Extending the lifespan of your sellers
Imagine you bought a piece of equipment for your company.
The equipment takes 5.5 months to install.
Once installed it works about 66% of the time.
After 22 months it stops working completely.
And you are left trying to get a replacement machine for a couple of months, only for the cycle to start again.
You wouldn’t accept it.
But that is the average experience for a Tech CRO hiring a salesperson.
The most recent research from The Bridge Group pulled data from 253 B2B SaaS companies. The data comes from 2021 - but is valid today.
I find it useful to draw the lifespan of an AE with clients.
It helps guide our thinking about what we might want to do differently.
There are three levers we can look at.
Faster ramping
The average ramp time is 5.3 months, and this depends on the role - SMB reps ramp faster than Enterprise.
Ramp time has increased by one month since the 2020 report!
Let’s think about why this is increasing.
Is it internal - more products, organisational complexity, more training, over-hiring?
Or is it external - lower customer demand, customer avoidance of outbound, lower budgets?
What are the AEs that ramp faster doing differently to those that take longer to ramp?
More reps hitting quota
This is the obvious mission for all CROs - if more of my sellers could hit their quotas then I could get to my number with less people (or less stress).
Speak to sellers, what is their view of the world? They are closest to the customers.
Deploy call recording, and then analyse and listen to calls. What are the actual interactions with customers like? Is this a volume issue, a product issue, a training issue, an execution issue?
Are there pockets of success that aren’t matched in other areas? By region, by customer size, by product?
Get out and speak to customers and non-customers yourself. Not to pitch, not to hear nice things about your company, but to really understand their world, their priorities, their challenges. With your experience it will impact the advice and coaching that is filtered down to your sellers.
Sales teams are struggling with pipeline, pipeline, pipeline.
As a CRO, its your responsibility to be all over the front end of the buyer experience - are you providing the right content, the right education, the right events, the right partners to drive demand and soak up buyer interest?
Extend the average tenure
This is less of a lever, and more of a lag indicator, but happy sellers stay longer.
My two biggest runs were 10 years and 8 years. I stayed because I was exceeding my number, I was seeing progression and I was being challenged to develop myself.
Instead of looking at your sellers as expensive cogs in a machine that isn’t working, look at them as valuable resources that you want to make successful.
Don’t just say “I want you to make a lot of money”, make it happen.
If your sellers are getting by with 80 or 90% of quota then they are hunting for other jobs.
They’ll be counting the clock down until they have a couple of years on the CV so they don’t look jumpy, and then they’ll……jump.
It is no surprise that the average tenure is just over 2 years!
A question I like to ask clients,
“If you could start afresh and hire a new sales team - would you rehire who you have today?”
That normally causes a deep breath in.
Look at your hiring process - are you bringing in talent with the right intrinsic motivation to figure out the problems in front of them, or are they conveyor belt sellers waiting for magic to be given to them?
If you are confident in your hiring process, then what has happened after they joined that has caused you, them, or both of you to reconsider the situation? Have you given them the right knowledge and skills to be successful? Do they have a territory that they believe can support exceeding their quota? Do they have a coaching manager who is leading from the front?
Take your sellers for a 121 meal or drink. Get beyond the quarterly survey or formulaic one to one. “How do you feel?” and now dig deeper, “and how do you really feel?”
Your sellers are one of the most expensive pieces of ‘machinery’ in your factory, and if you let them fail and walk out the door that’s on you - not the seller.
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Whenever you are ready, there are two ways that I can help you accelerate your revenue.
Buyer Experience Audit - I’ll impersonate a buyer researching your segment and company and let you know what I find. Ideal for planning your Revenue Operations strategy.
RevOps Impact Playbooks - I’ll help you implement one or more tactical processes across your revenue teams - content, referrals, testimonials, adoption and more..