Becc Holland, CEO of Flip The Script explains why best practice isn't working. Banging her head against fixed mindset leadership she discovered
- 76% SDR not hitting quota
- 85% AE not hitting 75% of quota
Seriously folks. How the hell is this even remotely acceptable. It is unsustainable and creates dreadful conditions
EVERY KPI is wrong!
KPI correlation does not point to causation. We are misdefining MQLs, SQLs and making the conflict between marketing and sales.
Open your eyes, your ears and your mind. Ask better questions. Start with "Why are we doing things this way?", "Does it serve us today?", "How are we creating completely preventable problems?"
"This is how it's done!" is a completely unacceptable and toxic response.
Becc and I discuss what is objectively true. You probably won't enjoy this episode because you'll learn how you are double paying to slow down your buyer's journey.
Contact Becc via linkedin.com/in/beccholland-flipthescript
Website: https://www.flipthescript.co/
Contact me on marcus@laughs-last.com
Tag a founder, CRO, CMO, VP of Sales, VP of Marketing who is screwing the pooch with their metrics, how they compensate to drive away customers, churn salespeople and burn through managers
SUMMARY
What must change in the way that leadership is evaluated and paid for them to value efficiency throughout the whole revenue operation?
A pivot away from present industry norms and an acknowledgement that current approaches might not be efficient are required to increase leadership's efficiency across the revenue operation. This will cause KPIs and processes to be reevaluated for sustainability.
How do we establish a relationship with our customers where we are perceived as their ally rather than their enemy or complicit?
Tracking inaccurate or useless KPIs, like conventional MQLs, might make a company appear less like a customer ally. They suggest, instead, rethinking and redefining what constitutes a qualified lead.
How can we challenge individuals by asking them to monitor the appropriate metrics so they understand how much waste is involved in maintaining the status quo?
There should be one person in charge of the front-to-end revenue amount who adjudicates amongst departments. This person should be held accountable for and in charge of all teams, from marketing to CSM.
TRANSCRIPT
Marcus Cauchi: Hello, and welcome back to the Inquisitor Podcast with me, Marcus Cauchi today I have, as my guest, a special treat Becc Holland, she is the CEO of Flip The Script and probably a name that's familiar to many of you. Becc, welcome.
Becc Holland: I'm glad to be here. Happy to be here.
Marcus Cauchi: Excellent. So would you mind giving the audience one minute on your history
Marcus Cauchi: please?
Becc Holland: Oh, one minute. I don't know if I'll need all of that time. But hi everyone who's listening. My name is Becc and a little bit of my history. TL; DR I was an account executive for about six years back in Texas selling heating, lighting, cooling projects to good old boys, and then made a transition to the Bay area.
Becc Holland: And I decided before I was gonna be a closer again, that I should, figure out what the ecosystem was. So I took the step back at the age of 30 to be an SDR and got to work for two MarTech companies, two sales tech companies. So I Just Gong G2 and Chorus. Wow. And. Build the go to market approaches for them within sales development.
Becc Holland: Cause I noticed a palpable gap between how I used the prospect as an account executive and then how sales development teams were running. So I. It had developed a litany of theories of how I can make a positive impact, with my teams from a practitioner perspective, and then started an after hour series to publish some of the results and methods of that.
Becc Holland: And coined it Flip The Script and the rest is kinda history from there.
Marcus Cauchi: Excellent. Okay. That's quite a pedigree. So tell me this. When you speak to leaders, surely there must be a sense of. Oh, God, here we go again, in terms of seeing the same old traditional mistakes being compounded and defended and justified by leadership that can't let go of what doesn't work.
Becc Holland: Yeah.
Marcus Cauchi: Okay. Right. Okay. So we're coming at this the same position. OK. Yeah. So for leadership to embrace. Efficiency across the entire revenue operation, what needs to change in how they are measured and compensated?
Becc Holland: Oh, that is a very big question. I'd say from the bedrock, just to your first question is I started with the script as a result of seeing things, not working.
Becc Holland: And I started banging down the doors of different sales, development teams and different prospecting teams in the bay area, thinking surely I'm the one out. I'm the odd man, odd woman out. Surely everyone has this, incredible playbook. And I'm just the person who hasn't been able to find.
Becc Holland: So I just start banging down the doors of enterprise SMB. Mid-market orgs, very well known, reputable brands, hungry for the playbook. It wasn't to disprove anything. What I came to find was most of them were in the same spot, if not worse than I was whenever you peel back the curtain. And so, I think that there needs to be a not abandonment, but a pivot away from quote unquote, what is best in practice?
Becc Holland: Because industry statistics are yielding that 76% of SDRs aren't hitting quota. 85% of AEs, aren't hitting 75% of their quota. So the best in practice that we have, I think the first step is just admitting from an ego perspective that what we're doing certainly at minimum has room for improvement, but in a realistic scenario, if we saw it in the light a day, that it is best house on a bad block at best.
Becc Holland: So I think that would be the first step is admitting. Okay. There's a problem here. If most of our reps aren't hitting quota and what do we do from a KPI perspective? What do we do from a process perspective? And let's talk about tactical and the little hook later, but what do we do from a real sustainability perspective to make this number go down?
Marcus Cauchi: Okay. So you're speaking my language, different dialect, but definitely my language. My question is this. How can we create an environment where we are seen as the ally of our customer instead of their adversary or their accomplice?
Becc Holland: Oh, yeah, two both of your last two questions are, could be a webinar in and of itself.
Becc Holland: So I'm gonna aim to tackle the KPI one and then dig into kind of the tactical, how we can be on their side from a KPI perspective. From my view, I don't know if this is gonna be too brash, but I'm just gonna say it anyway. Okay. Or measure everyone wrong.
Marcus Cauchi: Yeah. Hundred percent. Virtually every KPI is either a lagging indicator or
Marcus Cauchi: meaningless
Becc Holland: to totally.
Becc Holland: From what the traditional SaaS model is, marketing is gonna be measured on an MQL number and is just gonna be anyone who downloads your content, whether that is, someone who. Doesn't hit the right level of title. Like they're an individual contributor and you only sell into managers, whether that's someone who doesn't hit the right discipline of title, of like their in sales enablement, and you sell into sales, whether that's someone who doesn't hit the right firmographic criteria of they're a part of a 200 person organization, and you only sell to 500 plus, whether that's a current customer, whether that's someone you're already selling into.
Becc Holland: We're gonna call that the marketing qualified lead, unless they have a personal Gmail address and I'm like, wait, so let's back up here. Mark Benioff has a personal. Email . Yeah, there's not necessarily a correlation to the qualification rate. It's just a correlation to, they didn't wanna give you their business information.
Becc Holland: So you didn't send them endless nurturing emails and you allow them to by, allowing them to send over a personal Gmail,
Marcus Cauchi: but going into their spam box.
Becc Holland: Yeah, but just, yeah, exactly. So just in terms of the MQL alone, the marketing team, we're measuring people from a brand perspective of it is a marketing qualified lead if they download this piece of content.
Becc Holland: So that's one of the first metrics, and people say the MQL is dead. I'm like time out, the MQL is your defining. It is dead. Yeah. But the MQL itself is not dead. We're passing those over to a sales development team. And then we're saying, Hey, here's a list of people who downloaded our content.
Becc Holland: Can you follow up on them? So like sales development, guts through the list spends a whole bunch of time to get out the 25% of people that actually do hit the right title actually are a part of the right company you aren't currently selling into. And aren't currently a customer. Then they have to double verify or get their email address, get their direct dial, and then put them into a sequence.
Becc Holland: And the amount of time lift from that, just the scalability perspective to do that. It's quicker for them to just go to their account at Oracle and find VP of sales and get their email and their direct dial. So sales is yelling at marketing saying Hey, all these leads are bull crap. And for the, a lot of perspective, they're.
Becc Holland: 75% of them were. And marketing's yelling back at sales of Hey, you never follow up with any of our leads from the event. And they're like, yeah, it's cuz we don't wanna spend the time to get through the list. And so like here in and of itself, people call it the age old gap. I'm like it's a lead routing gap.
Becc Holland: That's all it is. It's a lead routing gap and a scanning gap and a KPI gap is what's happening at the core of it. So the KPI system question is the one that most organizations aren't asking, but when it comes down to it, is it probably if not the, at the fulcrum and the fulcrum culprit of the entire drama between the departments.
Becc Holland: So
Marcus Cauchi: this then comes back to the question about alignment around the customer. Yeah. At the end of the day, your customer has never will never. And under no circumstances in any universe will ever buy your product, they pay for the outcome. And part of the problem is that if you don't build your process around the execution and delivery of that outcome, then you will drive transactional behavior because I've gotta hit my quota this month.
Marcus Cauchi: Come what may, you will drive a disconnect between all the different revenue operation functions that touch the customer in any way, shape or form. So their experience will be jagged and your relationship will be brittle. And then you suffer from churn at 15, 20%, which means that every three years you have to replace half of the customer.
Marcus Cauchi: You got through the front door, cuz you let them out the back and you burn through SDRs AEs and managers like they're going out of fashion.
Becc Holland: Yeah.
Marcus Cauchi: So at some point someone has to ask, there are quite lots of unintended consequences going on. What the Hells going on? What, why don't they.
Becc Holland: I think that they asked the question, but I think the most toxic and paralyzing response that I've heard back to these people is the same response I heard when I asked the questions is this is how it's done.
Becc Holland: This is how it's done, and this is best in practice. And so to truly solve that, you have to come up, you have to be completely open handed from an ego perspective of if this isn't working for me, However I define working for me. If it's not delivering on my outcome, I'm going to release it into the wild, learn from it and become monomaniacal about chasing down what is working and optimized for that and double down.
Becc Holland: And I'm not going to Christopher Columbus and exactly, ask for any permission yeah. To run into the big rock. So you have to have a spirit to you of okay. I'm gonna chase down what works and I'm going to figure out, and I'm gonna be egoless in the process of figuring out what is objectively correct.
Becc Holland: And objectively true here. And how do I knit together a KPI let's take KPI systems, for instance, of most Allbound SDRs that I know they're measured on this, like meeting quota, and so they have a meeting quota of 15 meetings and then marketing pours in and they get these demo requests for 10, 10 of their demo requests and they set the meeting and then they're measured on influence pipeline.
Becc Holland: I'm like, wait time out. But they didn't cause that demo request. Number one, number two, see, you're double paying for these marketing leads for them to you're double paying to slow down your buyer's journey for them to get these time on your calendar, where they ask BANT questions, best case scenario, piss off your buyer.
Becc Holland: The AE doesn't listen to the questions and then they jump on the line with the AE. They have to repeat the BANT answers, that they said at the beginning, and then the SDR hits 10 out of 15 of their meeting goals. And you're measuring influence pipeline in terms of let's define influence pipeline as okay.
Becc Holland: It's org size. So an intern at Oracle requests a demo, and I was responsible for prospecting into Oracle. So now a 10th or a 15th of my quote is alleviated because I got time with that intern on the calendar. Which an intern in no case regard hits my ideal customer title. And then you're gonna tell me that this is worth an influence pipeline of 5 billion because it's Oracle, your AE gets it.
Becc Holland: And it's like what the actual is going on. So it's it takes a departure from, okay. Um, Okay. If something's not working for me, Then I need to figure out what the answer is and be pragmatic about that and be logical about that. And I need to, if something isn't yielding the result that I need from a logistical or logical perspective, I need to be okay with letting that go, whether that's industry standard or not, because it's not innately helping me in my day to day, but
Marcus Cauchi: That strikes me as difficult work.
Becc Holland: Sure.
Marcus Cauchi: And management and leadership, don't like doing difficult work
Becc Holland: Well , here's the thing that the more difficult work is not hitting quota or not having my org running as an engine or a system. And so I agree with you, but the more difficult work is gonna be the earlier the former problem that you described to me.
Marcus Cauchi: Yeah, but you'd be amazed at just how many people can be burnt out and churn through the grist mail. Before the leader eventually takes it in the neck, but by the 18 month marks, they probably already got their CV out. Okay. So let's explore some frequently unask questions. Let's go with the
Marcus Cauchi: tactical one, which is how do buyers, how do I like to buy? How do buyers like to buy and why is there such a massive disconnect? Between the way most organizations sell. And if they were in the buyer seat, they would run a mile. But apparently it's
Becc Holland: okay. Yeah. So you wanna know why there's that palpable gap
Becc Holland: or?
Marcus Cauchi: Yeah, that would be really cool if you could that shed some reason and logic upon this largely irrational.
Becc Holland: I think from the high level, most people are, they're thinking about process and they're giving themself the emotional out by saying that they're considering scale, but how they're building that scale is by orienting a process that is good for their organization.
Becc Holland: And it takes in at best case scenario, 20% of the mindset of the buyer into the process where I would pause that you Flip The Script. So to speak that you start with how buyers like to buy what they're metriced on and understanding their mindset. And you only buy because you have a problem that you wanna solve for to get an outcome that you want to achieve with using a product.
Becc Holland: So starting there with the buyer's journey, of I've heard some heroic tales of, CEOs of hotel chains and they'll once a month or once a year stay in their hotel to understand buyer journey. I'm like, you should stay in that hotel every day for a month. Yeah. Then you start to know.
Becc Holland: What your patrons are feeling, what your clients are feeling, and you should build this scalable process based on what does it feel like to eat? Live, breathe in that hotel, cuz that's how your prospects are thinking. So from the high level, from let's take B2B, SaaS for instance, for selling, it's the objection handle in the industry is oh, okay, send me an email.
Becc Holland: What would you like for me to include that email? I'm like, are you out of your mind that is someone telling you to go away? Yeah. And they wanna feel like a nice person. So that's you saying Hey Becc, will you go out with me on Friday? And I'm like, ah, no, I'm busy washing my hair at seven.
Becc Holland: That's like sending me shampoo for, to keep my hair cleaner for longer. So I can go out on the date. Like it's not the real objection, kind of thing.
Marcus Cauchi: And but again, I think there, there are a number of parallel threads that are broken. One is leadership compensation and KPIs, which then filters down to management compensation and KPIs, and the culture that is created by the investors you then have.
Marcus Cauchi: So let me ask you this. I suspect your response will be justifiably contentious is what passes for great in sales fit for
Marcus Cauchi: purpose.
Becc Holland: What do you mean by that? It's a good question. What do you mean.
Marcus Cauchi: What passes for great generally is money motivated will to win competitive then as an afterthought, there's consistency and consideration the problem with the problem with that is you encourage transactional
Marcus Cauchi: sellers.
Becc Holland: Yeah. Yeah, here's the thing. I love competition and I love aggression. I'm not saying that people shouldn't be competitive. I'm saying that the way that they're being competitive is from my perspective incorrect. And they need to learn how to be competitive in the right way. So if I'm going to be competitive, all I have to do is outsell.
Becc Holland: You. So if I do that by know, being aggressive about knowing who my buyer is and aggressive about things that matter to them, and I'm less aggressive on quantity, or if I'm aggressive about sending them value aggressive about sending them articles aggressive about sending them. Ideas that are for free, that don't result back to me resort back to me being the hero, that's all or aggressive about showing up for them whenever there isn't money in it, in the deal to be had for me.
Becc Holland: Yeah. That is how you sell. So I'm like, I think some people think oh, Becc, she's the super empathetic one, and she's she's focused on personalization because it feels better to sell that way, to know your buyer. I'm like, wait time. Becc and her root wants to smoke everyone in the room in terms of who's on top of the leaderboard, let's be very clear now how I was doing that was knowing how buyers like to buy.
Becc Holland: They like to feel supported, they and good for them. It's fair of what they're
Becc Holland: wanting
Marcus Cauchi: That's what Simon Bowen would describe as the I should bloody hope zone line, minimum expectation.
Becc Holland: They want you to know them. They want you to know their background. They want you to know something about their company, and the sales rep is that's ridiculous.
Becc Holland: We couldn't scale that. And it's but what you're trying to scale. When I started at my first sales tech company, I had to unhinge a lot of theories that were extremely age old theories that are so intertwined into sales culture that it's like taking them away is like ripping out their veins. But I knew I'm like when you bring the numbers back of Hey, give me a shot to prove out some theories.
Becc Holland: And if I don't two X you in a month, you can fire me. I knew at the end of the day, it'd come down to numbers. And I'm like, I had a feeling that if I knew something about my buyer and their company and that their role and them in specific from the psychographic perspective that it was gonna cause 'em to at least give me the time of day to read my email.
Becc Holland: So I'm like I'll I'll say this and then I promise I'll be quiet for a minute, but there's a post the other day on social media and I have a whole bunch of people coming at me for personalization. They're like, oh, do you really need it? Blah, blah, blah. So someone said okay, encouraging personalization.
Becc Holland: This is what this person wrote. Encouraging personalization is like saying if someone was on fire, In a building that was on fire and you're selling a, fire extinguisher that you should have to know something about them in specific. And I'm like, and he said Hey, the fire extinguisher, just needs to be there and the person's gonna pick it up and they're gonna put out the fire.
Becc Holland: And I said, but time out your analogies, I'm thinking in my head, your analog's flawed. That's not what it's like in the sales community. That's one extinguisher among 400 and stand out. And that's assuming that they know that you're extinguisher and what your purpose is within sales is never true.
Becc Holland: There's too much maccismo in sales, the language of campaigns and closing and, seeing the prospect in this adversarial light, what you've just described is really a microcosm of life. If you want to get on with people, you need to understand them. You have to make what you are selling relevant, how it has to be timely.
Becc Holland: It needs to deliver value and they don't care about your quota. They don't care about joining president club. They don't care about the jolly to The Bahamas. They care about it's, can you help me fix my problem? Can you bring value, but I can't get without your help.
Becc Holland: Totally.
Becc Holland: I could not agree more. And I'm so glad that you say that I've been reading a lot of which I always have, but I've been doubling down on his work recently of Eric Burn
Becc Holland: and I know he wrote the Games People Play as the book that people read a lot. but he wrote a lot of different books on the transactional analysis. He's known as the father of transactional analysis. I'm probably preaching the choir here. Absolutely. But that really was, is, the transaction between two people by way of conversation and what he found.
Becc Holland: And he says it in, in one of his books beyond games and scripts, he says that sales is a game. and that's why people don't like playing it because in a game, the rules of a game are, is that there's one person against another player. It's a salesperson against being sold to, and that you withhold information so that you can win.
Becc Holland: So the buyer deep down, people love to buy, but they hate to be sold to. And the reason is they're assuming that they're mutually exclusive, that when I buy from this person, they win and I inherently. Lose. So they don't wanna be a part of that process. So I'm like, here's the culprit from a psychology view of, because of how we've geared this thing and president's club, blah, blah, blah, and the gong going off.
Becc Holland: It just adds gas on the fire. Just adds gas on the fire from the perspective of, I'm not an advocate of my prospect, I'm not here to help them. I'm here to just push software on them at any, any way. That I can get the deal across the line. And the funny thing is it's like, Hey, what's the technique that I can use so that I can get this person to buy.
Becc Holland: I'm like, there's no technique. Figure out from an agendaless view where they are, what they're trying to solve and why they're, how they're trying to solve it. And is that from your perspective, given your expertise, is that gonna get them to where they wanna go? And then it's just a mutual, like a descriptive process of Hey, okay, is this all correct?
Becc Holland: So you really are their advocate.
Marcus Cauchi: So at the end of every month or every quarter, there's an extension to the number of days in the month. And pressure is suddenly applied to get any deal in no matter what. Yeah, because as you said, 76% of SDRs are missing quota. And 85% of AEs are not hitting 75% of quota.
Marcus Cauchi: That is an indictment on leadership and management.
Becc Holland: Yeah.
Marcus Cauchi: And pillaging next quarters pipeline to make up for your deficiencies as a manager, this quarter should be an act of gross misconduct.
Becc Holland: Yes.
Marcus Cauchi: So again, if we look at. Let's take this back to measurement because these are people who claim that they are all about shareholder value that they're trying to drive the value of the business up, and they get away with it because the feds down at 0% interest debt is at all time highs.
Marcus Cauchi: There's loads of money starting around, ready to be parted from the fools who. I saw, I can't remember who it was a couple of weeks ago, 300 million to produce a sequencer. It does strike me as being, it's not like they haven't already got a sequencer and there are plenty out there. As if the world needed another one.
Marcus Cauchi: Yeah. So what's my question. How can we challenge people by asking them to measure the right metrics? So they realize how much inherent waste there is. In sticking with the status quo?
Becc Holland: I think there's two things to it and whether either one of these are achievable within B2B SaaS I'll let you know, at the end of my career cause I'm gonna spend my career fight, not fighting them, but I think the first problem, again, this is one girl's perspective. But the first problem that you're inherently gonna have is there's typically no one central role specifically within enterprise. One role of someone who's responsible for the front to end at revenue number. And what I mean by front to end is marketing along with sales development, along with sales, along with AMR cross, sell up, sell renewal, along with CSM of the entire go to market team.
Becc Holland: Typically at most. I'll see. The CRO pick up the sales development piece and the pipeline piece and span to CSM. Sometimes I see it just sales dev in sales, but there's no
Marcus Cauchi: that's not
Marcus Cauchi: a CRO, that's a VP of sales with the CRO title.
Becc Holland: Exactly. And that's how I'm seeing it shake out. So I feel like there's no one arbiter, cuz there's gonna be, there's gonna be some decisions that are good for your marketing team, but are bad for the overall org.
Becc Holland: Okay. There's gonna be some decisions that are good for the sales development team, but aren't great for sales. There's gonna be some decisions that are gonna be good for sales, but aren't gonna be great for sales development or CSM, but they're better for the entire org. So I think there should be one arbiter.
Becc Holland: That's on the line for Mar from marketing all the way to CSM who is responsible for that overall revenue number and that they should be the one, with the keys to make the decisions on all these interdepartment decisions, because reality is okay, let's take the MQL thing. For instance, if I'm a marketer, And you tell me that an MQL number should only be based on people we haven't sold into that we aren't currently selling into that hit this level of title that hit this level of company away from, we are preexisting measured on just if the person downloaded content bought a bang, I'm gonna say, heck no, I'm gonna fight that as a marketer because it's going to drastically decrease my number, but that's for the overall health of the department.
Becc Holland: So if there's not someone who's over, who's overseeing. So the first piece that I think most orgs are missing is usually how I see it again, is like CEO is the vision person. And then CRO at best is sales dev all the way to CSM, but that all teams from marketing all the way to CSM should be overseeing from some responsibility perspective or accountability perspective by one person and have interdepartmental team heads
Marcus Cauchi: in
Marcus Cauchi: the companies that I'm working as CRO.
Marcus Cauchi: We're making it so that the CS head has to approve a deal before it can go through. And that's an interesting shift because if we can't deliver, we have no business selling it.
Becc Holland: So there, yeah, there should be peers. They should all be peers from my perspective, sales staff, along with marketing, along with sales love with C along with CS with a common head that roll up to a CRO.
Marcus Cauchi: There also needs to be collaboration. My pal Patrick Linchrist runs an innovation challenge in the city of Helsingborg. So by 2023, they're aiming to be Europe's city of innovation. They've got a very modest budget, but one of the things that I thought was absolute genius was hiring people called managers of the gap are not gonna attempt the Swedish.
Marcus Cauchi: and their job was to bridge the gaps between the silos.
Becc Holland: Yes.
Marcus Cauchi: And I think what's really missing in many revenue org organizations is lack of not only accountability, but familiarity with the work that each other does, what progress they're making and what impact you doing a good job or a bad job has. On the other moving parts , and even more broadly into the rest of the organization and obviously the customer, and I don't think there's anywhere near enough of that level of collaboration going on at the moment.
Becc Holland: Yeah, so yeah, that bleeds into the second piece that I think is vital for orgs. But like you said, that the funnel where it's gonna be weakest is the hinges marketing, the sales dev not only from the pass off perspective, but that's where you're bleeding, out your hemorrhaging out, your leads, your pipeline through follow up process, etcetera.
Becc Holland: I won't even get into it, but I think what's necessary. The second piece that's necessary is, you said Hey, what metrics should we be measuring? For overall pipeline health? I don't believe based on the current definitions of terms within our CRM, that we have set ourself up to measure the right things.
Becc Holland: I'll give you a great example. Within any kind of handoff from sales stuff to sales, you'll have a process of, okay, this is, and the terms are gonna interchange, but it's something like this. This is a sales qualified lead. And what I mean by that is the sales stuff. Team set an appointment. They set an appointment and the salesperson's gonna come in.
Becc Holland: The salesperson's gonna come in and they're gonna say they're gonna BANT them or based on need or based on timeline or based on, use case or et cetera. I'm gonna say that this is qualified or not. And I'm going to define that an SAL a sales accepted lead, or a sales qualified opportunity in SQO or a sales decline leader, dead on arrival like this.
Becc Holland: Isn't someone that I want to talk to and I'm like the first problem is that an AE is measured on conversion ratio from first discovery meeting. That's quote unquote qualified. Into closed one. So they inherently have a bias to disqualify and say that this person wasn't qualified and how they can do that is basically by saying oh, there wasn't a need here.
Becc Holland: And it's wait time out. That's your job is to ask the right amount of questions to uncover what problem they're. They're on the line for some reason, if I'm a VP of sales and I took 30 minutes at Oracle, and I took 30 minutes to talk to you. It's because in my head, deep down, whether I tell you or not, there's a problem that I think I might be able to solve using you.
Becc Holland: That's why I gave you the time. And so the AE says oh they didn't volley up okay, based on their understanding of their problem and your product, that there was a need. And so this isn't disqualified. So the swing rate is like 90% of what, AEs are saying is qualified or isn't qualified based on what they feel would close or not.
Becc Holland: And considering they're measured on conversion and they wanna delay a churn of, their bosses Hey, you're not hitting quota. They're gonna inherently blame something else. And how they're gonna do that as say, my pipeline was just unqualified.
Marcus Cauchi: The stats on this are truly fucking terrifying without putting, you can find a point on it.
Marcus Cauchi: Based on connect and sales records of 40 million calls a year. It's one in 36, goes through to a decision maker, sorry, one in 33, unless you're calling a senior, exec it. In which case it's one in 46. So dial to effective is a one in 46, effective to meeting is one in 14 and conversion from first to second, which is the most depressing statistic is one in eight.
Marcus Cauchi: So 88% of the time your salesperson turns up, they don't deliver enough value to justify being invited back. Doesn't mean they won't have agreed to do a whole load of work for free that no one's gonna read cuz it goes straight in the round file. But they've not created enough value. Now, bear in mind prior to that they'll have done their MQL.
Marcus Cauchi: So they'll have blown 10 bucks a pop to acquire the spam email address of somebody whose only intent was to download your white paper, it wasn't to purchase again. We have this cabal of sales and MarTech spaghetti that lots of people have been sold without really thinking about how to use it effectively.
Marcus Cauchi: And I see an awful lot of shiny objects in out there with all these technologies and you see so much crossover in functionality, people doing horrific act of birbarism like sending out a hundred thousand emails and wondering why they get blocked by Google or not even noticing and continuing to send a hundred thousand emails a month and wondering why people are pissed off.
Marcus Cauchi: Am I missing something?
Becc Holland: The only thing. No, that's all correct. All correct. I don't think anyone would admit that and sales or any tech vendors that themselves, but the, you said something interesting, which is what I've spent the last whatever five years of my career and we will continue to spend my time on is the, how.
Becc Holland: No one will tell you the how do you sequence these people? How do you bridge the it? Like, how do you bridge the gap from MQL number to actually the amount of people that you can sell into? How do you lead route all of these people? How do you set up from a tactical perspective, sequencing perspective, KPI system, all of the, how is left up to the user, and the problem with that is a limited understanding.
Becc Holland: Be limited time in terms of bandwidth. So we've just essentially, handed all these really great, for lack of better PC purposes, rifles to someone and said, Hey, go hunt these people down. And the problem is they don't understand, what this thing is. What are all the functionality?
Becc Holland: When would they use that? In what case scenario? And there's no vision of the, how to use the rifle. So essentially all it is a really expensive stick that they're trying to boot, beat a moose down with.
Marcus Cauchi: But again, all of this Becc points to the fact that they talk about scale, when what they do is they just apply brief force to drive growth.
Becc Holland: Totally.
Marcus Cauchi: And their growth is linear. By and large, I've yet to go into an organization where I couldn't find 400% growth, potential latent within their existing accounts, cross sales, upsales, the ecosystem, and eliminating waste and enacted idiocy. And self-sabotage the average rep spends 80% of their working career chasing people.
Marcus Cauchi: They should have qualified or disqualified or closed on the last call. They spend 12 to 21% of their time actually in front of customers and in the pandemic, I would be amazed if it was even that high and yet they measure all the wrong things. To me, the only thing I'm really interested in there enough behavior going in at the top of the funnel?
Marcus Cauchi: Are they advancing sales? Because it means they turned up and they were relevant. And is there enough? at the qualified, moving to closeable stage for us to reliably be able to hit our quota without having to pillage next month's pipeline? . And do we have a strong referral base within those accounts?
Marcus Cauchi: If we've got those four things, chances are, we're probably gonna hit our quota, but stop worrying about the brief force metrics.
Becc Holland: Yes. Okay,
Becc Holland: go ahead.
Marcus Cauchi: That'll teach me not to end on the question, mark.
Marcus Cauchi: so go ahead.
Becc Holland: No I didn't know what the question was.
Marcus Cauchi: My question is what are the minimum metrics that are good, clear leading indicators that someone can simply measure that are 100% with the reps within the reps control?
Becc Holland: So I would start from the marketing perspective.
Becc Holland: If it were me, I would define within my CRM contacts as anyone who downloaded anything, or that you acquired through an outbound perspective, it's just a list. It's just a list of people within your CRM. I would define leads as people within that CRM that hit the firmographic and demographic in time of, in terms of nomenclature and titular.
Becc Holland: Ambits that you give them. So like a lead would be, let's say the titles of manager level and above and over 200 person companies, so that would be a lead. Is anyone out of that contact base who hit those and MQL would be anyone out of that lead base that hit all that criteria. That marketing got to engage with some level of action of that's they downloaded content, they attended a webinar, et cetera.
Becc Holland: So the contact to lead will show you out of this CRM, the contact to lead percentage will show you outta your CRM. How much percentage of your CRM do you actually wanna sell into the lead to MQL will show you out of that lead base, the people that you wanna sell into, how many people were you successful in getting somewhat engaged with you and your brand or your content, or they know who you are.
Becc Holland: From there whenever marketing acquires that lead and sales development does the back analysis of yes, this is the right person. They do hit the right company. I agree with you, that the email address looks correct. They can have MAL or marketing accepted lead, or an MDL or marketing decline lead.
Becc Holland: That actually this isn't the right person to the company, even though we thought they hit that gate. And so MQL to MAL or MDL will show you the percentage, basically out of the the leads that were required from marketing. Which one was truly correct. So was our data true? And then an MQO would be the last definition for marketing, which would be a lead that was an MAL
Becc Holland: so marketing acquired them through some action. They did hit the right title. They did hit the right company and sales development wants to take them in their pipeline. That would be an MQO so be the first round of definitions that I would suggest for a marketing team. For the sales team, I would basically, the biggest thing that sales teams can do to help them from a metric perspective is to define an accepted lead from sales as a lead who hits an overt
Becc Holland: objective definable criteria that's bereft of, or void of the subjective quality of need timeline, buy-in decision making authority and just define it and say, we sell into managers of sales at 200 plus companies. So if I said an SQL, I'm a sales development rep, and I SQL being defined, as I said, an appointment with them and SAL should be a accepted lead, meaning this was the right title.
Becc Holland: This was the right size company. And they showed up. Those are the only reasons they should be declined. Yeah, we don't BANT those are the only reasons they should be declined. And you should know all those things beforehand. So you don't have to BANT them on the spot because asking someone, if they have budget, It's asking someone the beginning of a dinner of like your first date of Hey, do you want kids?
Becc Holland: And do you wanna get married? And are you ready for a serious relationship? Valid question, but you don't tease out the answer by asking it and you probably scare away perfectly nice people in the process. So by defining it that way, and so sales isn't in this authoritative role, of like falsely authoritative role of saying what's qualified, they're just answering.
Becc Holland: Was it a director or not? Was it a 200 plus company or not? And if so, it's accepted, if not, it's declined. And if I wanna take it into my pipeline, that being defined as I wanna take a second meeting, I'll call it an S QO that is the infrastructure that will just give you now, even the hopes, of measuring the right things and I've never seen an organization have that.
Marcus Cauchi: And
Marcus Cauchi: I'd have to say, I love the granular focus, that it's progressing or it's out. Totally objective is a thong-shaped pipeline instead of the pair of granny nickers that most people have, or the pencil. Because they're either not doing the prospecting and they're relying on this mythical steady pipeline of referrals that doesn't happen.
Marcus Cauchi: It just happens as a nice surprise or they're just keeping everything in the pipeline because they're afraid that if they told the truth, then they'd be out of the job. And again, the amount of time that is was. By entire sales teams sitting around, listening to other people lie from their work of fix, and also known as a forecast.
Marcus Cauchi: You can recover probably 30, 30, 1 hours in pointless meetings where people are sat, listening to other people report. Yeah. Why is that even necessary? Why would you not just have a one to one with your manager? When you get everybody together, you use that as an opportunity to learn.
Becc Holland: I agree. It's so what are we even trying to base it on?
Becc Holland: We're trying to base, we're trying to base coaching off of conversion, percentage of what an AE thought was qualified into closed one it's. Anyhow, I don't mean to take a dump of everyone on the info dump. From the tactical takeaway. I know that we're closed up here on an hour and so we have to close out, but from a tactical takeaway, I think the three things that I would be asking is, number one, am I selling how I would like to buy.
Becc Holland: And, when someone gives me the objection of send me an email, or when I walk into a retail store and a person says Hey, can I help you with anything? And I say no, I'm just looking, why am I lying? And what do I want instead? And start your tactical process there. So that'd be number one, two would be, think about, ask yourself the question, what KPI, what am I motivating through the KPI systems that I've given my reps?
Becc Holland: And is that what I want to motivate? And then number three would be, am I measuring what leading leaning and lagging indicators within my sales org. Am I optimizing for, and is my data anything based on the preexisting definitions and how much subjectivity am I introducing into those metrics? The tears that their validity through via the way of imposed agenda.
Becc Holland: So what data am I measuring? Why am I measuring that? And how accurate do I believe that to be to the cause that I'm trying to drive
Marcus Cauchi: outstanding. So of on our next call, subtle hint. Did you feel the brick hit your head? On our next call. I think we should probably explore CRM hygiene because I'm sure that's the topic that will get your blood boiling again.
Marcus Cauchi: Okay. Becc, tell me this. You've got a golden ticket and you could go back and advise your idiot. 23 year old self who knew everything. The you were invincible. Imortal what, one choice, bit of advice would you whisper in her ear that you know, should've ignored?
Becc Holland: I would've told myself this. It might be a weird one.
Becc Holland: But I, I had a lot of theories, right when I was 23. And when I was 33, a lot of theories as to why I didn't think the thing was working. And the question I had in my head was not, are the theories valid? The question I had in my head was even if I came up with something that was more pragmatic, is anyone interested in pushing the needle?
Becc Holland: And can I get buy-in. Would anyone be a part of that process or would anyone listen? Essentially, and I think that I would go back to myself at 23 and, I was terrified and I thought that my opinions weren't valid and surely there was something wrong and surely I was missing something and surely this wasn't correct.
Becc Holland: And on surely I think I would tell her. that you can change it. It's gonna cost a lot. you're gonna get, you're gonna get, the first guy through the wall always gets bloody, but that you can change it just as long as you're willing to throw all in. And I think she would've found a lot of comfort in that.
Becc Holland: Excellent. They do say a pioneer is a man with arrows in his back. Yeah. okay. What would you recommend people watch Reed listen to, to really try to understand the customer and understand what they should measure and incentivize.
Becc Holland: Yeah. So if you go to, there's gonna be a shameless, I'll give you one me and one, if you go to start with the me first, I would suggest you read Eric Burn's work in its entirety.
Becc Holland: He's again, father of transactional analysis here not. yeah. Beyond Games and Scripts is a great book of his Games People Play is another great book of his, but start there. And the understanding between two people, the games that they're playing whenever they're in the different ego states and what those look like implications on the sales process.
Becc Holland: The second resource is if you go to FlipTheScript.co I have 135 hours of recorded training all for free. All you need is an email. It's got decks, it's got everything. And if you go to specifically season two or personalization point, I go into very in depth in terms of KPI systems how to use marketing to fuel expansion selling.
Becc Holland: An N fuel expansion selling. So everything is within there. So FlipTheScript.co and click free sales training hub, and there's a litany of different topics in there. All with decks free for anyone who wants take a look
Marcus Cauchi: excellent and definitely highly recommended Becc Holland thank you.
Becc Holland: I had a blast. Thank you so much.
Marcus Cauchi: Likewise.
Marcus Cauchi: So this is Marcus Cauchi signing off once again from the Inquisitor Podcast. If you've enjoyed the episode and you feel like someone else would benefit from it .Please tag them, share them, send it as a private message, but have them engage. And if you've enjoyed it, then please like comment, share and subscribe.
Marcus Cauchi: If you wanna get ahold of me, Marcus, last-last.com or direct message me on LinkedIn. Take care. Happy selling. Bye-bye.
