Dan N.

Hot take- less tools, more training. If ops aren't under control, adding a new or shifting to a different tool isn't gonna fix the chaos. It's gonna get worse, especially if it's customer-facing. Writing up SOPs, updating documentation, getting team members better trained, and consolidating from three tools to one is a lot less sexy but a lot more effective. I primarily work with small marketing agencies and they loooooove their tools, to a fault. Improving communication is consistently the best ops de-chaos-ification decision they can make, so I wrote a guide on how to do that: https://go.learntoscale.us/better-agency-communication

Great template! I particularly liked how you made "soft measures" like using a customer's language an objective checklist item. Job aids like this are supremely useful in getting team members to follow a process, versus Sales By Vibes. Obviously you need a manager to train a thirsty and excitable SDR on each of these 21 line items. Unfortunately, some of those items take months to "master" and a lot of managers frankly stink at training and will throw 21 nuanced pieces of feedback at someone two weeks on the job. If you were to pick your three favorite/most high impact Demo Quality Check items from your scorecard that EVERY sales manager should start with, which would they be?

lol, AI. Specifically use the Deep Research Function. And don't spend too much time watching the competition- you'd be better off talking to actual enterprise prospects about all those questions.

Richard H. is right on the money- it's not a classification problem, it's a people problem. If it's really a classification problem, then put the right people in the room, hammer out better qualification criteria, embed it into the CRM, and off you go. This should be the normal course of business, revisited on a semi-annual basis... ...but if you don't get the right people in the same room with leadership holding up core values, willing to spend real $$$ on a fair and equitable sales motion, then yeah, prepare for tribal warfare.

Hi maksym P., I specialize in helping marketing agencies scale. ✉️ For someone getting started, you might find my biweekly newsletter helpful as you lay the foundations for your own agency: https://go.learntoscale.us/posts 📈 If you want to see where you'll (most likely) grow, take a look at my research behind agency owners and operators: https://www.learntoscale.us/agency-research

I gotta "yes, and" you on this. It would be amazing if candor was a CRM object and performance was measured through the lens of failure and learning. and every Closed/Lost deal has a little personal fuckup-ery mixed into it. Every lost deal, even the Ghosted, Bad Timing, and Lack of Budget can have a little lesson lurking. Deal Spotlights and Deal Retros, as an organizational cultural practice, should be the spaces to acknowledge this reality.

Hi Tammy, I work exclusively with agencies and without knowing you at all (and I'm very willing to be proven wrong!) I'll be the naysayer here: unless you were earning about $17K/month consistently for the past year, you probably are setting expectations that are too high. You have to be clocking $4K a week, which means you better have a fully-baked product offering and a full pipeline, plus extra for churn. Unfortunately, everything you listed is stuff my virtual assistant Iffy does for $20/hour using AI. Content writing on any platform is so commoditized now. And unless you're Jason Swenk's cousin, agency referrals are not a $18K/mo service offering. There's hope: if you have connections to execs, interview THEM on their biggest headaches. That's the first step to building your $18K/mo lifestyle: loving the problems faced by your target market. Just don't pick the unfunded SaaS execs: they won't have money to pay your rate 😅

IMHO, management is doing exactly the right thing...unless you have an overfull pipeline of better qualified leads, but few businesses really have that luxurious problem. This practice is great CRM and business hygiene. Closed/Lost deals getting recycled keeps all the pipeline metrics squeaky clean and accurate while hitting your ICP until the moment a competitor does a stupid and then suddenly you are calling at exactly the right time. The more interesting question is if all those competitor displacement leads were truly disqualified, what could you and your fellow BDRs be doing instead? I bet if you could come up with a prospecting strategy with a faster sales cycle, you could get away from the annual "No thanks, we're good" calls and earn more commission.

I want to doubleclick on Dennis J.’s comment because the simple tactical things are low-hanging fruit. One afternoon with your meeting booking tool can solve a lot of them and I bet you'll see a small decrease in no-shows. The thing that an afternoon of focus can't solve is the reps (or if these are cold inbound demos, Marketing) selling the value of the demo. Even without all of Dennis's excellent tactical hacks, if the reps/Marketing positioned this next meeting as a can't-miss opportunity, the leads would be showing up early with their pencils ready. It's a people issue and a positioning issue, not a workflow issue. I bet if you shadowed a few discovery calls you'd start to see the problem: reps failing to uncover the true pain points, failing to match product benefits to those pain points, failing to paint a future state (with your product) that's rosy and awesome, etc. Doesn't matter if it's a long or short sales cycle: that demo should feel like the lead is about to touch the face of God.

Welcome to the club! I'm figuring it out, and probably the other 59K+ people in this workspace too are also figuring something like it out. Hiring help to help you figure it out is going to get you a lot further and faster than consuming books and short-term tactics. This is just a detour on a longer journey- keep hustlin' and trying.