Q&A | How Can Sales Culture Be Influenced From the Top Down?
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Hey folks, I'm Mark Roberge, and this is The Science of Scaling, a podcast about how to scale your sales and revenue.

We have another Q&A episode today. And as usual, my favorite producer, Matt Brown, is here to help. I don't know how you feel about these Q&A episodes, but I like them a lot. Yeah, these are great. Like, I get plenty of time with you while we're doing our recordings. But I feel like these episodes, right, they're a bit looser. People get to hear what it's actually like talking to you in person. So I think they're great, too.

Well, thanks, man. I mean, they are my favorite too. I mean, I love going out and speaking with all these guests. I almost feel like it's like a MIDI Harvard case study specifically on sales that's happening in real time. And I get to learn from it and share my thoughts. But what I like more is like, what is in the head of our listeners? Yeah. And this is just like cool to be able to hear that directly and coach them on it or go out and research if it's a question that I haven't received before and tell you what I think. So yeah,

Please keep them coming. If you have a question, shoot me a note on LinkedIn. You can email us at podcasts at HubSpot.com. Or if you're listening on Spotify, there's a Q&A section that's going to pop up right now. You can just enter your question right there on the phone. So Matt, what's the question for today? Yeah. Our next question is about culture, specifically on a sales team. How can sales culture be influenced from the top down? Yeah.

Yeah, I actually thought a lot about this in about year six. I mean, I wrote up a model that I should probably try to dig up. And it was all summarized for me of scalable visibility. That's really how I described it, which is I like, I analyzed the go-to-market system as a machine. The foundation of that machine is our target market, our ideal customer profile, and

And the buyer journey, how do they buy? That's the foundation. We're there to help them buy and become successful. And on top of that is the sales process by which we do that. We call, we create meetings, we execute those first meetings, we do demonstrations, we sign customers, we onboard them, we renew them, we expand them, we make them successful. So that's our process there to help them achieve their goals of buying and creating the value from our company.

That was the foundation on the two inputs to that are the sellers we hire and then demand that we create. Now that's oversimplified because we're hiring CSMs and we're hiring other folks. But for the most part, it's like we have to hire well and we have to create demand. And then the machine runs every day. It's driven by two things, largely how we pay our reps because that's how they behave and how we coach our reps to the model. And it spits out three things in order.

It spits out sales activities like calls and meetings and demos and contracts sent out that lead to a forecast that lead to predictable revenue. That's my machine. And so those are all the components. There's the buyer journey. There's the sales process. There's the hiring model. There's the demand gen model. There's the coaching model. There's the compensation model. There's the forecast, the activities. So within there, I thought about how can I inspect that all of them are running in

in an A-plus way. That gets really hard when you have 500 people across multiple continents selling to half a dozen different type of customer segments. You literally can't do it in an eight-hour week. So you have to start thinking about how can you inspect it as deeply as possible and get a very good feel as to whether quality is falling down. Okay, so I'll give you a couple of examples. Probably...

A really important one that I don't think is done well is whether our coaching is being done well. Like are our managers spending enough time coaching our salespeople and is it good coaching? And so that was actually a pretty easy one to inspect. It took a little bit of time. It took me almost a day, a month, and it happened all in one day.

So basically what I would do is on the second day of every month, I would schedule this month in advance. I scheduled the meeting with my directors one-on-one, one-on-one with a director. Now that director had four managers under them and 40 salespeople. And we covered the same topic every time, rep by rep, one at a time. Let's talk about Matthew. What are you coaching Matthew on? How are you going to coach Matthew on that skill? And how are you going to measure if it worked?

Okay. So, oh, we're coaching Matthew on sense of urgency because his close rate on opportunity to close is in the bottom quartile of the company. And we did a qualitative inspection and we believe he has sense of urgency issues. Cool. That's good. How are you going to coach him on that?

His manager, Susie, is going to do a weekly gone review, a one hour review of discovery calls and specifically focus on how he's developing sense of urgency. Great. How are you going to know if it improved? His close from opportunity to customer will grow from 17% to 25% in two months. That's tight. Right. And so I do that for every rep. It takes me an hour per director.

I got whatever, five directors. I spend five hours of my day on the second day of every month. And I have deep inspection. And because the director, to prepare for that meeting, met with each manager, had the same conversation. And to prepare for that meeting, every manager had the same conversation with their rep to create those plans. So within whatever, five hours, I have a really good inspection of whether coaching is being done well. And I can measure it. Okay. Another example is demand, Jen.

You know, we've spoken another episode around sales and marketing SLAs, and we got that down to like very clear responsibilities on demand from marketing versus demand on sales. And what's an MQL and what is the target and what should the confirm close rate be? So demand gen is one of those that's like it usually can mostly be inspected from the dashboards. All right, let's talk about hiring.

So obviously the easiest one to inspect on hiring is you hire a salesperson, you give them some time and they either hit quota or not. That's a really big lagging indicator. Unfortunately, in many contexts I've seen, it can take like two to three quarters to know if you've got a legitimate performer or not. So if all of a sudden you're hiring execution degraded,

You've hired people for three quarters and you didn't know it. They were not good. That's not early enough. And so this is actually a cool technique I've used that really helps us crystallize the role of sales enablement, specifically the sales training element of sales enablement. So what I would do is put the new hires through your onboarding process. That could be a week, two weeks, a month, whatever.

And they're obviously during that process, part of what they're learning is the sales process. How do you book meetings? How do you run a discovery call? How do you run a demo? How do you close? And so you can have a basic certification score on those skills for each new hire. And the trainer does the certification. So let's say that your onboarding process is a month.

Well, at the end of the month, if you made seven new hires that month, the sales trainer needs to generate a scorecard report card for each rep. There are three out of five on discovery. There are two out of five on booking meetings. There are five out of five on Taylor demo, whatever. And that's how I hold my trainer accountable to their role. Cause you can't have the manager do it. The manager made the hire. They think they made the best hires.

The trainer is judge and jury has no bias. They see every rep coming through. And if I look at the trainer's assessments and six months later, you know, Bobby gets fired, but the trainer had assessed him as an A plus. It's like, dude, what happened there? Or if like, you know, Janet gets promoted to manager and one of our best reps and the trainer had low scores on her, what's going on?

You're not reading this. Whatever we're doing in training is not correlated to end success. So hopefully my trainer can get that dialed in. And that's an example of a really scalable way for me to set up a leading indicator to know if our hiring quality is going down. And of course, at some point, you can still do interviews. You get to really big numbers, like hundreds, right?

you know, of hires and you still can be making time in a year to do interviews to spot check that. So hopefully that gives you a view of like how you can move go-to-market and sales away from an uncontrollable art form to a data-driven predictable process. Yeah, we're looking for a culture of discipline, of data-driven and of predictability. And so hopefully you've seen that like scalable approach

visibility as the executive to inspect every aspect of the go-to-market system. So I hope that answers it. Looking forward to the next question. These are great. Thanks so much.