Document, Standardize, Automate

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Strong Sales Leaders don’t build high performing teams by focusing on coaching alone. They look holistically at the environment in which their team operates in order to identify inefficiencies and remove them so that their team members can deploy their time toward only those activities which generate revenue or mitigate churn. The best way to do this is to take a systems thinking approach to identify leverage points which you, as a leader, can impact to the benefit of your team.

My favorite framework for Sales Leaders to use when working to make a system wide / process change on their team is a simple one with three steps:

1. Document

2. Standardize

3. Automate

The goal of taking the Document, Standardize, Automate approach to examining your business is to make a process change which improves your team’s ability to do their work. This approach works because the steps are simple to follow even for those who are not naturally inclined to be process oriented leaders.

When looking for where to start, I often plot a simple 2 x 2 matrix with Effort on the x-axis and Impact on the y-axis. On this matrix I add any of the existing processes / tasks my team is responsible for on a daily basis (e.g. prospecting, cold calling, pre-call planning, post-call note taking, etc.).

After I’ve documented the different ways in which team members currently do that work, I plot each process to see where standardizing, and eventually automation, would have the highest impact for the least amount of effort. As you progress with this framework for making process change on your team you will eventually gain the confidence to make those “big bets” and standardize / automate items which are high impact but also high effort.

I ❤️ documentation you can too

The most common question I get when initially introducing the Document, Standardize, Automate framework for making process change is, “why does document come before standardize?” I used to ask this question often myself and, it’s true, that if you are building a sales team from scratch or introducing a new process you may be able to produce a standardized approach from the onset of that work. Two items to keep in mind, though:

1. If you are creating a new standardized process, the way you’ll communicate that process is through documentation.

2. Chances are your team is already doing the work you’re looking to standardize today. Creating in a vacuum is never easy (and often ineffective) so it’s best to ask your team how they currently get that work done.

More than the above two points I once had a mentor who told me, “Just because you don’t have a documented process doesn’t mean you don’t have a process. It probably means you just have a bad one.” Whether the team I’ve worked with was in the Marine Corps, at Google, or at a Startup that comment has thus far stood the test of time.

I ❤️ documentation and you can too. Many sales leaders are type-A, action oriented individuals, which I love, but when they hear the word documentation the 🤢 emoji often comes to mind. Leaders who prefer action rarely want to stare at a blank page and put on paper how their team does the work they do but it is imperative you do so.

Keep it simple, start by doing an interview with each of your team members and have them demonstrate to you how they do the work. Record this demonstration so you can be present during the session. Later, go back and write down each of the steps your team member took. Once you have a bulleted list for each of your team members you’re ready to move to the next step.

📋 Standardize

Now that you have the different approaches across your team documented it’s time to comb through them to identify the optimal way to do the work you’ve documented. The final output of this step will be a simple doc with, “{process name} standardized documentation” as the title.

The first line of the standardized document should say Purpose with the reason why this process exists. The second line should say End State and outline what the process will look like when complete. For example, the lead-in for a standardized document on how to plan for a discovery call might look something like this:

Purpose: The purpose of this document is to define the minimum set of expectations for preparing for a discovery meeting with a new client so that our team consistently positions ourselves to be successful at uncovering revenue generating opportunities when speaking to customers by coming to those calls well prepared.

End State: The pre-call planning process will be complete when a note exists in Hubspot which, at a minimum, contains all of the information covered in our pre-call planning checklist.

Now comes the fun part, standardizing the process. For this phase I always start by ignoring, or trying to ignore, the demos which my team gave me. I ask myself if I took a first principles approach to designing a process to accomplish the goal we’re working toward (e.g. plan for a meeting with a client) how would I do it? I then write down bullets for the way in which I would get the work done.

Next, revisit the demos each of your team members did for you and look at the bullet points you collected. Start by looking at the way your top performers do the work. What do they do that others don’t? Do they complete the steps in the process they developed for themselves in a logical order? Are there obvious gaps that they didn’t include?

Combine your approach with the demos you observed from your team members to create the new standard. Once you have it, ask your best performing team member to put it into practice before their next call. Take any feedback they have and iterate on the standardized version. At this point you’ve combined your approach with your team’s and had your top performer work through it themselves. Ask your team member to present it to the team as the new approach to completing the process moving forward. This serves as a great way to get your top performer leadership exposure while also implicitly gaining buy-in for the new process from other team members.

🤖 Automate

Now that you have a standardized process you’re ready to take the most powerful step in our Document, Standardize, Automate framework - introduce Arnold the Terminator Schwarzenegger to destroy all of your menial, repetitive tasks through automation!

While the governator might not be needed in your business, automation surely is. Automation acts as a force multiplier on your sales team allowing you to redeploy your team’s time toward higher impact, revenue generating activities.

In military parlance, a force multiplier is, “the effect produced by a capability that, when added to and employed by a combat force, significantly increases the combat potential of that force and thus enhances the probability of successful mission accomplishment”. Put more simply, force multipliers are any “force” (tool, process, etc.) which allow your team to be more effective.

Automation serves as a force multiplier because it allows the individuals on your team to be more effective. Think about this example, you expect your team to make 100 Cold Calls to prospective customers each day. You could simply give them a list of contacts with phone numbers in a spreadsheet and ask them to dial away on their cell phones. Alternatively, you could pair modern tools like Salesloft and Orum to automatically make those dials and only connect your team when a prospect answers the phone.

In the above example you’re able to take one person post-automation and make them as effective as multiple people pre-automation.

Look across your list of standardized processes created in the above step. Look at those processes which are repetitive and require minimal creativity. Use the same effort / impact 2 × 2 discussed at the beginning of the post to find the lowest effort, highest impact process. Start by automating this one.

To actually automate a process you’ll likely need to work with your Operations or Engineering team. That said, it has never been easier as a Sales Leader to use tools like Zapier to automate processes of your own accord. I encourage all Sales Leaders to take a process oriented approach to running their teams. Your team members will be grateful that their daily work requires fewer menial tasks and your quota will reflect your teams ability to focus their efforts on more important, revenue generating, activities.

Whether you’re a new Sales Leader on your team or you’ve been leading a team for a while I encourage you to look over the work your team is doing with a process first approach. At the very least, standardizing processes will allow you to clearly communicate the way top performers get their work done. In the best scenario, you’ll automate away tasks which don’t provide value so that you’re team can spend more time with customers. Document, Standardize, Automate.

See ya’ll next week.