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“You can only manage what you measure”

Companies everywhere are trying to get a grasp on how—and how much— the coronavirus pandemic is impacting their business, so they can make short and long term adjustments.

And though this quote might feel a bit cliche, it has never been more true!

One of the amazing aspects of working at Troops is that we’re able to see how some of the top companies in the world are instrumenting and operationalizing their go-to-market (GTM) motions.

In this post, we’re going to cover various ways we’re seeing teams adjust their CRM to capture information related to COVID so they can remain agile, coordinated, and productive during this crisis.

“Another COVID-19 email…”

Like many of you, I continue to receive emails from company leaders about what they are doing about COVID-19.

For internet companies, we’re hearing about people working from home.

For local stores, we’re hearing about businesses completely closing.

In all cases, there are people like you at every one of these companies trying to figure out how to navigate this new world.

Outside sales reps deal with challenges on the road that most office-bound reps rarely think about — what to wear, where to go, how to get there, and when to report back add multiple layers of complexity to sales.

The challenges don’t stop there, however. Many reps struggle to get quality sales information into their CRM during the day (and the last thing anyone wants to do is spend the evening in Salesforce). What’s more, they work apart from the rest of the sales team and miss out on the same progress reports and motivators their peers get in the office.

It’s also difficult for sales managers who are trying to give them guidance from afar.

When it comes to sales forecasting, people usually talk about the big five forecast data points: forecast category, stage, amount, next step, and close date. Problem is, while these data points are enough to create a sales forecast, they’re not enough to ensure the forecast is realistic.

Companies spend a lot of money on sales kickoff meetings. They often drop $1,000-$2,000 a sales rep on the event alone. Add in travel and entertainment and that cost increases by at least $1,500-$2,000 per rep.

It’s no surprise then that companies seek a return on this investment. They want their SKOs to rally the troops around a new product, new pricing, new packaging, or a new sales process that’s going to make 2020 a massive success.

The problem is while SKOs are great for building excitement and initial momentum, they’re not so good at teaching and reinforcing new, long-lasting behaviors.

Imagine going to college for two days and expecting to learn everything you need to know for your degree. Then add bright lights, emotional speakers, a whirlwind of new information, and an array of food and drink. It’s a miracle you get out with the knowledge you need to immediately start executing on a big, new initiative.

Now consider the abysmal statistics for retaining what you were able to pick up. A whopping 85%-90% of training just floats away after only 120 days, sometimes sooner. Where does it go? Who knows.

So, you’re about to announce a major initiative at your SKO, and you 100% need your sales team to execute on it when it’s over. How do you make that happen?

You reinforce it.

Reinforcement ensures your sales team takes the things they learned at SKO and executes on them even after the event becomes a distant memory. Here’s how you can use Troops to create sales reinforcement that helps your team adopt the very behaviors they need to make your 2020 sales initiative a success.

When we started Troops we told people we wanted to make work easy. Turns out, when you’re building a company from scratch, it’s anything but easy. But over the past year, the Troops team kept marching on towards our mission and we’ve made great progress with hundreds of partners and thousands of people using Troops each and every day.

At Troops, we still want to make work easy and make work more human. As we enter a new decade, more than ever, the tools we use at work and the software we interact with to do our jobs should adapt to humans instead of requiring humans to adapt to outdated, hard to use software. 

In October 2019, at Slack Frontiers London, Slack and Salesforce announced availability of a deeper integration between Slack and Salesforce Sales and Service Clouds.

Many sales organizations spend a small fortune implementing a new sales process. For example, expect to pay a trainer $10,000-50,000 to teach the new process to a team of about 25 people for a few hours over a couple of weeks.

Once training’s over, it’s not uncommon for everyone to get excited about the new things they learned, only to eventually revert to their old ways without the sweeping changes you hoped for.

Sound familiar?

In speaking with our customers and other industry leaders, we discovered that getting sales teams to effectively adopt the new sales methodology once it’s rolled out is one of the biggest challenges sales leaders struggle to overcome.

Thankfully, there are ways to make adopting a new sales process easier for teams and leaders alike.

Proper documentation, proactive prompts, frequent inspections, leadership oversight, and automated workflows help ease some of the most common pitfalls that come with transitioning to a new sales process.

We’ve discussed this in previous posts, but the average discovery meeting costs over $700. In some enterprise environments, this number is a lot higher.