At the workplace, best practices are essential for employees to grow and develop their skills. However, they are often forgotten or overlooked. In order to ensure growth and success, making best practices mandatory should be a priority.
These meetings help your team stay on top of advancements and changes and improve each week as people practice and study their roles. Another key benefit of mandatory best practices is proactive training. By equipping your team with the skills and knowledge they need to tackle potential issues, you can avoid panic and stress when those issues arise.
Thanks for listening!
At the workplace, best practices are essential for employees to grow and develop their skills. However, they are often forgotten or overlooked. In order to ensure growth and success, making best practices mandatory should be a priority.
These meetings help your team stay on top of advancements and changes and improve each week as people practice and study their roles. Another key benefit of mandatory best practices is proactive training. By equipping your team with the skills and knowledge they need to tackle potential issues, you can avoid panic and stress when those issues arise.
Thanks for listening!
All these years blood, sweat and tears. I'm still here. Nothing stopped me. Running, running, running, running. Nothing to stop me nothing could stop me.
Scott Scully:Welcome back grow nation. My name is Scott scoli. I'm with my partners in growth. Eric Watkins and Jeff winters. Gentlemen, how are you doing? I'm
Eric Watkins:doing great. We're back.
Jeff Winters:We are back.
Scott Scully:The weather is heating up. We are heating up. The show is heating up. Today. Like all the others, we promised some fire. Some grow nuggets. Before we get into some grow nugget specifics. We'd like to head over to the on site sheriff. LinkedIn is favorite fan, Jeff Weiner.
Jeff Winters:combing the streets of LinkedIn.
Eric Watkins:It's the streets now. Not the
Jeff Winters:pasture, pastures, the streets. I'm everywhere, every roads, I look through LinkedIn. Every week, I try to try to find two things that are true. And one thing, Eric, that is a one of this week's truths comes from Scott chisel talked about his seven mistakes being a CEO for last 20 years. And one mistake I think is a great truth said he didn't define our values didn't define our values. As the company grew, not everyone understood what our core values actually meant. And in some cases, they took them in the wrong direction. Don't just create core values, you must define them. I think it's so easy to go and get a poster and say our values are integrity, honesty and integrity, accountability, training, wisdom and treating everybody good. Go. And that is wrong. This is the truth. And I think just a nugget here and they'll pass it. You know, one thing we did here was we got our people involved in sort of defining what the values actually meant. And I think it's made a huge difference. Great, great point from Scott,
Scott Scully:I love it. And I if I could go in and edit the post, I'd add and measure. Because otherwise, like you're trying to define values and how you want people to live, and act and be you know, how do you determine whether or not an individual or a team is indeed living by your values? How do you measure it? What are the outcomes you're looking for?
Eric Watkins:Yeah, I agree. I think values are really the guidelines for when things aren't super defined. So you're always gonna have people running into situations and if you have strong values that everybody understands they know how to act in those situations,
Jeff Winters:kind of guide people. Yep, this one is close to my heart. This is salesy, but a lot of LinkedIn is salesy, and you know what? I'm combing the pastures not you all I'm doing this one says the best sales enablement cannot cover for poor sales management. I really like this, the best sales enablement cannot cover for poor sales management. You can get your sales team, the most meetings, they can have the most beautiful slide presentation, they can have the most incredible visceral case studies and videos and proposals and snippets about clients. If you've got shitty sales management, and and you could do you can have all the meetings in the world with the best presentations and the best slides and most beautiful stuff and the greatest CRM all of it. It still can't cover up for bad sales management. I think this is a great truth, I think doesn't resonate with a lot of people. I agree. Yes, accurate truth, truth. Sales, management's underrated anything. Yeah,
Scott Scully:I keep coming back to people. But you know, in a prior episode we talked about even the best people need to have a fire lit within not just the one that they like, but their leader has to continue to motivate them. So I'd say the only thing, the only potential of getting around bad sales management would be if there's a lot of really good salespeople on that team. But then eventually I feel like results go down and some of them turn over because they're not respecting leadership.
Jeff Winters:I feel like a lot of sales, the problems of sales management do get blamed and blamed on enablement. You know, it's so easy to go oh, this case study be pretty error. The meetings can be better, the meetings can be more qualified. You know, when else sales management can be better, they can be more calls. They can be listening and coaching and auditing more calls. They can have a better team they can have better recruiting process they can have more people lined up for when folks turnover, easy to blame sales enablement wasn't very
Scott Scully:long ago that salespeople had to get their own leads. And they still can. It
Jeff Winters:is possible. It is people of our
Eric Watkins:Groeschel nation that is truth, truth from LinkedIn.
Jeff Winters:And now we come to are at this company this is even more flagrant lie than most referral programs don't work. You can't force referrals. They are happening organically in communities, at events and all over LinkedIn.
Scott Scully:Well, I know a lot of people disagree with me, but I think that the best way to get something rolling is to have an action plan and have it scheduled in As a must do, and I do agree that over time, when people see the results of it, then it organically starts doing creased and snowball gets bigger rolling downhill. But I think if you want to get anything rolling, you've got to have an initiative and referral programs have worked for us, you know, there are people that feel uncomfortable providing a referral. But for instance, in our case, it may bring their price down over time, or they may get a significant discount for one month, if they provide a referral to us that closes, then all of a sudden, you've got the people that aren't necessarily comfortable, or not thinking about providing a referral that are motivated to provide a referral so they can stay on our program and do it for less. So we've proven that the right program actually energizes our clients to provide more referrals. So I think it's a big false,
Eric Watkins:naturally, people skew towards the negative. So you go to a restaurant, you have a bad experience, you're way more likely to write a review on a bad experience than if you had a great experience and to go out, it just doesn't stay top of mind. So yes, these are happening in communities, etc. But if I talk to my client recently, and I went over this program, it's going to be top of mind when they go out in their community to be able to do that. So that's all I'm not saying. They provide the referral, just because we have a program, they provide it because they're happy with our service, ultimately. So I agree with that aspect. But having more conversations about it, or having a way to incentivize your partners, I think that's just don't like a you absolutely have to have something thinking that wouldn't work. I don't get it.
Jeff Winters:I think one thing that abstract does really, really well around referrals. is I think it's it's dedicated resources. It's great management of and goals toward referrals and how to do it. I think that's where people screw this up is they think, Oh, well, his sales are down, let's go, let's go get referrals, as opposed to this person is responsible for referrals. This person is responsible for referrals. This is what I'd say to anybody wrote that or believes it, try for six months dedicating one person to referrals, and give them the resources and breath to be in space to be able to create a program that will incentivize clients to do it and make one person responsible on calls in six months,
Scott Scully:I put reviews in the same category, you know, the same individual would probably say review programs don't work. And you have happier clients, if they're providing more positive reviews. And if they are providing more referrals, that's of course, an outcome you're looking for. And you're doing things the right way if you're getting those, but if you have programs, they will come like that. Otherwise, the top restaurant chains in particular taking reviews into consideration, they wouldn't offer something to provide a referral, or they wouldn't offer something to bring in a friend. You know,
Jeff Winters:what makes this true? Bad referral programs don't work. haphazard referral programs don't work, bold statement. The vast, vast, vast majority of companies and bordering on all, don't do nearly enough to generate referrals and don't know how to do it.
Scott Scully:All right, good stuff. As always. Thank you, Sheriff winters. All right, we're gonna move over to the 50 for 50. Another big topic today, mandatory best practices for some of your biggest roles. Here, what we do is we make sure to have a best practices session once a week. Yes, literally every week built into schedules. For in our case, every role, but the way that we are operating we in 85 to 90% of our roles, we have multiple people doing the same thing, right? If you're listening and you have three, four or five people, then there may be one best practices session that everybody's in, but people want to grow. People need to grow. People need to practice and you are going to go nowhere if you do the same over and over again. Right definition of insanity, I guess you know, our producer Neil reminded me of a quote by Gandhi and and we were talking about this before the show, I love it. And he said, learn as if you will live forever. Live like you will die tomorrow. Think it's pretty impacted. I
Eric Watkins:didn't know they were getting Gandhi today. They didn't they didn't know.
Scott Scully:I think that in the rest of our lives, if we're going to be good at something. It's just known that we practice want to be a good football player, your practice, even outside of the practice that you have at high school or college, you're in the gym, you're practicing You're watching Phil, you want to be good at playing the piano, you practice, if you want to know a little bit more about the world and have, you know, just knowledge of, if you want to be good at the trivia table, you're reading books and watching the news and practicing. But then you get into your professional career that you get into a position where you spend most of your waking hours for a huge portion of your life. You get into the position, but then are you learning? Are you studying or you're practicing? And the answer is, in most cases, no, what we do is we operate like a team. We operate like a professional sports team, where we say, you're playing your role, and we're going to practice and we're going to study, we're going to watch film, we're going to see what works and what doesn't work, and we're going to adapt to the business climate, we're going to adapt to technology advancements, we're always going to change and we're always going to get better, we want to get 1% Better, every single week. And if you make best practices mandatory, you will see that happen. If you treat it as a nice to have or do it every once in a while, you will not be as good of an organization, you know, just a few of the things that we think about that, you know, were mandatory best practices help is, you know, you're doing proactive training. So you're literally giving somebody a skill set before maybe something comes up. So they're ready for that problem, as opposed to oh, shit, this is coming up. Now we got to get people in a room and train them, which is how it's usually happening. You get to see other leaders involved in the training. And so they get to develop their skill set in leading classroom training and developing others. You know, this whole, creating a culture of constantly getting 1% better, we touched on that interaction with people in a best practice session, guess what if someone has an incredible account manager, month in month out, then all of a sudden, which doesn't always happen, the other account managers can be in a session with somebody that's doing a good job and hear about things that they're doing. To get a higher retention rate. It's the interaction of people. I think that at least what we've found here is today, more so than ever, people want to learn. And if they if they're not growing, they're leaving, right? Yeah, our our retention of people in our productivity have gone up. Since we've done this, it has impacted our employee retention rate, because people feel like they are learning and growing. And so there's more patients in getting into, you know, advanced positions, because they're still learning that those are just a few things. But if you think about running a team, anywhere else in life, wouldn't you have place? Wouldn't you practice those plays? Wouldn't you always be training and always be practicing? So if you're out there, and you're listening, and you have salespeople, or, and there's probably more training going on in sales than than anywhere else, but I would suggest, maybe not as much as there should be, or account management, or people ensuring safety or people answering the phones or building a particular product. Get together and practice. You know, we may we're gonna get sued after I say this. But Michael Buffer, we like to have the Michael Buffer challenge. Let's get ready to rumble. I think now that I say this, we get turned in and Michael Buffer comes after us, but we're just using your name because we like you, buddy. But there's a challenge. Like our salespeople that have been doing the same, you know, selling our product for eight years, nine years, 10 years have to get up in front of the room. And we throw objections at them. And they've got to continuously make, you know, get better at their trade, always, always be training and growing. And we've talked in another episode about putting you know, which was a good kind of controversial episode where we suggested everybody should have a schedule of the things that they do in their job laid out well, best practices session should be on that schedule. What do you guys think
Eric Watkins:it's just a thing that has been really ingrained in our culture. And one of the things that we've done, really last year was when we started doing this is we took it out of just sales, account management, delivery, and we stretched this across our whole organization and made sure every department every position, had a best practices that they were attending, and there's so many benefits to this. First thing, one of the bigger things that just want to highlight what Scott said, You're not being reactive with your training, you're being proactive, and you are creating that culture of constant improvement getting 1% better. One small thing is like There's a magic that happens in these best practices, someone has an idea or a piece of feedback. Or you can hear what someone's using that's really working. And that spreads like wildfire. And it gives, whether it's the thing itself, or it's the belief that they now have this thing that works, you know that that's just a huge advantage. And not to mention just getting your whole group together on a weekly basis. So if there's important announcements, or changes, just to have that meeting already set where you don't have to throw another meeting on everybody's calendar,
Jeff Winters:this was new to me, and it was jarring. Eric And Scott, have been doing this relatively the same way for a long time. When you come in from the outside, and you see, every single person gets one hour of training every single week, and we're going to track it, and we're going to report on it, and we're going to celebrate it. That is a very new thing. Because what I had done and what I had seen is we're gonna do training when we need it, and then we're not. And then we're going to do it again when we need it. And then when we're not and training goes to the backburner when things aren't going well, unless you force it. And what best practices does is, every person every week gets training, it forces training, everyone is being trained. And it not only forces training for everyone, but in particular forces training for the highest performers. Because I think most of the time and a lot of organizations, what you see is the highest Oh no, no, Joanne doesn't come to training, Joanne's good. She's the best service. Or Steve doesn't come to training Steve's the best salesperson we know know, everybody comes to training, it is a lunch pail culture is a come in it is get better, and the best people are also going to be there. So you can hear from them what they're doing. There's a humility that's built into best practices that is underrated. And at your company. If you want to continuously grow and get better, like there's a reason on those best workplaces survey, there's always a question, do you get the training, you need to be great at your job? Yeah, because you that's what that's the thing. The best workplaces do every person one hour of training every week, mandatory. Lock it,
Scott Scully:love it. It's just a big one for us. Again, what you know, what's the homework, look at your departments, look at your organization, think about the things that you want to make sure to be great at, and put sessions in place. And just make sure that these people are always great growing, and involve them, involve them and what the curriculum should look like, involve them and helping put on the trainings. And if your group feels like they are always growing, you're going to be more productive, and you're going to win, you're going to outlast other organizations, people will be trying to catch up. So we're interested in hearing, hearing your feedback and how that goes. So with that said, it is time to head over to mining for growth
Eric Watkins:mining for gross gold, cue the pickaxe. Alright, so for today, what we're going to talk about is little email marketing. And, you know, this came about, as you know, we come on this show, and we talk about how, you know, we've figured things out, and we have a lot of the answers. But we're always looking, we're always looking at our data, we're always trying to get better. We're always trying to find commonalities, we can come on here and share this was all a view of what's working internally. So recently, we did some evaluation. And we looked at, you know, our top 10% of email performing clients. And we looked at our bottom 10%. And we wanted to see our correlation between subject lines. And what we found is that between both of those groups, they had just about the exact same subject lines, there was really no difference between the top 10% And the bottom 10%. Now, you may ask, Well, does that mean subject lines aren't important? I would say no, that's not necessarily the case. There's we follow a lot of best practices with those. But what is arguably more important than the subject line in this day and age is the message preview. And I'm talking about the five to seven words that show up under the subject line, depending on the zoom of your screen, how many words you can see where you can actually get a little preview of the message. So we were looking at these clients and seeing the ones that were performing well, and the ones that were performing, not so well. And what we found is we found a lot of commonalities with the ones that weren't performing well, the ones that are that were not doing well, the ones that were doing well, you know, there there were some definitely a couple of trends that work but more importantly, it was like just don't do these things. So here's what we found, and this is what we're going to give to you today. First thing is being too aggressive or salesy right up front people and we're talking about the first five to seven words. They should not feel like you're trying to sell them something right up front. Second thing is this sounding too proper. When we were looking at some of our emails, we were trying to be too eloquent and official, you know, people are getting internal emails with all lowercase writing that are like, Hey, are you gonna, you come into this meeting at four, you know, you want to be camouflaged as an internal meeting and that, you know, that just doesn't play. And then the other thing is just saying anything about yourself, I did this exercise where I looked at my inbox, because I get a lot of sales emails in a day. And almost all of them started with Hey, Eric, I, or we, and then insert everything about their their company in general. So what I'm what I'm getting at with this is the number one thing I think people can do for a best practice is try to talk about the prospect specifically, in that first line, what can you do to relate this email to that prospect? In more than anything, when you're sitting down to write your content, spend a little bit extra time on that message preview, think about what they're going to be seeing and think about what you're going to be competing against. I think this is a really big deal. And it's something that in our organization, when it comes to writing our content, we're gonna put on a pedestal and we're gonna get a lot more intentional with it. I am in
Jeff Winters:a unique group on this that you too are not in, because I haven't a proper name. And I have a nickname. I have Jeffrey. And I have Jeff. The preview text very quickly, shows me who my friends are and who my friends are not like Eric is Eric Scott has got Niels Neil. It's not Eric Solem. You just there. But very quickly, I open or donate, you send me an email that says Jeffrey I do not open. And that is the definition of how preview text kills your open rates, reply rates and meeting rates, because that could be the best message anyone's ever sent. It could say, Jeffrey, this is the IRS. I have not learned about opening it says Jeffrey. Nobody calls me Jeffrey, the goal is to get it opened you open emails that look like they're coming to you from someone who has some knowledge of who you are or what you do. commonality, whatever. That's easy. Eric, I think this is a great observation. People fixate on the subject lines, they shouldn't the preview text, spend more time there.
Scott Scully:I love this. You know, in any kind of direct marketing, I think that what is coming up in the, in the first part of the messaging is is important. Obviously, it's it's not that much different than saying you need a hook up front. Right, right. You're just saying that that's the first thing that they see. So you better talk to him personally, and make sure they're hooked. And I love though, that you went and looked at subject lines, and then really came up with this. Yeah, we probably have good subject lines anyway, like you said, because we have best practices to say, here's what we need to do every time with subject lines. But I I love when you're doing both. Well, that you would say that the preview text is even more important than the subject line.
Eric Watkins:Yeah, you know, it's interesting, too, because the it's not that the first part of an email has always been important, because it also gets them to read the rest of the email. But I think the important like there's just now that first five to seven words is most about how can I get this person to open it up? And then the rest from there is how you can get the prospect to convert, but it's interesting.
Scott Scully:All right. Good stuff. Eric, thank you for that. We now need to figure out how to close all these leads, since we've got a whole pipeline full of them. What good advice do you have today, Jeff?
Jeff Winters:Today we're going to talk about the sales follow up process and the importance of really, really narrowly defining for your sales team, the sales follow up process. Because often what happens is a lot of time and thought and energy goes in to the sales process. We're going to have a discovery call, we might have a demonstration, we're going to give a sales presentation. That sales slide deck looks like this. The sales presentation here are generally the script, there's going to be some q&a, there's going to be some objection handling, then we're going to have a second meeting that we're going to send a proposal. We've thought a lot about this. It's in our CRM, we've got different stages. We talk about the pipeline in our pipeline meetings with our salespeople, we're good. But then you get off the first sales call and you go what's the next step? Got a follow up? All right. Next, follow up is so critical in so many different stages of the sales process, and it means a million different things to a million different people. And I think as leaders and sales leaders if you started digging into your sales follow up from your For sales reps, you would be shocked at what's being sent, you would be shocked at what's not being sent. Or you'd be shocked at how few calls are being made, or the interval between first meeting. And this person's ignoring me, and how many calls are in those intervals. And so my message to sales leaders and leaders in general today is you need to provide your team with and define a sales follow up process. And it's a little tricky, because deals are going to go in different directions. But don't fool yourself into thinking that deals are gonna go into an infinite number of directions, they are not. So here's what you do, you have different branches of when a deal goes this way, when a person does this, when I have a great follow up call, and I think it's going to close in under a month when I have a long term sales cycle, it's gonna go this way. And what we do is we have a defined step, or play for, we've got probably 25 defined plays that you can run, whether it be an email, or a phone call, or text or whatever, we've got it in the CRM, and our reps have to select which play, they're going to run out of that group, on which day. So day three, we're going to do this. And if they don't respond, they said, We're going to do this. Having that level of rigor not only helps us be consistent in the process, and we're constantly making sure they have the best place to run. But also, it ensures that our sales reps aren't spending endless hours thinking about and craning over the specific email they're going to write. And then I give it to my boss, do you like this email? And then I go look at it again. No, no. Have it defined? Have it laid out? Make sure it's followed? Be rigorous about it, define your sales follow up process?
Scott Scully:I love it. I think anytime that you have what good or great looks like and it's documented and defined, you're gonna have a larger percentage of your people following best practices. Like it's, it's good stuff.
Eric Watkins:Yeah. And when you don't have it, what happens is you have reps just hanging on to deals as long as they can, when you know you have a defined process, you're more apt to get to a yes or no. And that's the that's what it's all about. Like, the more people you have in the maybe category are on the fence or you can't get them back on the phone. That's what clogs up a sales pipeline. That's what ultimately limits what you're going to sell long term. And then it makes it okay to get enough. Get it no moving along the process. And there'll be back in the picture at a later date. Absolutely.
Unknown:Okay. Okay.
Scott Scully:We are there to do or not to do the question
Eric Watkins:or not to do. The weather's getting nicer outside. We're coming up. We're not too far away from summer, people are gonna start traveling a little bit,
Jeff Winters:Eric, we've got international listeners they might be in summer, I just got to my right. Global
Eric Watkins:global, we may want to go reach those global customers. And so when we do that, we got to fly on a plane. And none of us are talking about
Unknown:a gross show road tour.
Eric Watkins:I could be the gross
Jeff Winters:show roadshow.
Eric Watkins:The crow show roadshow. That's fun, I like that, we should do that. But when we do that, you gotta get on a plane. And typically, you got to make a decision. You either do it beforehand, when you pick your seat. Or if you're flying southwest, it's based on when you board and you go pick your seat. My question is, do you sit in a window seat? Or do you sit in an aisle seat? And what is your preference and why Scott will start with you and not even hard aisle. aisle and why? Cuz I just,
Scott Scully:I don't want to be crammed up against the window. And if you do happen to get with a couple of larger people, that's exactly what happens. Your shoulders are bent. Your cheek is on the window. And it's a longer flight and you want to get out it's a pain in the ass you got to ask them half the time they're asleep drooling half lane on you got to wake them up. They're pissed. You gotta get them up. It's just an aisle. And can I add to that? Yeah, not an aisle in the front of the plane so that when you get in there, your southwest let's say and you get in there and you take an aisle on the front and then 172 People pass you and just knock the shit out. Like I walk if I'm on Southwest West which I do not like doing but if I am I'm getting off in there first and then I'm going all the way to the back and picking an aisle so that I don't get knocked into by all those people you go to the back I do not I go to the back
Jeff Winters:I'm also I'll but I'm gonna give you something that may be a little more controversial. If I am faced with The uneven vehicle decision of a middle seat versus a window seat, a middle, middle, middle, always middle wise, I find the window seat claustrophobic. I find it often there's a lot of pressure with the window up or the window. I don't like that part of it. And I am always thinking about when I inevitably have to go to the bathroom. How many people am I going to disrupt? And the fewer the better. And so therefore, I'm a I'm a winner. And I also feel like the the aisle and the window they know you don't want to be in the middle. You're there because you got to be because you were late because something went wrong. And so I think they pay you a little and show you a little more love. So I am a I am an aisle always. But if I'm faced window or middle, I'm always going mental 100% of the time going metal.
Eric Watkins:I like the window. Yeah, I like seeing what's going on. Like I don't want to be in the dark. I'm in the I'm in the dark. They got it closed. And I can't sleep on planes because I sleep on my side. But on the window, got a little head laying there. Do you neck pillow? I did neck pillow for a long time. And it just stopped working. So I do I think just the good old hoodie crumbled up.
Jeff Winters:neck pillows a tough look, I
Eric Watkins:think Yeah.
Scott Scully:You said that. You feel like there's a certain amount of respect that people pay to the people in the middle. Yeah. I think the people in the middle have no armrests. The person on the person on the on the window and the aisle have fought hard to take the arm or the person in the middle. And maybe that's why they're sleeping sleeping on. Yeah, because it's like, they've got both arms and they're just like nothing to do but try to fall asleep because it's so miserable. It's horrible.
Jeff Winters:Scott, look, I know you're this way. If during COVID I could have gotten on a plane that went nowhere just to work, I would have paid whatever it would have cost i love i crane. It's one of my favorite things to go on a plane and get out my computer and work in an uninterrupted way for hours in the middle. Forget it.
Scott Scully:We've we have now caused 1000s of people to really reconsider the plane flights or Yeah or wave or they're not going to listen anymore, but we hope you hang on because we enjoy doing this. We hope you enjoy listening to another great episode of the Grow show. As always, please like subscribe, follow this let people know that we're out there we want to make it easier for as many people as possible. We can grow and grind.
Eric Watkins:Let's grow let's grow.
Unknown:Let's grow. The grow show is sponsored by creative sweets big agency flavor bite size price