Part 1: Creating a Culture of Excellence

There are two types of motivation: intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsically motivated people are motivated by internal rewards like the opportunity to improve themselves and overcome challenges. Extrinsically motivated people are motivated by external rewards like money and social recognition.

Most salespeople are extrinsically motivated. They want to close deals to make more money. There’s nothing wrong with this. When you’re just starting out however, you want to hire smart people who are mostly intrinsically motivated. They’re motivated by the opportunity to learn more and reach their highest potential. For them, money is just a byproduct of that.

1.1 - Hire Well

As a leader, it’s your job to set your team’s direction and expectations. This process starts from the moment you hire someone. Make sure that job candidates know what you expect of them before you hire them.

Your goal is to create a culture of excellence and execution. Here at Ringio, our culture is focused on “saying what you are going to do and then doing it”. There are no excuses. There is no trying.

1.2 - Set Expectations

Everyone on your team should know what they should be working on and how it helps contribute to their goals. Review KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and goal progress on a recurring basis to ensure that your team is moving in the right direction.

Schedule daily team stand up meetings to teach and ensure accountability by giving everyone an opportunity to share their daily goals.

1.3 - Ensure Accountability

When a deal is lost or a goal is not reached, it can be easy to fall into the trap of negativity. The problem is, negativity won’t help you improve. No matter the outcome, you need to analyze the process that lead to it in order to find out how to improve the outcome.

Focus on building a collaborative culture that wins together and learns together. Identify the problems in your sales process that you need to solve and allow your team to provide input on solutions. Constantly seek open and honest feedback from your team on how you can do better as a team.

1.4 - Seek Improvement

The best way to motivate your team is to create a place where people want to WORK. A lot of people dislike their jobs because of bad managers, unclear goals, and other issues. Imagine the kind of company that you would be excited to work for. What does your day to day look like? What makes this company different from the rest? Do everything you can to make your company just like it.

Remember that the core of every company is people. By making your team successful, you will make yourself successful. Help every team member constantly improve their skills to reach their goals. Sales is a tough business, where the most successful will fail 95% of the time. To beat the odds, you need to create a culture of constant improvement.

1.5 - Motivate and Inspire

Part 2: A Simple Process For Building Your Sales Machine

Identify Engage Convert

Step 1: Identify Your Customers

Identify

2.1 - Answer Key Questions◇ Who is your ideal customer?◇ What value do you provide them?◇ Why are you unique? Different?◇ Why are you better than the competition?◇ Why should they buy from you?

Your organization as a whole should be aligned on the answers to these key questions about your customers, not just sales and marketing.

The answers to these questions will affect everything your company does, from how you build your product and prioritize features to how you do customer support.

2.2 - Align Your Org

Step 2: Engage Them

Identify Engage

2.3 - Specialize When Possible

Outbound SDR

Inbound SDR

Customers

Start with a blended team handling both inbound and outbound. As you scale, you’ll have more resources and more inbound volume to justify full time hires to handle each lead source.

Specialization ensures that each member of your team is focused on the critical function that they are best at.

Inbound◇ What marketing

strategies will you employ to get your target to come to you?

◇ What is the Sales Accepted Lead criteria?

◇ What are the agreed upon Service Level Agreements?

2.4 - Answer Key Questions

Outbound◇ How will your Sales &

Marketing team work together to reach out and proactively engage your target?

◇ What outreach methods will you use?

Inbound - What triggers would occur to make your target customer look for your service? Grab any low hanging fruit first by focusing on tactics with a trackable ROI - Cost Per Lead or CPA plays like affiliates and software directories, SEO, Social, and Retargeting.

Outbound - How can you create awareness in your target market? Have your outbound SDRs proactively engage with the content your marketing team creates.

There are many ways to target your exact buyers, especially in enterprise sales.You have to be unique and use the right message at the right time. Look for triggers that indicate a buyer could find value in your solution. Inbound or outbound? The answer is both.

2.5 - Inbound or Outbound?

Step 3: Convert

Identify Engage Convert

2.6 - Inside Sales Structure

Outbound SDRs

Inbound SDRs

Account Executives

Customer Success/

AMsCustomers

Leads Qualified Meetings Closed Deals

Account Executives◇ What counts as a

qualified meeting from an SDR?

◇ What’s the transfer process once a deal is closed?

◇ Who is responsible for churn and upselling?

2.7 - Answer Key Questions

Support/AMs◇ Once a deal is closed

what’s your onboarding plan?

◇ What are the goals of this function?

◇ Is it proactive or reactive?

Part 3: 7 Steps to Lift-off!

Keep your base salaries as low as possible to get talent, simply to avoid risk. As predictability increases, you can invest more in base and ramp down variable costs.

Ensure your plans are profitable based on conservative assumptions around lead volume and close rates.

SDRs should be compensated on qualified held demos or a % of pipeline revenue generated.

AEs should be compensated based on revenue. Use a sliding scale to underpay low performers and overpay your most profitable sales reps.

Commission should never be capped hence it must be profitable at even the highest levels.

3.1 - Compensate Wisely

Input data that helps sales intelligently engage and deliver an awesome customer experience. Your CRM is the center of your sales process, and it should be well organized. Every team member should know what data they need to input and where to find this data.

Sync any useful data from marketing automation tools to your CRM. Use this to align sales and marketing messaging when communicating with inbound leads.

For every lead, you should know where they came from, what they are looking for and what content of yours they consumed.

If your product uses a freemium model, any product usage data that helps sales engage with leads should be in your CRM.

3.2 - Optimize CRM Data

Create a great training program by focusing on communicating the product and vision effectively to your sales team so they can communicate the problem you solve and the benefits you deliver to every lead.

Ensure you have a leader that can teach the proper sales process and coach your team to success. Invest time to create sales scripts so your team can learn the preferred message before iterating on the scripts on their own.

Use role playing exercises to test knowledge before sales reps can speak live with potential customers

3.3 - Train Early & Often

After you define your message and train your team, you need to determine how you plan on reaching out to your prospects and what you expect from your team.

A cadence is a series of calls, emails and social touches. The right cadence is critical to convert potential customers. Implement a 10 touch minimum for every lead. Monitor this and communicate your expectations to your team.

A 10 touch cadence will ensure that leads do not fall through the cracks and that the value of every lead is maximized. Continuously test your cadence messaging, timing, and delivery to get to maximum effectiveness.

3.4 - Develop Your Cadence

Use sales tools that will automatically log important data for you instead of having sales reps waste time manually logging details.

Every email and call should be automatically logged in your CRM. Tools like Yesware and RIngIO can do this for you.

For anything you cannot automate, make it easy for your team to input data by creating views in your CRM.

Phone calls and other interactions should be recorded and stored in your CRM for coaching purposes.

3.5 - Automate Data Entry

By automatically logging activity, you can understand how often your reps are touching leads and what they are saying. How many calls are being made daily? How many convert into qualified meetings? Use metrics to analyze the activities of your best sales reps to see what they are doing differently.

Create visible dashboards and automated reporting that keeps everyone on the same page as to where they stand and how you are pacing towards goals.

SDRs are typically junior reps with 0-24 months of experience that need development. You’ll need managers that can invest time in training and coaching to improve their performance.

KPIs should focus on leading indicators that warn you when things are not going according to plan.

3.6 - Make KPIs Transparent

In a specialized workforce where key customer handoffs occur, alignment must be agreed upon.

Marketing and Sales should agree on qualified lead criteria. SDRs and AEs should agree on qualified meeting status. AEs and AMs should agree on a qualified closed deal and expectations to support the customer.

Without alignment and accountability, conflicts will come up over who is responsible for certain functions.

3.7 - Reduce Friction

Scaling inside sales is difficult. Success requires strategic planning, collaboration, transparent KPIs and a data rich CRM to foster a culture of continuous improvement.

Summary

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