Welcome to Season 3 of 10/10 GTM: The Podcast for Revenue Leaders!
Our guest for Episode 19 is Beau Brooks, VP of Sales & CS at Teamwork. Beau brings more than a decade of experience to the table. Before Teamwork, he held leadership positions at Factorial HR, Formstack, and Signpost.
In this episode, Ross and Beau discuss why it’s necessary to review pain on all internal deals, make deal stage progression transparent, and run team level calls.
Listen to the episode here, and get the key takeaways from our conversation below.
Reviewing pain on all internal deal reviews
Getting to a prospect’s true versus perceived pain point isn’t always a straightforward process. According to Beau, the discovery process is usually a smokescreen: “We’re asking the buyer to tell us the things they’re doing wrong, or they’ve done wrong, or they’ve ignored, and nobody likes to talk about the things they do wrong.”
That’s why Beau stresses the importance of talking about pain during internal deal reviews. Oftentimes, what the rep has identified as the primary pain point isn’t. Instead, it’s just a problem that manifests from a larger issue. To get to the root cause, the rep needs to push harder and ask different questions. Having an internal review process allows sales leaders to weigh in and help the rep come up with the right questions to pinpoint the issue.
When doing the internal pain review, here are 5 questions to ask your reps:
- What’s the pain?
- What have you documented?
- What are you still working on discovering?
- Is this real or assumed pain?
- What do you not know?
When this is done right, it offers a major competitive advantage. Most of the time, buyers are talking to various companies when evaluating a new product or software. And if they’re getting all the same questions from other companies, but your organization is the one that asks challenging questions, pays attention to their answers, and gets them to reveal the uncomfortable truth they don’t want to share, win rates go through the roof.
Making deal stage progression transparent
There are typically 5 to 8 stages that sellers carry a deal through. At the leadership level, these stages are crystalized. The sales leaders decide what each stage is called and what the conversion rates are. Then, they use this information as a forecasting tool. But the reps often get left in the dust because they don’t have a clear definition of what each stage is and what their responsibilities are.
When you make deal stage progression transparent, you provide your reps with a roadmap outlining what the expectations are in each stage and what needs to be accomplished to move a deal forward.
Sometimes this process is uncomfortable because as a sales leader, you have to make difficult decisions about what it means to move a deal into a negotiating stage and what it should look like. But it’s important because it takes the guesswork out of the process for sellers which makes it easier to forecast and determine what accounts to focus on.
Running team level calls
Team-level calls can easily become the cornerstone of building a winning sales strategy. This process involves gathering your sales team for a meeting, selecting a call to review, and then benchmarking it. The purpose is to define what good looks like and what bad looks like.
“When we run our team calls, we select two reps ahead of time to listen to the calls. One prepares positive feedback of what went well and the other provides constructive feedback,” says Beau.
To get alignment across the organization, it’s also beneficial to invite other departments into the calls such as Marketing, Product, and SLT. When you do this, your team can get on the same page about how to talk to customers or what updates need to be made in marketing materials to clarify common questions.
Regular reviews also help reps identify and break bad habits. For example, reps are often shocked to discover how frequently they use filler words. Becoming aware of their frequent use of phrases like “you know,” “I mean,” and “like” encourages them to pay more attention to their speech patterns, which can be developmental for the entire team.
Rapid fire: Beau’s fast sales insights
In a rapid-fire Q&A session, Beau shares his insights with us on a wide range of topics:
What’s the main reason most teams miss their ARR goals? Failure to plan and lack of alignment between Marketing and Sales.
What’s your favorite resource for revenue leaders? I’m a big John McMahon fan. He’s the author of The Qualified Sales Leader: Proven Lessons from a Five-Time CRO, which is a great resource.
What’s the number one challenge for revenue leaders in 2024? Getting to the ultimate decision maker inside of an organization.
SMB, Mid-market, or enterprise? Mid-market.
What’s the most important org: Sales, CS, or Marketing? Marketing.
Best way to unplug from the demands of leadership? I’m a trail runner, so running 10 to 20 miles on the trails in Colorado helps me unplug.
About Beau Brooks
Beau is the VP of Sales and CS at Teamwork. He has more than a decade of sales leadership experience and previously held roles at Factorial HR, Formstack, and Signpost. Drawn to challenging problems, Beau is known for raising his hand when no one else will. He enjoys finding creative solutions and implementing them effectively.
