Make Yourself at Home in a Glass House

You’re reading an excerpt of Founding Sales: The Early-Stage Go-To-Market Handbook, a book by Pete Kazanjy. The most in-depth, tactical handbook ever written for early-stage B2B sales, it distills early sales first principles and teaches the skills required, from being a founder selling to being an early salesperson and a sales leader. Purchase the book to support the author and the ad-free Holloway reading experience. You get instant digital access, commentary and future updates, and a high-quality PDF download.

The level of transparency in a well-instrumented sales organization is a massive change for most people. From win and loss notes and closing ratios to leaderboards and error checking, everything is right there, available for everyone to see.

If you’re doing a good job, you will have all customer-facing interaction instrumented and recorded—every single email, every presentation, and every call—either in its entirety in the case of presentations and email, or in some partial capacity when it comes to calls and conversations. You should get comfortable with teammates jumping into those records and asking questions about why a call went this way or that way. Your creation of this transparent data is of paramount importance for the success of the organization, from both a go-to-market and a product-development standpoint.

Similarly, activity levels, or lack thereof, should be clearly documented and inescapable. If a rep spaced out today for some reason, the lack of calls and emails will be fully observable. And if your CRM is really well done, it will be observable down to the granularity of which hours of the day that rep was lagging.

So too with error checking. If your CRM is well executed, you will have reporting that shows exactly which opportunities and accounts have been missing activity for a certain period of time and are in danger. The only question that will remain is why you haven’t hopped on top of that! In fact, your CRM reporting should yield valuable insights all the way down to every single closed-won and closed-lost opportunity. For every win, you can see the strategy that sold five seats instead of two. For every lost opportunity, you’ll see what went wrong: budget, competition, a prospect not yet convinced of your solution’s value, and so on. But you lose this insight without transparency.

And while this may sound frightening, it’s actually extremely beneficial, both for the individual and, in aggregate, for the organization. It creates an environment of accountability and shared learning that drives a positive, self-reinforcing feedback loop. Your staff focuses because there’s no way not to. There’s no excuse to not work on high-priority items, because the errors are documented and visible. Flubs and failures are socialized so other staff won’t crash on the same rocks, but also so they’ll realize that failure is part of the game and not to be feared. And that foments a culture of action orientation rather than loss aversion, because fear of failure is one of the biggest blockers of action. If you remove that fear, you remove that brake on activity. And when you transparently share wins alongside losses, your staff know that they’re real, and not puffed up, and thus can take them as helpful guideposts for how they should execute.

Document all of your team’s activity, and everyone can simply put forth their maximal effort without worrying what will be available to whom—because the answer is everything, to everyone.