Tracking can make a huge difference to startups. This article summarizes a recent interview we held with go-to-market operations expert Andy Mowat.

Do you track the performance of your sales funnel and go-to-market operations?

When you first started your company, you may not have put too much thought into tracking. But as the business scales, it becomes more important. Failure to track your funnels and operations leads to inefficiencies.

Those inefficiencies can cost you both time and money, which is the last thing that a growing startup wants.

You need tracking to help you see where you’re going right…and where you’re going wrong.

In a recent episode of our podcast, I spoke to Andy Mowat about the subject.

He is the Vice President of Growth Operations at Culture Amp.

The company makes it really easy to collect, understand, and act upon employee feedback. Specifically, he focuses on the company’s go-to-market operations.

During our conversation, Andy highlighted seven metrics that you need to track as part of your go-to-market operations.

Metric #1 – Lead Flow

Lead flow is one of the biggest problem areas for startups. You need leads coming into the business regularly to both sustain and grow.

Andy identifies two key issues in regards to tracking lead flow:

1. Speed of response
2. Lead Destination

In regards to speed, Andy points out that the longer you wait to respond, the less likely you are to turn a lead into a client. Responding to a lead in two minutes leads to more conversions than responding in five or 10 minutes.

Tracking your response times allows you to see if you’re taking too long.

He then covers the issue of who the leads go to. Andy recommends using Confluence Pages. These are essentially internal wikis where you define the processes that your sales team needs to follow.

Creating an internal Confluence Page allows you to create a source of truth in regards to who the leads go to. Your Sales Development Reps (SDRs) can check this Confluence Page to see where the lead goes and ensure it’s in the right place.

Metric #2 – Data Quality

Andy also discusses a concept called lead-to-account matching as an ideal way to track data quality.

He defines a lead as an object that has some fundamental data attached to them. This could include company names, accounts, and contacts.

This is all data that the right tools can categorize.

The key here is that you’re looking to avoid duplication. With lead-to-account matching, you check every new lead that comes in against the ones you already have on your system.

To do that, you create a set of rules for your tools to follow. They check every new lead that comes into the system using those rules. If the tool discovers a duplication in the data, such as a company name that’s already in your system, it flags the lead.

This ensures that your sales team avoids entering the same lead data into the system multiple times. Thus, you avoid any confusion in regards to the status of your leads.

Andy says that you can use automated tools to carry out these checks. The end result is that you have better quality data that ensures your sales team isn’t repeating work.

Metric #3 – Performance Tracking

Andy says that you need to track the answers to two questions in regards to each of your sales reps:

1. What’s your time to win?
2. What’s your time to loss?

A key issue that you may face is that your days to loss are longer than your days to win. Ultimately, this means your sales team isn’t doing a good job of qualifying your leads. This results in leads that will never qualify staying in your pipeline for longer than they need to.

Your sales team continues dedicating time to these leads, which means they’re not focusing on qualified leads.

That’s why tracking the times for wins and losses is so important. The longer it takes to achieve a loss, the worse the rep’s doing at qualifying your leads.

You should have a good idea of how long it takes to close a lead. Furthermore, you should know how long it takes you to qualify a lead and move it to the next stage of your sales funnel. You should also know what disqualifies a lead, which causes you to remove the lead from your funnel.

Apply this knowledge to your performance tracking. Compare each rep’s numbers to what you already know.

If your rep’s numbers are a long way away from what you’re expecting, you may have unveiled a new coaching opportunity.

Metric #4 – Deal Quality

When it comes to deal quality, Andy says you need to track the answers to these key questions:

• Do you have the right start date for the client?
• Have you got the correct billing address?
• Have you entered all of the data correctly?
• Are your people following the right procedures in terms of discounts and what they’re giving to your clients?

These are all small things. However, there all essential when it comes to moving a lead through your pipeline. Making mistakes in these areas causes delays and may even directly cost your business money.

Such issues often come down to a lack of clarity.

Defining and tracking the answers to these questions improves your deal quality. This improves your interactions with potential clients and helps make your sales and service processes more efficient.

Metric #5 – CPQs

According to Andy, CPQ stands for “Configure, Price, Quote.”

He describes it as a module that helps his team to determine the proper pricing model for the things that the company sells.

The module tracks the following:

• The specific products they’re selling.
• The prices for each of those products.
• If any of the discounts that the company’s running apply to the products.

The end result is a more accurate pricing model.

Many startups do a poor job of tracking their pricing models. You may have your prices vaguely jotted down on a piece of paper or in a document somewhere. Such vagueness opens the door for inconsistency in your pricing.

Implementing this tracking helps you to define your pricing model. It also ensures that new contracts fit that model and you’re only making special offers under set circumstances.

Metric #6 – Pipeline Quality

Pipeline quality has some similarities to deal quality. According to Andy, it’s pretty easy to confuse the two.

He says that tracking pipeline quality means ensuring everything in your pipeline has the correct close date. You also need to track the probability in terms of achieving a conversion.

He also says that it’s important that anyone in the company can see the status of the leads in the pipeline.

There may be other issues that you need to track, such as where the leads are in terms of legal and security. However, those may not apply to your own pipeline.

The key here is to remove any ambiguity from the process. Defining and tracking these things allows you to scale effectively without having to deal with issues later on.

In regards to how deal and pipeline quality differ, pipeline quality examines open opportunities. By contrast, deal quality tracks closed opportunities.

Metric #7 – The Sales Stages in the Pipeline

This is an area where overcomplicating can become a real issue. You don’t want your teams going through sales stages where they’re looking in all sorts of different places for the things they need.

Every stage in the pipeline needs a definition and clear processes in place.

Andy Culture Amp’s way of dealing with the closing of a lead as an example.

Their system prompts the sales rep to fill out a form that asks them several questions. That simple process provisions the account, alerts the right people, and gives them the info they need to work on the account.

This ensures that all of the stages that surround the upcoming kickoff call for that lead get followed.

Using forms allows Culture Amp to track the stages of their pipeline while keeping things simple for their reps.

Each stage in your pipeline needs to offer a similar level of simplicity. The more complex it gets, the harder it is for you to keep track of what’s happening.

The Final Word

This only scratches the surface of the topics that we covered with Andy during the podcast. For each of these points, he dives a lot deeper to provide some valuable information.

Proper tracking is so important once your startup starts scaling and you build a team. It helps you to understand what’s happening so that you can nip any problems in the bud.

There’s a lot more that you can learn from Andy and the many other people that I’ve interviewed for my podcast. We cover a host of topics that may help you to implement tracking and amplify revenue.

Listen & Subscribe to The Startup Selling Show here:

Stitcher | Spotify | iTunes |Soundcloud |SalesQualia.com

References:

http:// https://salesqualia.com/case-studies/

https://www.temi.com/editor/t/7t3y4yrULEQqbDf5fQa2HyFsbjCi6egb718gY0dtz7aZP6PWVhwn9EiG3pAgVRFsg-3qAtAf5KWwAzmGBVXpwfFM59o?loadFrom=SharedLink

https://salesqualia.com/testimonial-category/testimonials/

https://salesqualia.com/testimonial-category/testimonials/page/2/

As a startup founder, you have undoubtedly dealt with a big issue…

Your business has started to grow and you are pushing and pushing harder to make it a success. The push becomes a constant thing that ingrains itself into your culture.

But are you thinking about the effects you’re having on yourself and your people?

Eventually, you burn out. And worse yet, your people start burning out too.

This is why putting your Self first is important for your business.

How Burnout Impacts Your Team

Some CEOs may balk at the idea of putting themselves first. That’s a natural instinct, especially once you’ve started to build a team underneath you.

They’re relying on you to provide them with guidance and to keep pushing the startup forward.

That’s what motivates you to work the long hours and extra weekends. It’s all for the benefit of the team and the company. Many believe that by making these sacrifices, they’re making life easier for their people.

However, that is rarely the case. In reality, you’re creating an example that your team will begin to follow.

If you’re working all hours of the day, your people may feel obligated to do the same.

Suddenly, you have your entire team turning up to work on the weekend. And they’re not doing it out of passion.

They’re doing it because that’s the example you’ve set for them. You’ve unwittingly created an expectation that your people feel like they have to meet.

Often, they end up putting the business ahead of their personal lives in the same way that you do.

This can create a negative culture within your enterprise. Your people may even begin to resent you for what they feel is an unspoken obligation that you’ve placed on them.

Interestingly, you can also look at your team to see the symptoms that suggest you need to start putting your Self first. Specifically, you’re looking for signs of burnout within the team. These might include the following:

• Talented individuals have started to make simple mistakes.
• Unplanned absences start to build up, which is a sign of employees wanting to avoid the workplace.
• Tension in the workplace that intensifies when you’re in the room.
• Heightened irritability that leads to team members snapping at one another.

These are all signs that your team members aren’t putting themselves first. They often do that because you’ve set the example for them to follow.

Your team isn’t just looking to you as a leader within your startup. Each person’s looking to you to guide them towards becoming who they want to be as well.

You can’t do that if you’ve lost sight of who you want to be. If you’re not putting yourself first, you’re telling your team that they shouldn’t put themselves first either.

It’s not just a question about enjoying your time off.

Putting your Self first helps you to establish how your people should act. By doing it, you create the sort of culture that makes people want to work with you.

Plus, whenever you’re ready, here are 3 ways I can help you grow your company…

1. Grab a free copy of my book

It explains the core selling strategies that EVERY startup needs to sell if you really, really have to and don’t know how…  Click Here

2. Join me on my monthly LIVE Sales Q&A

Every month, I tackle YOUR sales questions on anything and everything sales – Prospecting, Pipeline, Sales Metrics, Buyer Behavior and more…  Click here to save your spot and send me your toughest sales question.

3. Work with me and my team privately

If you’d like to work directly with me to take your company from Start Up to Ramp Up to Scale Up, just reply to this message, put “Private” in the subject line, and tell me a little about your business and what you’d like to work on together, and I’ll get you the details!

Listen & Subscribe to The Startup Selling Show here:

Stitcher | Spotify | iTunes | Soundcloud | SalesQualia.com

Sales leaders may find themselves struggling to get their teams to execute an effective cold emailing strategy. In a recent podcast with Damian Thompson, we heard about seven cardinal rules for cold emailing.

Sales leaders often find themselves struggling with the concept of cold emailing. That’s no surprise. It’s an exceptionally difficult strategy to communicate to your teams.

You need to find a way to use emails to break the ice with potential clients. And you need a framework for your teams to follow.

Our recent podcast with email expert Damian Thompson has the answers. It’s one of our most downloaded podcasts ever. And in this article, we’re going to summarize some of Thompson’s key points.

Who is Damian Thompson?

Damian Thompson is the Chief Customer Officer at Lead Fuse. Before that, he also worked as a sales coach helping hundreds of professionals.

With his guidance, Damian’s clients have earned a combined $100 million.

He has a proven track record, which makes him a valuable source of advice when it comes to strategy.

He’s also a big fan of skill-based games. Damian isn’t a big believer in luck. Instead, he believes in combining skill and strategy to achieve the best results possible.

That philosophy extends to his cold emailing email strategy. A lot of teams may just send out cold emails without giving them much thought. They’re contacting people out of the blue, so it’s just a matter of luck if someone replies back.

During this podcast, Damian outlines a bunch of things that sales leaders can get their teams to do to make cold emailing more effective.

Photo by chuttersnap on Unsplash

The Biggest Mistake That Founders Make

Damian starts by telling us about the biggest mistake that company founders make.

Namely, they think that there’s a specific and right way to do things. They believe that so fervently that they stop thinking about possible alternatives.

There’s nothing wrong with having a framework. In fact, Damian shares his own during the podcast.

The key is that you adapt different ideas and frameworks to your own business needs. Don’t think you have to do something one way just because somebody else does. It’s often through creative application and alteration of existing ideas that you’ll build something that works for your business.

Now, let’s get back to the topic of cold emailing. The following are Damian’s seven cardinal rules. Experiment with them to see which work best for your company.

Rule #1 – Rise Above the Crowd

Damian says that he succeeded with cold emailing because he had the confidence to try something different. Most marketers weren’t using the tactic because they assumed it wouldn’t work.

By trying something that scared other people, he achieved a 5% meeting rate.

The first cardinal rule is that you can’t be afraid of rising above the crowd. Do things that others don’t even think about doing. If your competitors aren’t using cold emailing, you have an opening. There’s a niche there for you to explore.

Rising above the crowd also means that you avoid competing using the strategies that everyone else uses.

Do the things that others think are too hard. That’s how you stand out from the crowd.

Rule #2 – Remove Passive Aggressiveness

The tone of the email is extremely important.

You may have received a few cold emails yourself in the past. Damian has, and he says he hates the passive aggressiveness he sees in most cold emails. In fact, he calls it the quickest way to turn him off.

What does he mean by the passive aggressiveness?

Consider the language you may use when sending a follow-up email to a prospect who didn’t reply to the first email. Many marketers may open with something like “Hey, I didn’t hear back from you…”

That’s a passive aggressive opening line. It’s an attempt to put the responsibility for replying on the recipient.

The reality is that it’s your job to get the recipient to respond to you. Trying to pressure them into doing that without offering anything of value to them isn’t going to make that happen.

Damian says to ask yourself a simple question:

Would I want to receive this email?

If the answer’s no, it’s not an email that your sales teams should send out.

Rule #3 – Make Your Subject Line Count

First impressions matter. A cold email’s subject line is the first thing that any recipient sees. Your sales team needs to give the reader a reason to want to open the email.

Damian’s company sends out hundreds of thousands of emails and they’ve made a simple discovery:

Short subject lines work better.

He says that five words or less is pretty much the ideal length for a subject line.

In fact, keeping it short can lead to a 10% increase in open rates.

Damian gives an example of one of his best-performing subject lines – “You’re doing it wrong.”

Straight away, Damian creates intrigue. The recipient’s going to wonder what they’re doing wrong. They’re also going to assume that the email will not only tell them but also offer them a solution.

Make sure your sales team craft subject lines that capture the recipient’s attention. Again, ask yourself the question.

Would you open an email with the subject line you’re sending out?

Rule #4 – Don’t Waste Your Words

It’s not just the subject line that you need to keep short.

Damian tells us that brevity is a powerful tool in every aspect of the email. It’s about finding the balance.

Keep it short enough to hold the reader’s attention without it being so short that you don’t get your point across.

Damian says that it’s crucial that you don’t waste your words.

For example, many people open cold emails with an opening dialog about how they found the recipient. They may say “Hi, I found your details on Angel List and I decided to get in touch.” That’s useless information for the recipient. They’re not interested in how you found them. They want you to get straight to the point and tell them why they should take time out of their days to pay attention to you.

Rule #5 – Start With a Question

Damian digs further into the idea of keeping it short. He says that the opening line of your email is the most important part of the content.

Wasting it on pointless platitudes won’t get you anywhere.

He says that it’s best to start with a question. Challenge the reader to think about a critical issue that relates to their business.

Empty questions, such as “Hey, how’s your day?”, won’t elicit a response. Instead, it’s best to open with a business-related question.

Damian provides a general structure that you can follow to open your email:

“Are you using <x> to get <wide benefit>?”

For example:

Are you using cold emails to generate leads for your business?

Here, Damian identifies the pain point of lead generation. He then reverse engineers that pain point to demonstrate a potential solution as part of the opening question.

You achieve two things with this formula:

1. You tell the reader about a strategy that you’re going to introduce them to.
2. You tell that about the benefits that this strategy achieves.

You’ve piqued their interest from the start, so there’s a higher chance that they’ll read the email.

Rule #6 – Build the Right Call to Action (CTA)

Asking to “book a meeting” isn’t an effective CTA in the modern marketing environment.

Damian says you need something that’s going to start a conversation. He remixes the question he used to open the email to create a CTA:

“If you’re not using <x> to get <wide benefit>, what are you using?

This final question allows him to start a conversation. That’s crucial to understand with cold emailing. You’re not looking to sell anything with a cold email. The recipients of your emails don’t know who you are and they’re very unlikely to buy from you at this point.

You want to build a relationship. Your CTA needs to reflect that, rather than going straight for the sale or conversion.

Rule #7 – Write Emails That Suit Your Sales Personality

Damian openly admits to being quite a straightforward guy when it comes to his emails. The subject line of “You’re doing it wrong” is a good example. It’s a straightforward statement that causes the recipient to think about their business.

That strategy might not suit your personality or preferred tone. You have a sales personality of your own and it should show through in the body of your email.  

Make sure that your subject line and email content connect well. You need that cohesive voice running throughout to get people to trust you.

Photo by Campaign Creators on Unsplash

The Final Word

With Damian’s advice, you can help your sales team to create a powerful cold emailing strategy. Use it to initiate conversations and pull more leads into your sales funnel.

Would you like to learn about more strategies that you can use to improve your lead generation efforts?

The SalesQualia podcast, Startup Selling: Talking Sales with Scott Sambucci, is a great place to start. Each episode shares interesting concepts and techniques that you can apply to your company.

My conversation with Damian Thompson is also part of this series.

Subscribe today on Spotify or iTunes.

References:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=ooMzo0fbuZU

https://www.temi.com/editor/t/BZfIoJtThMGF0gUgfVCXh-eF1mRlbbcXLgjnrMbmuRnVH–lxzKpIbrXA-C8V-G8CiR5XpDWlbVjm8peBM3q4EtX35g?loadFrom=SharedLink

https://salesqualia.com/case-studies/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=171&v=E9Xqt53Hnao

When was the last time that you sat down and had real conversations with the people on your team?

As CEOs and founders, it’s easy to find ourselves lost in the metrics. You have so many different dashboards and spreadsheets at your disposal. It’s easy to spot surface-level problems using those numbers. You can see when you’re not making enough sales or when your people fall behind on their numbers.

And when that happens, you may slip into telling your team to go faster or to fix the bugs. Perhaps you’ve caught yourself telling your people to pull all-nighters to get your projects over the line.

You may think that’s okay as long as you’re offering plenty of perks and rewards. For example, you may offer free company dinners and access to dry cleaning services. The misconception here is that these things that your people actually want.

Perks like these aren’t things that your people can really use in their everyday lives. They’re certainly not things that they really need. You’re asking them to work in an unpleasant environment where they constantly have to push

Perhaps you’re so focused on the numbers that you’re losing sight of the people behind them.

That’s why it’s so important to communicate well with your people. Specifically, it’s crucial that you hold real conversations that help you to learn about who they are and what really drives them.

Without that knowledge, you’re going to keep pushing without offering incentives that have any value to your people. In the end, that creates resentment.

Here’s a simple technique that can help you to overcome these issues. It’s called the One-Hour Question.

What is the One-Hour Question?

It works like this.
You’re the manager of a team or you’re running a company. You have an entire group of people working with you. Maybe you even have a growing team, which can make it even harder to keep track.

Your job is to schedule an hour for each person on the team.

During that hour, you’re going to really talk to them about their work. This isn’t your cue to start telling the person what you need from them or how they could perform better.

The aim is to focus specifically on their work and how they’re doing it.
Focus your questions on what motivates the person. You’ll often find that money isn’t at the top of the list. 

You’re looking to learn what really motivates the person you’re speaking to. What gives them the drive to get up and come into work each day?

What could you offer them that would make them happy about coming in early? Is there something they need from you that would make them more willing to work late?

What’s going to push them to want to go above and beyond?

You’re usually going to find that it has nothing to do with the extra percentage point you to add to their commission.

People have deep-seated motivations that go beyond the monetary. Part of the One-Hour conversation involves digging into those motivations. Find out what they are and how you can leverage them to improve performance.

And once you’ve done that, you can start learning about the sales techniques that will further improve performance.

Plus, whenever you’re ready, here are 3 ways I can help you grow your company…

1. Grab a free copy of my book

It explains the core selling strategies that EVERY startup needs to sell if you really, really have to and don’t know how…  Click Here

2. Join me on my monthly LIVE Sales Q&A

Every month, I tackle YOUR sales questions on anything and everything sales – Prospecting, Pipeline, Sales Metrics, Buyer Behavior and more…  Click here to save your spot and send me your toughest sales question.

3. Work with me and my team privately

If you’d like to work directly with me to take your company from Start Up to Ramp Up to Scale Up, just reply to this message, put “Private” in the subject line, and tell me a little about your business and what you’d like to work on together, and I’ll get you the details!