How to build a top 1% Sales team
How to build a top 1% Sales team
With Kevin Dorsey, SVP Sales at Bench
I recently had a fantastic conversation with Kevin “KD” Dorsey on The Revenue Fomula Podcast on his perspective on building and scaling Sales. You can listen to the whole episode here.
In today’s Revenue Letter, I wanted to break down KD’s framework and show how you can start implementing it in your teams.
What makes a one percenter in Sales?
They’re consistent in numbers, pitch, followup and activities.
They treat their career like a professional, they’re always prepared, and you can always count on them to plan out their week, quarter and year.
And most of all, they make it look so effortless.
But the thing about one percenters? They’re one percenters for a reason.
You can’t just build a top 1% sales team by betting on 1% sales reps.
But you can use them to learn from the best, and bring the rest of your reps to 80% of their level.
In this article, I’m going to share KD’s 5 steps on how to do just that.
And how this framework led to an 18% lift in ACV
Step 1: Figure out What Good Looks Like (WGLL)
It’s not enough to point out that a rep is producing 2-8 times more than the rest and say “do that.”
Instead, dissect every part of their approach.
Who do they target?
How do they run discovery?
What questions do they ask?
How do they handle objections?
How do they handle pricing questions?
Etc.
In KD’s example, they noticed that a particular rep had a 30% higher ACV than the rest of the team.
Step 2: Define
The ACV difference is obviously the good that we want to copy. But before we can do that, we need to figure out how the rep did it.
In this case, one of KD’s directors started reviewing her calls and proposals and found the answer.
While most of the team was breaking pricing down piece by piece, the top performer was presenting it as a package.
Step 3: Document
Now that we know what behavior leads to a higher ACV, it’s about documenting every aspect of it. Write it down in a doc, create a scorecard, create prompts, etc.
This is important because folks need to be able to find it somewhere to reference it. You can’t just tell them once.
Specifically, in KD’s pricing example, they created scorecards.
Step 4: Demonstrate
In this step, you show the rest of your team how it should look like. Pull up calls, pull out snippets, and do training around it. This gives reps a real understanding of how these new tactics could and should look like.
In KD’s example, they demonstrated it through the top performer’s sales calls and broke down snippets for training purposes.
You can even have the top performer be part of or lead the training themselves.
Step 5: Deliberately Practice
A problem most orgs have is the common sales mindset of “we just need to get good at the game”. We tend to think that we can just teach new sales reps to sell, and throw them into a call with a CTO or CRO.
But the thing is, the game is not practice. It’s where practice pays off
Instead you spend this kind of deliberate practice away from the calls, and more on helping reps find their tone and words, as well as objections and how to handle them.
KD’s team deliberately practiced the new training for a whole quarter. 1:1s, training and roleplays on one particular aspect. In this case: pricing.
The result? The entire team had an ACV jump of 18%.
And that led to millions of dollars of additional revenue across the board.
Listen Here
Don’t forget to check out our full Revenue Formula Podcast episode with KD. He touches on:
How Sales Enablement can know WGLL and run 4Ds
How marketing can find trending keywords leading to revenue, and create cases and content for objection handling
RevOps role in finding WGLL
Keep Reading
Follow Kevin Dorsey on Linkedin for more sales content.
And if sales performance interests you, make sure to check out KD's sales leadership accelerator.