In the latest recap of the Demo Diaries podcast, I interviewed the legendary Ralph Barsi, VP of Global Inside Sales at Tray.io. We talked about his inspiring system for leading sales teams based on his 4 pillars of sales excellence, and how you can make this system work for your organization as well.
Meet Ralph
He’s currently leading the inside sales team at Tray, which is a general automation program to connect tech stacks. In sales for nearly 30 years, he spent the first half of his career as an individual contributor and the second half building and leading sales development teams at the top of the funnel. Now he’s committed to sharing and showing his work along the way to pay it forward by writing and speaking at conferences and on podcasts to share his extensive knowledge of the sales world.
Driving team excellence
The first step to creating a successful sales team is each and every sales rep making a decision that they’re going to be committed to being successful – and that step is an uphill climb. Leaders need to get their reps to flip the switch on and commit to serving the organization, the market, and their colleagues.
Ralph helps his teams do this with his Standards of Excellence. They have 4 pillars: performance, process, proficiency, and professionalism. And he and his leaders quantify and grade reps in each area every month. Reps also evaluate their own performance each month, which helps them measure their progress against those 4 pillars regularly. It’s been a gamechanger at Tray and other companies where Ralph has implemented it because it helps reps to hold themselves accountable for their performance on a frequent basis.
How to implement this system
If you’re interested in implementing a similar system for your own organization, Ralph suggests looking at each pillar and creating three sub-categories that inform each one. For example, for performance it could be the number of sales-qualified opportunities, levels of activity like outbound calls, or deal win rate. Process is more challenging to measure, but you could gauge things like CRM hygiene and ensuring SLAs are met between departments. The key is finding criteria that inform each category for your own organization.
At the end of the day, it comes down to discipline, execution and accountability. At the end of the month, for example, if that spreadsheet is not filled out and time is not carved out to pay attention to these areas, no one will win. If you as a leader agree you want to roll this out, then actually do the work and hold each other accountable, making sure it’s done consistently.
One tip to win your demo
Working at the top of the funnel, you need to get most acquainted with the problems the product solves in the first place, and the issues customers face regularly, and how they rank those problems. What systemic impact will solving those problems have on other business units and teams? Focus on their issues and prioritize them. We always start with problems that the product solves. Then we get into the product itself – going from current state to future state to close the deal.
Watch the full episode here:
