2 Years in the Trenches – Lessons Learned Building a Prospecting Machine
Linkedin kindly congratulated me one morning last week on my anniversary at Allego. And what a journey it’s been, anyone who’s worked in startup land knows how quickly things change week by week.
To say a lot has happened would be a huge understatement, we’ve had new faces, new customers, new offices, and more recently a giant hole in the floor! So I thought to myself, what better way to reminisce than by sharing some of the mistakes, successes, and lessons I’ve learned along the way.
I can still remember day one, sitting down with our GM Kevin Beales over a coffee and going through the plan. He confessed lead generation had been keeping him up at night and it was a problem we needed to fix and quickly…….no pressure then!
Lesson 1: Test Everything
I’m a firm believer that lead generation is the hardest job in sales but get it right and it makes everything else a damn sight easier. This leads me on to lesson number one: test everything. This isn’t revolutionary but it’s true. I personally hate the saying ‘if it isn’t broke don’t fix it.’ If the human race had followed this advice we’d still be driving around in Ford Model T’s or even worse living in our caves.
Everything can be improved. We’ve made plenty of mistakes but we’ve tried to learn from each and every one. If we ever get a 90% open rate, I can guarantee we’ll be pushing for 91%. This goes for us personally, as individuals, and as a team, we are constantly looking to get better each and every day.
Sir Dave John Brailsford the mastermind behind the only sport (cycling) Brits were decent at for a good while sums it up best.
He believes in “The aggregation of marginal gains.” He explained it as “the one percent margin for improvement in everything you do.” His belief was that if you improved every area related to cycling by just one percent, then those small gains would add up to remarkable improvement.
I think sales have a lot to learn from sports in general, but more on that some other time.
One of the hardest challenges we’ve faced at Allego was scaling the team. We’d worked very hard to establish a process that worked, spent endless amounts of time tweaking and testing the process to consistently deliver the desired number of qualified leads.
Now it was time to roll this out and grow the team. I’m far from an expert on hiring sales reps and there have been a number of blogs written by others with vastly more experience than I have.
There are an endless number of things to look for in a potential new hire, but the two things that are essential in my eyes are coachability and attitude. Give me a hungry SDR straight from university any day, one who has the right attitude and is willing to learn is already on the path to becoming a rockstar and I’ve been lucky enough to work with a few at Allego..
Lesson 2: Know Your Numbers
This leads me to my next lesson, know your numbers! Whether you have five SDRs or 500, the process MUST be scalable in order to make it predictable. And in order to achieve this you need to know your numbers, how many dials does it take to reach a prospect? How many prospects do you need to speak with in order to create an opportunity? How many demos does it take to win a customer, and so on?
It’s critical to establish what sales performance metrics are important in your company, so reps have a clear understanding of what is expected of them. When you have this information you can provide a pathway to success. If an SDR is not achieving the levels expected of them, it also makes diagnosing the problem far easier so time spent coaching can be dedicated to those areas.
Our biggest breakthrough at Allego came when we dared to be different. We aim to stand out from the crowd and cut through the sea of mundane emails and cold calls prospects receive on a daily basis. It makes me proud every day when the team is praised by senior sales leaders for their fantastic outreach.
My colleague Jen is a master of this on the phone, her approach involves introducing herself as ‘the smiley ginger woman stalking you on Linkedin.’ This atypical approach immediately warms up most (not all) cold calls, buying Jen valuable time to open up the conversation.
Lesson 3: Coach Your Team
This brings me to my final point, sales coaching. I’ve always been a huge advocate of coaching and have been fortunate to have some great coaches both professionally and personally in my hobbies. However, what did shock me was the impact coaching has had at Allego. Take Jacob, one of the first SDRs to join the team. He joined us straight from school, his attitude is brilliant and he’s proved to be as coachable as they come.
Any advice Jacob receives he takes on board and runs with. I regularly coach his call and demos, do regular sales role-play sessions and scenario challenges, Jacob has also taken ownership of his own development regularly asking our CEO and head of sales to coaching his calls. This has helped him progress from a junior SDR with a little phone fear, to a confident top performing SDR who is now running his own demos and closing business within 6 months. I think coaching is as close to a silver bullet as we have in the world of sales, but it’s also massively underutilized, which is what I’m passionate about changing.
All in all, there can be no denying it’s been a rollercoaster ride. What I can say with 100% certainty is I love coming to work, having the opportunity to work alongside this talented team has helped me to grow every day and I’m excited to see what the next two years have in store for the team Allego!
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