Driving Growth with Sales Metrics

Darryl Praill: Folks, it's another week here. Another week's gone by baby. That's right. Can you believe it? I don't know where the summer goes. The summer just flies by. It just seems like winter. Again, I'm in Canada. We have real seasons here. It's not like just hot and hotter. We actually have spring, summer, winter, fall but for some stupid reason, winter feels like it takes for ever and summer feels like it just flies by. Foom, gone. I cannot believe we are in the month of August already. This is crazy. With that said, September is just around the corner and this is when we put the big push on a course for, we want to hit the numbers and you want to hit your number and you want to hit president's club, if that's an option or you want to hit the accelerators and all this great stuff. And I want to share something with you that I get to endure as chief revenue officer, every single Tuesday at 11:00 AM Eastern time. At 11:00 AM Eastern time, I get to sit down with all of my fellow colleagues on a wonderful Zoom visit and we go over what's going on in the company. What's happened. And you know the drill, it's kind of here's what's going on. Here's the update. Here's where I need help. Here's where I'm struggling. But it's interesting, so here's the difference. Every other person in the team gets to talk about what they're doing, the big things. We're overhauling the knowledge base and the customer base and we're implementing this new tech stack and we're on the next sprint in development and it's all cool. And oh yeah, the employee loyalty's through the roof and everybody's great. And just got the employee survey back and they're loving us and all this great stuff. And then when it comes to me, I have those exact same updates. I really, really do but that's not what they want to hear. They do. They're being polite. What they want to hear, every single one, no matter what department they're in is, where are we at in the numbers are at this moment in time? I bring up all my Salesforce dashboards and my reports and I do the screen share and I show them, here's how we're trending. And half the time I'm doing one of two things, I am anticipating, as you might expect that you probably do with your boss, your one on ones your, weekly one on ones, I'm anticipating where I'm going to get hammered. And I'm trying to make sure I know why I got myself on this boat in the first place and what I'm going to do to get out of it. That's the first thing and I'll explain that in a second. The second thing I always do is I try to talk people back from the ledge because you know as sales professionals, sometimes the numbers, they're not so great. Now, how do I do all this? Well, how I do all this is by having a killer grasp of the numbers. Now, when I say killer, that probably sounds like I'm obnoxious and I have a killer grasp with the numbers. No, I'm stupid. I want to be clear on this. I am not a bright guy but I'm smart enough to know bright people. For example, when I took on the CRO role and I've shared this with all of you, this should not be new. I had some conditions. One of the conditions was that I built a revenue ops team. Why did I build a revenue ops team? Twofold. One, I needed numbers and insights. I needed to be able to have a firm grasp on what the pipeline and the forecast was with a high degree of authority and trust. I need to understand though, even more importantly than the top line numbers, how the individual reps were performing. That's what I needed to know. And I knew that if I had access to that data, then the reps would have access to that data. It's not just me monitoring them but they're going through the same hell that I'm going through. While I'm getting ready to report to my colleagues and my boss, every single Tuesday at 11:00 AM with the numbers, those reps should be doing the exact same thing on the Monday or on the Friday because I'm going to go and hammer them before I go into that meeting. And honestly, they should do that anyway because it's their book of business. Why are they doing well or not well? When you understand where you're weak, for example, maybe you're a killer closer. When the lead comes and it's qualified, you rock. Boom, high closing rate but your book of business is weak. Well, why is that? Well, I bet it's because you suck at prospecting. And I said that with love and affection. If you suck at prospecting, let's look at the numbers and say," Well, how are my email's converting? How are my phone calls converting? I need to go and figure out how I move from stage to stage. I need to understand if I'm stronger in one area than another and maybe I need to switch up my playbooks and my cadences and my sequences. Maybe I'm not touching enough people. How does my average deal size compare to my colleagues' average deal size? How long does my deal take to close compared to others? What's my deal velocity? I need to understand so I can approve my business so then when Praill comes to me before he goes to Hood, who's the CEO I have numbers. And not only do I have numbers, I can tell him where I'm exposed and I can tell him what I'm going to do about it so he can do the same thing." Because that's how the business works, goes up and down the food chain. It's all about numbers. And I don't have that knowledge, I will be out on my, behind as a CRO, very, very fast. There's a reason why the tenure is only 18 months in this role. Numbers matter. I thought it was important that we talk about this with you because we really haven't had that conversation lately, have we? And I was doing my usual reading like I like to do. And one of my people I love to read is Amy Franko. Amy's my buddy. Amy and I were at Outbound together. It was actually the first time we got to meet each other live and in person and she was way nicer than you might think online. Online, she looks tough. But she was short and she was nice. It was good because I was kind of scared but she's got a great blog and she's really, really good at what she does. And she just did this blog. I'm not making this up. And it's called 11 Sales Development Metrics that Drive Growth. And she's looking at it from different points of view, from the rep's point of view, from the leader's point of view. And I said," Amy," because now we're on a first name basis. Before it was just Miss Franko." Amy, can you come on and talk to us about what a rep needs to look at number wise to manage their book of business and to hit the next level in their sales success?" Amy, Amy, welcome to the soul, my friend.

Amy Franko: I am so glad to be here. And I get a lot of descriptors about me, short to nice. I think another one of Iannarino may have called me aggressive. I don't know but they're all good.

Darryl Praill: If it makes you feel any better.

Amy Franko: They're all good and we're on a first basis.

Darryl Praill: They're all good. Because I'm a short ass too. With my age, I'm just getting shorter every year because the spine is compressing.

Amy Franko: You're shrinking down.

Darryl Praill: Yeah, exactly. My poor producer Daniel has to adjust the camera every single week, a little bit lower Darryl, a little bit lower. But what's funny was I actually went back to everybody back at the head office here and I said," You know what? I'm not as short as you think. I think I'm taller than Jeb Blount. And there's a few others out there that look much taller, much more vertically gifted on video. They ain't so as tall as you think they are."

Amy Franko: Vertically gifted on video, I like it.

Darryl Praill: Exactly. Vertically gifted. All right, so I want to talk about numbers.

Amy Franko: Let's do it.

Darryl Praill: Okay, so let's have some fun. This is totally unscripted. And reps, as you're listening to this conversation, you know the drill I want you to kind of be self aware. Some critical thinking. As we have our conversation, ask yourself, am I guilty of that? Do I do that? Can I answer that? If you can't then you know what to do. But we're going to help you that too. All right, Amy, I just made a broad stereotype and I said, reps typically, aren't very good at measuring and monitoring themselves. Am I stupid? Or is this actually a malaise that actually affects the large percentage of sales reps out there today?

Amy Franko: The really elite sellers are the ones that pay attention to their numbers and they pay attention to them daily. As you're thinking, my selling friends out there, is this something that I do on a daily basis? Or is it something that I leave to a QBR or a 30, 60, 90 type of review or when I'm going to be with Darryl at 11: 00 AM Eastern time on Tuesdays? Elite sellers are looking at their numbers all the time and they are always looking for ways to get better.

Darryl Praill: I love what you said there, because it's actually really, really true. Let me ask you folks, when you log in in the morning and you're in your CRM, we'll say it's salesforce. com, What's the first thing you do? You come and look at your schedule for the day? Do you look at kind of your customized, personalized view of your activities and tasks you need to do? Or do you go to the metrics dashboard, whatever that is for your organization and actually check out how you're performing? How you compare and contrast with others, how much more you need to do from an activity or a actual revenue point of view to hit your short term and medium term goals? What's your first step? Amy, should that first step be that they're hitting the dashboard? Or what?

Amy Franko: I think hitting the dashboard and looking at where you are on a daily basis, that first thing, just to get a sense of where you are for the day, for the week, can help set the stage for the activities that you want to take on for that day or the rest of that week. Yeah, absolutely. I think it's just a part, it's one of those habits that we do. And maybe somebody out there watching or listening, they might be in a smaller organization. Maybe they don't have Salesforce or they don't have a sophisticated CRM. You still need to figure out a way to do this. As an individual seller, if you're not in an organization that has that data, you still are responsible for it. You may just have to get creative with how you get that data.

Darryl Praill: I love that. That's one of the things, maybe you're an independent sales rep, a 1099, manufacturer's rep, whatever you might be, and your ability to invest in the tech stack that you need to be successful is nominal. There are solutions out there. You can get simple and just spreadsheet everything and track your calls and your emails and the whole nine yards and conversion rates. You can do that. And hell, you can use Google. Google Sheets. Sorry, I was going to say Google Docs. Google Sheets and you can track it all that way, which is free if you have a Gmail account. There you go. Which also is free. There's those options but you don't need a full fledged CRM. You can just get, there's a number of options out there comes to mind, something like a Pipedrive. It's a simple Salesforce automation tool. It's really about opportunity management. There's other tools out there that similarly equally affordable. One of the things, you're going to be successful in sales, you've heard me say this before, you need to invest in yourself not just in your learning though. Sometimes it's your gear. Think about a professional videographer or a photographer. They make their living on the quality of their end product. And for you to have a quality end product, you have to invest in an expensive camera if that's the case. You're no different, you're a professional so equip yourself to succeed. Those are some options. What I like about that is the dashboard does a couple of things, it kind of shows you, it almost if it's done right, it should drive your behavior. Let's walk through some scenarios. There's the classic stereotype, it varies by industry, but we'll just be cliche here for today that my pipeline should be 3X, minimally 3X what my target is. If you need to produce a$100, 000 this month, you might want to have 300, 000 in pipeline. Now maybe your case is 200, maybe it's 400, whatever. You figure that out. But the premise is you're only going to close one in three, hence 3X. Therefore, that's what you do. Is your pipeline there? Are you looking at your pipeline? If your pipeline is not there, why? Is it an activity thing? Again, these are all numbers. If you're not doing the activity, then you know your plan of attack for that day or that week should be a hell of a lot more activity. If you are doing the activity, then clearly that's not the issue so what is it? Maybe it's a conversion thing. Your emails, your phone calls, aren't converting. If the emails aren't converting, therefore you have lots of activity but poor emails and they're not converting therefore you don't have 3X pipeline, then why aren't they converting? Let's try mixing up the messaging and doing an AB test and see which one converts more because numbers, you can have small incremental gains, your B version of your emails that have the good old, trusted A version starts to convert 5% better. That can have a massive impact on your longterm pipeline. These are some things you should be doing when you do the analysis. When I ask you Amy, from you in your days or as you coach and train all the people you work with, how do you coach them and use them to use that dashboard, to go through the process? What I just described? Or would you tell differently?

Amy Franko: Some of the work that I've been doing as of recent, that I think ties into everything that you just said is I do a lot of assessment work with teams. And one of the things that they're asked to do is submit what they consider to be some late stage deals to be analyzed. And those are deals that they think are really close to winning. They've done all the work, they're close, they're close to a win. And interestingly enough, what happens when those deals are actually analyzed and put through the criteria to really validate, is this a late stage opportunity or not? The vast majority of those opportunities actually aren't qualified and they should be moved back up the pipeline and in some cases out of the pipeline. When you talk about needing to have a certain number, some amplifier on the number of deals that are in your pipeline, most of the time it's because they're not as qualified as we think they are. That's certainly one metric to be paying attention to. And one that I've been working with my clients on to look at their process, look at their pipeline and really help them to scrutinize our the deals in my pipeline actually qualified? Or do they need more work? Or do they need to exit?

Darryl Praill: Let's drill down on that a little bit because I'm curious because I've gone through this very exercise this year with my entire team. And I think you can almost predict how it goes. We're all human. It's just a little bit predictable. Are your deals qualified? Absolutely they're qualified.

Amy Franko: Oh of course.

Darryl Praill: Of course they are. And you start poking holes at them. They're like, yeah, but. How does somebody, how can they analyze without getting into the minutia of the deal, he said, she said, stakeholders, influencers, all that usual stuff. Is there a way that I can kind of, some quick and dirty ways that I can kind of vet the pipeline?

Amy Franko: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have to say the pandemic was the great equalizer maybe of my pipeline. Let's see if anybody could relate to this. When the pandemic hits, what? 18 months ago or 15 months ago, all the time blends together now, I really had to do a brutally honest review of my pipeline because so many things were either stalled or they weren't going to happen for all the reasons that we all know about. And it was a little bit of a scary exercise if I'm being really transparent. And at the same time, it was also kind of liberating because once I got through the painful part of analyzing my pipeline, it's like, all right, here's where I'm at. This is the kind of the honest, brutal truth. And now there's let's build it back up because sometimes when you see this really full pipeline and you are 4Xing the number of deals in your pipeline, that can sometimes give us a false sense of security. That hey, I've got all this stuff going on. But in reality, we really need to qualify it. There are some categories that I will typically ask my clients to run through as they are looking at qualifying their deals. What's their access to decision makers? What's their knowledge about budget? What's the urgency of the timeline of the opportunity? I don't know about you, but if there isn't an urgent timeline, it's really easy for that deal to slip, a quarter, six months, even longer. And then also, what's the impact of winning this deal to me and to the client? There to be value or impact in winning it otherwise the urgency piece of it can fall out. And then also taking a look at what might be some of the obstacles that get in the way of that deal? I actually have an exercise that I'll take clients through and they'll go through those categories. They'll bring a couple of deals to work on and they'll plot it out visually. And the interesting thing is I actually just did this exercise this week. A few of them said," I have quite a few deals that are in the lower quadrants that probably just need to exit. I've been spending so much time on them and they're just not going to happen." It's a great way to be brutally honest about your pipeline. And then, all right, if you've got to exit these, how are we going to continue filling the top of the funnel?

Darryl Praill: Oh my gosh, I love that. And the reason I love it is because we went through that exercise here. One of the biggest things that I was hammering, poor, Catherine, my director of sales and then Catherine hammered her team, was on pipeline health, pipeline quality. And it wasn't a case of, how do I put this? We just wanted an honest to God, actual, factual, realistic representation of the pipeline. And what was interesting is when we did that, we did very much what you just described. And it was a healthy, healthy, healthy exercise in the end but it's scary as hell in the middle because we had reps who thought they had a massive pipeline or a very healthy pipeline and then when we started really drilling down and being truly diligent about asking the right questions and doing the right analysis, we realized that many of these, as you said, maybe we had it closing next month and it's really six months away because there's nowhere to see, whatever. And a lot of them, they didn't really have a proper value on the deal size because they actually hadn't done a thorough discovery process. And again, with no blame, this is why you do the exercise. And then so the net is when it's down, you're like, my pipeline is not 4X, as you said, my pipeline is 0. 75X and this is a problem. Especially with COVID, that happened. But the freeing thing about that is that now you know. And you're not going to give Darryl, or the Darryl version, equivalents in the world, bogus guidance, which will then be relayed to the CEO and the peers on the executive team, which will then be relayed to the board and then subsequently when we miss our numbers, it all filters back down to you again because that's what happens, folks. It's just a good thing. Now you can actually solve it. All right.

Amy Franko: Yeah. There's a piece of that. Just add one more brief point. There's a piece of that that comes back to thinking about ourselves as business people and looking at metrics and really being tuned into the metrics of our territories. That's about being a smart business person in addition to being a smart salesperson. That's business acumen right there. Taking the fear out of cleaning out the pipeline or the penalty of cleaning out the pipeline because you just want a really good healthy look at the business. And then from there, that's where you could make better decisions about where to.

Darryl Praill: I'm looking at your blog posts and you've got 11 of these. And again, they're for both leaders and reps. But some of these, like here, where are we going here? Closing percentage. This is pipeline stuff, talking about pipeline right now. Because your number nine of course was quality and quantity of the pipeline. We've already beat that one up. But you've got closing percentage, length of the sales cycle or deal velocity as we were alluding to. What are some of the numbers that in your experience, a rep should be able or some of the reports and the KPIs that a rep should be able to just whip off about the state of their pipeline or the state of their activity at any time?

Amy Franko: Yeah. I would say that there are a few. You should be able to know the number of deals in your pipeline at any given time. You should also really be able to share easily what your closing rates have been for past quarter, current quarter and the average closing rates that you've attained because that's going to tell you, all right, I have to have this many deals in my pipeline and qualify them because I have X percentage close. It's 33% or 25%. Every industry probably looks a little bit different but you should be able to rattle off your closing percentages. And you should also, if your company sets you up for this, you should also be able to rattle off the profitability of your deals because revenue's important. Bottom line profitability, in my opinion, is more important. If you sell a million dollar deal and it costs you 1,000,002 to do it, that's not a winning deal in my book. Now there might be some times that you need to take on those strategic deals but you should know the profitability of your deals in your overall book.

Darryl Praill: I would also add a few things there, then I want to circle back to what you just said. You should know your activity, know this week, this month and how that compares and contrasts. And I think you should also know how your activity is converting. Relative to the baseline or the goals or the benchmarks, in other words, am I doing better or worse on my phone versus others and email, et cetera. And then I go one step further, when you know all these numbers, I think you then need to go to the next step and say," Based on these numbers, this is my plan moving forward." And that could be to develop certain skills, that could be to optimize certain processes, that could be just simply doing increased activity, whatever. But if your plan moving forward is based on rock solid data and that data's based on real life performance and you're comparing yourself against your peers or against industry averages, now you've got context, then all of a sudden you're a lot more credible. And then here's the thing about the beauty of all this. If you do this, this is what happens. If you do this, guys like Darryl leave you alone. They just leave you alone. Your life just got way better. And if you don't do this, people like my good friend Katherine, my director of sales, she is all over you non- stop to make sure it's real because she doesn't want to be the one who gives Darryl bad advice and bad guidance. It is in your own selfish interests. Now you talked about profitability and I love that. That was your second on your list for a financial metrics, profitability. For context, one of the top KPIs for me in the year 2021 to my executive team and my board is customer acquisition cost. And clearly we want to lower our costs of customer acquisition, our CAC. Doesn't that sound awful?

Amy Franko: It sounds lovely.

Darryl Praill: It sounds lovely, doesn't it? In other words, that's another way of saying, if you're a highly profitable salesperson, then my customer acquisition cost with you is low. And I like that. Everybody likes that. And that's how we measure the health of the business as a whole. To your point, because it's not just, for me as CRO, because I own sales and marketing and other teams, I have to look at the whole lifecycle of the customer. Because there's a customer acquisition costs from marketing as well before it even gets to the salesperson. All these are inputs, so you're right. You do need to know your profitability. And if anybody out here knows their profitability right now, are you a profitable sales rep, yes or no? I want you to message me on Twitter or LinkedIn and I will do some kind of attaboy because you are in the 0. 01%, I will contend. Let me ask you this. I am listening to this and I'm feeling uncomfortable. I'm feeling like a fish out of water. This is not my strength. Is there a quick and dirty way, tool, book, ebook, whatever, YouTube video, one on one consultation with Amy Franko rockstar that you can recommend to get me started so I can kind of get my act together?

Amy Franko: Yes. The first thing that you want to do as a team member is assuming, I'm going to run on the assumption that you have a sales leader that knows these numbers and knows the health of the business. Sit down with your sales leader and walk through the most important metrics of the business. If you don't know, ask, because I think there should be no penalty for asking and being able to sit down with your sales leader and really, what are the top five or 10 things that I need to be paying attention to in terms of metrics? That's one thing. The other idea is probably more of a left field idea and it's something that I did personally. I do not have a financial background. Everything I've learned, I have learned by doing so I track all my deals. I look at every single deal. I know the top line revenue. I know, in bookkeeping speak, the COGS, accounting speak, the cost of goods and services sold. And I know the gross profit of every single deal. I put this into, I spreadsheet it because that's how I really analyze those numbers. You can do it in other ways, but I look at every single deal. But the other thing that I did, that's maybe kind of a left field idea is I am part of a nonprofit and I joined their finance committee because I don't have a financial background and I wanted to learn the inner workings and how all of those things played out. Those are skills that you can learn anywhere. In a Coursera course or by being on a finance committee on a nonprofit board, that give you a better financial acumen. The more financial acumen you have, the better you're going to be as a seller.

Darryl Praill: For those of you tuning in because you saw on the little podcast show notes that my guest today was going to be Amy Franko, talk to me. Is this not another Amy Franko kick ass way to go? She's a rockstar. She never disappoints. Now, for those of you who read those same show notes and said," Amy who?" It's okay, we're not judging you. It's okay. Not everybody is as wired as those who know who Amy Franko is. We've all been there. It's been a long time for me, of course, but for you it's okay. She is the bestselling author of The Modern Seller. You got to check it out. You can get it on Amazon. She is a dynamo who actually develops high impact leaders. She's got online training, she's got incredible advisory services. For example, if you're listening to this and you're going, we don't do anything of what Amy says. I might suggest that you might want to reach out to Amy. Amy, what's the best way to reach out to you? Is it your website? Is it LinkedIn? Is it smoke signals? Is it Clubhouse? What is it, my friend?

Amy Franko: Well, I'm always happy to have a conversation and I would say the two best places, LinkedIn, also let me know that you heard me on the Inside Inside Sales Show, and my website amyfranko. com.

Darryl Praill: All right. There you have it folks. She was dynamite at the Outbound Conference and candidly, let's call a spade a spade. If you're on stage at the Outbound Conference, you got some big cajones. You're a rockstar in the world of sales training. There we have it. Amy, it's always delightful to have you here, my friend. Thank you so much for spending some quality time with me. And from one short person who shared a stage with another short person, it's been dynamite. Folks, this is another book of the Inside Inside Sales Show that we're going to close the cover on, but don't worry because there's a whole bunch more in the book already you can go back and read. You should go check out Amy online. And if you liked today's show, well just wait, just you wait until who I bring next week. I'll talk to you then. Take care. Bye- bye.