in your software
00:08:05.580 that you haven't solved yet, how do you answer that?
00:08:09.140 So as a sales manager, you wanna make sure
00:08:11.060 that you create that awareness
00:08:12.860 so they don't get blindsided on a demo call
00:08:15.740 or a discovery call
00:08:16.400 and then have to essentially wing it
00:08:18.740 or make it up or sound uninformed.
00:08:21.040 So competitors is always on there
00:08:22.820 in regards to what people are doing
00:08:24.980 so you can inform your team.
00:08:26.440 And number eight, lastly, is training.
00:08:29.380 One of the most critical things
00:08:31.720 is making sure your team gets brought up to spec
00:08:35.820 on different aspect of your sales process,
00:08:38.860 meaning that if you have a talk track
00:08:41.380 for how to do discovery, how to understand the needs,
00:08:44.720 how to look for a critical event,
00:08:46.020 how to look for the emotional impact,
00:08:47.540 how to deal with objections, how to deal with competitors.
00:08:51.560 You wanna make that part of a training curriculum.
00:08:54.340 These are 10 minute at the end of your sales weekly meeting
00:08:58.040 where you teach all the salespeople,
00:09:00.700 hey, I just wanna talk about dealing with this objection.
00:09:04.180 Here's our protocol, here's the script.
00:09:06.340 Let's role play, everybody does it.
00:09:08.260 It's a quick 10 minute training
00:09:09.540 and it's just part of,
00:09:11.940 and there's other sales training
00:09:12.940 that should be involved in your process,
00:09:14.740 but I just think on the call,
00:09:16.520 it's just a great way to finish the meeting.
00:09:18.620 It gives them a new tool to add to their toolbox
00:09:21.380 and just leaves them feeling with a sense of excitement
00:09:24.640 and confidence to bring to their next set of calls.
00:09:27.700 So quick recap, the specific agenda structure
00:09:30.960 you should be using for your weekly sales meetings.
00:09:33.020 Number one, start with wins.
00:09:34.700 Two, review your pipeline.
00:09:36.500 Three, talk about some roadblocks.
00:09:38.460 Four, discuss the buyer feedback.
00:09:41.560 Five, review your metrics.
00:09:44.040 Six, announce anything that's going on across the company.
00:09:47.840 Seven, your competitors, so competitive analysis.
00:09:50.740 And eight, train your team.
00:09:54.000 As I mentioned at the beginning of this episode,
00:09:55.560 I wanna share with you my Rocket Demo Builder.
00:09:58.760 You can click the link below to download your copy.
00:10:01.180 It's my nine box framework to allow you
00:10:03.800 to literally cut your sales velocity in half
00:10:07.560 or the amount of time it takes to a closed deal
00:10:09.200 and double the size of your average deal.
00:10:12.240 You can click the link to download that.
00:10:13.660 Rocket Demo Builder, it's helped my clients
00:10:15.560 generate close to a billion dollars in sales.
00:10:18.900 It's yours for free, you can just click the link.
00:10:20.940 If you like this video, be sure to smash that like button,
00:10:23.880 subscribe to my channel and click the notification bell.
00:10:26.260 That is the most important thing
00:10:27.240 so you get notified when new videos are released.
00:10:30.440 And as per usual, I wanna challenge you
00:10:32.400 specifically to live a bigger life and a bigger business
00:10:35.060 and I'll see you next Monday.
00:10:37.560 Dan Martell here, that's a bit much.