Latest / Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth / 77: Set a big goal for your team to rally around

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77: Set a big goal for your team to rally around · Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth

• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: If you're looking for a way to fire up your B2B sales team or have them rally around one big cause, this is the episode for you.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: I remember in back in the 80s, the first big British BBC crime drama was something called Prime Suspect.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: And it was one of these things, and it's actually happened a lot over the last two or three decades, where the British, I guess, acting and film community, every year they just seemed to have a breakout hit around crime drama.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: Alright.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: And the one back then was called Prime Suspect.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: What was interesting was at the start of the three or four part series.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: At the start of it, the focus was around solving this murder.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: And the lead detective was was getting his team excited, and all the detectives were rallying around the idea they're going to beat Jimmy Smith's record about how fast to solve a case.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: And what was happening was as they got a breakthrough, they would cheer and go, Yeah, we're going to beat the record, and he would run down the hall saying we're going to beat Jimmy's record and all this sort of stuff.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: And he coalesced a whole group of detectives around the idea of his one goal, which was they're going to beat this one record that'd been supposedly around for decades.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: And this is actually the idea of this episode.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: And the term these days being used quite a bit is the big, hairy, audacious goal, the BHAG.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a very powerful tool to bring a group of people together around a common cause to go after something.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: And it should be something that's difficult to do, right?
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: But people should feel like it's a big thing if it was achieved, but not too big, it's almost impossible to do.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: So how do we use a BHAG in our B2B sales team to rally the team around and get great success?
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: So the first concept is the idea that salespeople are not coin operated.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, it's one of these phrases that just pisses me off, right?
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: It somehow, to me, anyway, it sounds very demeaning when people say, Oh yeah, salespeople, they're just coin operated, just throw money at it.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: Now, don't get me wrong, throwing money at me is not a bad thing, right?
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: But at the end of the day, salespeople are human beings who have their own motivations.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: And often, when, in fact, often, I mean most of the time, vast majority of the time, almost without exception, it's not actually the money that motivates us.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's what the money means.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I've seen this in in sales reps and sales leaders where it's somewhat closer to their goals of retirement.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: It might be to get on the scoreboard at a certain level, right?
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: They might have set goals to beat their previous year, the previous year, or they might just in their team want to say, I want to be number one, and to do number one, I've got to sell this much, and that means so much to me.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: But really, it's the satisfaction of being number one.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: There's lots of different reasons behind the money.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: And rarely it's just to say, oh yeah, I just made this much and it means nothing to me apart from that, right?
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's kind of ludicrous to say that.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: So the first thing is to recognize that we as human beings need more than just a paycheck in order for us to be motivated, to have purpose in our jobs, to have meaning in our jobs.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: And that kind of leads on to the second thing, which is well, what is it about what we do that drives us, that gives us our motivation to work?
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: Now, there's two areas, two recent books that have been done, been written about this.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: This first one is very popular, which is Daniel Pink's book, Drive.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: And the second one is a book by Susan Fowler called Master Your Motivation.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: Very similar in terms of their conclusions, basically looking at a whole bunch of research on people rather than just anecdotes, and thinking about what it is as you look at the research that says, here uh is what we as human beings are motivated by.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: And in Daniel Pink's book, they talk about purpose, and in Susan Fowler's book, they talk about connection.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: But the idea is kind of similar, which is that we want a connection and we want a purpose to this higher belief, this higher dream, this big goal, this bigger thing to achieve in life.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: What's interesting, when I first started off doing what I doing selling in in software, you know, 20, 25 years ago, there really wasn't anything about this in terms of how companies were thinking, at least the ones that I worked at, right?
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: It was very much, hey, we've got this, it helps our customers in this way, now here's your quota, go sell, right?
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: And if I look at into the 2000s and certainly into the the 10s, 2010s, there's been more focus from companies to think about what it is they're trying to achieve, the bigger goals and dreams that they have.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: And this whole concept of the founder story really came to the fore.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: And that founder story is what's told again and again at companies to say this is what we're trying to achieve.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not, you know, be the most profitable company or sell the most of our software and that.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: There's some bigger goal to go after.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what the center of what Susan Fowler and Daniel Pink's research is, is that one of the things that we need as human beings is this bigger sense of purpose.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: So, what does that mean in terms of in the B2B sales team?
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we don't need to rely on the company's big sense of purpose and big connection to a bigger ideal in our individual teams.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: You, as a first line or even a second line leader, can have your own sense of purpose for the team around the idea of a BHAG.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: All right, and I kind of look at these in in two buckets.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: One is where you're moving towards something to achieve some great things.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: And the second one is where you're trying to, you know, beat or move away from something that's bad.
• 6:38
  unknown: Right?
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: So, what does all this mean, and what be some examples?
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: So it may be that the moving or moving against something bad might be, you know, what are we all battling out there?
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: It could be the bad people, the hackers in the cybersecurity world.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: It might be against a competitor who we believe has terrible business practices and are just awful people for our customers and for the market in general, right?
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: It might be against a bad year of the year before, right?
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: Where what we're doing is trying to come out of this a bad situation, move towards something good.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: And when we're thinking about good things, that it might be doing something that hasn't been done inside the company, right?
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: It might be being number one, right?
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: That might be something that you want to rally the troops around.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: It might be being known for something as well.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: You might want to be known as the team that you know, I don't know, built the most pipeline, qualified pipe in the first six months of the year, right?
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: Something like that where you're actually moving towards where you're gonna almost win when you get there.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: Where the other one is about beating someone else and moving away from that world over there.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: So these are the two kind of options that we have.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: And what are some examples for each of those?
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: So if we're looking for the winning one, it might be the number one team in the company.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: It might be more new, simple things like that.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: You know, maybe the team kind of gets rallied around competitive stuff, right?
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: So that might be big for them.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: It might be something that's really super simple, right?
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe the the company or the sales team has got a bad rap internally about discounting too much.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: And we just say we're gonna be the team that doesn't discount.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna be the lowest discounters in the company, right?
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: And it puts a pressure on the team to really sell value properly, right?
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: It could be actually much more customer oriented, right?
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: So you could say, for example, that we want the most live customers, not logo wins or actual live customers, customers to go this year than anyone else in the company.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: And that might rally around the idea that you really want to have successful customers, right, who are using the software and therefore are referenceable or or can do case studies around whatever it might be, right?
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: So that's another one.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: Another one might be the idea that you can transform existing prospects, right?
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: So you could say, you know, we've got a pipeline that looks like this.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, we want it to be like this, and we want more of a mix of this product set or something like that, right?
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: And you rally around the idea that you're gonna be the team in the company that achieves this great thing over a year.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: There's lots of things that can be.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: The I think the key is to not make it monetary, right?
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: That's what spiffs are for, right?
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: And spiffs kind of work, you know, again, don't get me wrong, throw some money at me, I'll go after it, right?
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: But don't think of this just in terms of spiffs, think about it as attaching a bigger thing to go after that a team is gonna rally around.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: And what you might want to do is when you think about your your weekly calls or your regular team calls, is you don't call it, you know, weekly team call, you call it whatever the BHAG is, the logo generation call, the pipeline generation, whoever it might be, right?
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: You can again rally around it.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: And on every single call, and maybe on emails or communications with the team, you're talking about where you are against that BHAG, right?
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: We're at two of 30, right?
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: The first month, right?
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: We're on track or we're slightly behind.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: We need to re-rally around this whole idea, and then you kind of get everyone coalesced to get things back on track, right?
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: So giving the team updates about where you are against the B Hag is kind of important.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: So these are all some ideas to think about.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: I think you know, one thing I would do is work with the team on what the B HAG is.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: This shouldn't just be, you know, pulled out your back pocket and said this is what it should be because they won't really believe in it.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: If you get the chance to get the team together at any time, or maybe you have to do it in different groups as you're you're going around your team, get them to say, well, what could we do this year that would be meaningful?
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: What could we do as a team that's gonna be light our name and lights and and we're gonna feel an incredible sense of purpose at the end of it, right?
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: And inspire them to come up with more things than you know, be the quota busters or you know, whatever it might be, get the most people at the club.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: That's not a bad thing, but you know, inspire them to think bigger and wider than that, that they get super excited about it.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: So there you have it.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: That's the power of a BHAG.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: And my challenge for you is to think about how and when you could put that into play in your organization.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: When's the chance where you can get some of the team or all the team together to have that discussion, maybe informally, to say, well, let's go after something meaningful this year, but we need to figure out together what it is, and then make sure you embed it in everything you do and track it and rally around it.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: Just like I said with the detective at the start, he was constantly rallying his troops around every success they had in the investigation.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: He would say, We're gonna beat the record, we're gonna beat the record, right?
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: Same thing you know with with the B Hag.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: Every success you get as you start moving towards the goal.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: You can communicate with confidence, guys, we're on track to get this.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: We just keep going at this rate, we're gonna be able to get there.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: And imagine what it means for us all when we do.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: So rally the team around a BHAG and let the team flourish in that environment.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: This episode is sponsored by Sales Bluebird.
• 12:01
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• 12:13
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• 12:18
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• 12:28
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