How Top-Tier Revenue Leaders Guarantee ‘People Success’
Former Head of Product Marketing at Gong
Former Head of Product Marketing at Gong
At Gong’s #celebrate conference, sales leaders tackled three pillars: People Success, Deal Success, and Strategy Success. In the coming month, I’ll reveal golden nuggets from their talks. First up, People Success.
“People Success” isn’t what you think.
It’s not happiness, motivation, fulfillment, or other important personal metrics. People Success is where your business processes and people meet. It means hiring the right people, coaching everyone to excel, and learning from your best reps.
How do you do that well? Let’s dig in.
Start by Hiring the Right People
Gong’s CRO, Ryan Longfield, asked that of a #celebrate panel that included Josh Allen, CRO of Drift; Mark Roberge, Former CRO of Hubspot; and Ed Calnan, Founder & President of Seismic. They all agreed that it’s an iterative process that begins with assessing for coachability when you hire. Your reps must be able to receive AND implement feedback, or you’ll never improve their skills.
Once that hiring criterion is entrenched, you can hire for other valuable skills. Recognize that your team’s will change over time, as will the skills required to succeed. Pinpoint the skills related to your top reps’ success and hire for more of the same. Then pinpoint the skills you don’t want and avoid those like the plague. How? Use Revenue Intelligence to see inside your reps’ everyday practices and clarify desirable (and undesirable) skills in no time.
From Left to Right: Josh Allen, CRO of Drift; Mark Roberge, Author, Lecturer at HBS, and Former CRO of Hubspot; Ed Calnan, President and CRO of Seismic
Don’t Coach in the Dark
After you’ve hired the right people, focus deeply on ongoing coaching. According to our panel, it’s the most important factor in your team’s success. That’s because it’s the most reliable way to move everyone’s numbers UP. Use Revenue Intelligence to scan every deal and identify why buyer engagement stalled. This data-driven view guides managers with facts, instead of guesswork.
Our panelists use this same granular data to learn from their best reps. They watch how their top reps get things done, then coach to clone those behaviors across their teams. It’s totally frictionless and a process YOU can implement.
Power Your People NOW
Couple those strategies with fantastic company culture, care of Patty McCord’s playbook, and you’ll have an outstanding shot at success. She’s the former Chief Talent Officer at Netflix, and she shared candid stories about People Success at #celebrate.
Patty McCord, Author, Advisor, and former Chief Talent Officer of Netflix
Here’s how she creates a culture that supports People Success.
Annual Reviews are Dead
Forget about yearly reviews (Patty hates them). Your people need feedback now. Real-time feedback—good and bad—drives behavioral changes immediately. Learn what’s happening on the ground and coach on it.
Focus your feedback on known problems. Get clear on what they are, then make a plan with reps to solve them. This means understanding the gap between where you are and where you’re going. Clarify what works and what doesn’t, then implement better solutions. (You’ve surely caught on that Revenue Intelligence can drive this behavior forward :)
Trust Through Transparency
You can do this company-wide too. Find out what customers are saying about your product—the competition, pricing, messaging, and more. This is unfiltered feedback that every go-to-market team needs. This helps enable collaboration at scale by offering transparency around your customer conversations. Bring product, marketing, sales, and leadership together around a single source of truth.
With these insights, you can craft a clear narrative about your team and demonstrate your successes. And yes, Revenue Intelligence will support you every step of the way.