When a manager gives your deal to someone else

Published: Wed, 06/28/23

June 28, 2023

TOGETHER WITH

This is it. The final three days of the most important quarter in history. We hope everyone finishes strong and goes into the summer with a nice commission check on the way. In this week’s issue, we’ll reveal the best times to call and email prospects, share a Sales Fail about a “helpful” contribution, and give some advice to a rep whose manager gave their deal to someone else. Enjoy.

NUMBER OF THE WEEK

On average, sales teams experience a turnover rate of approximately 34%,

of which 66% is involuntary.

Source: MarketSplash

SALES ROUNDUP

Here’s what’s happening in the sales world this week:

Car prices have been at record highs for the last several years, fueled by pandemic-related supply chain issues. But a new report indicates they’re slated to fall dramatically as production ramps up and undersupply turns to oversupply. UBS estimates that global car production will exceed sales by 6% this year, leaving an excess of 5 million vehicles that will require price cuts to get sold off of lots. You can read the full article here.
We recently came across an interesting article from ProPublica, which reported on a whistleblower lawsuit alleging that sales reps from medical device giant Medtronic “groomed” doctors to overuse its vascular products in patients at a veterans hospital, even when it wasn’t medically necessary. Additionally, VA workers allegedly received steak dinners, Apple electronics, and NASCAR tickets in exchange for giving Medtronic a lucrative contract with the hospital. You can read the report here.

FEATURE

Jelena Zelen/shutterstock.com

A New Report from ringDNA Reveals the Best Times to Call and Email Prospects

In a 2016 HubSpot sales perception survey, 37% of salespeople who participated said that getting through to clients via phone or email was one of the biggest hurdles they faced. The good news is that AI has done its homework on the best times to get in touch with prospects and would like to share its findings with the class (please don’t kill us AI).

RingDNA is an AI platform that helps guide companies on how to close more deals. They recently shared a report with Business Insider that analyzed over 130 million sales calls and emails and concluded which time windows have the best response rates.

Howard Brown, founder and CEO of RingDNA, told Insider: "The idea is — businesses sit on all of this information that their sales teams do on a daily basis, but they never had a way of analyzing each and every single step. It's been there. You can have a manager listen in to a call, but you never had the ability to search through massive amounts of data using artificial intelligence to find interesting moments and patterns that achieved the best results."

Here are four tips for better response rates, based on the report’s findings:

Make sales calls between 10 and 11:30 a.m.

The report shows that this is when people are most likely to pick up your calls. Late morning to just before lunch is when people are settled at their desks and more likely to have the bandwidth to talk to you. The study found that afternoon calls often go straight to voicemail.

Keep calls short

RingDNA's report shows that successful sales calls are on average 14.3 minutes in length, after which the chances of securing a demo decrease. Not only do you want to keep your sales calls short, you want to listen more than you talk. In a Salesforce study, over 70% of sales managers said listening to your customer’s needs and paying close attention to details are some of the most important skills for salespeople. Case in point: the report stated that the best salespeople only speak in increments of about 12 seconds (!) and spend the rest of the time listening to their customers.

Send emails between 12 and 3 p.m.

According to the report, if people aren’t responding to your sales calls, it’s because they’re opening your emails. Convenient, eh? While the hours between 12 and 6 p.m. are a good window for open rates, the peak email connecting time is right at 3 p.m.

Conclusion? Make calls in the morning and send emails in the afternoon.

Keep the pitch nice and short. Be clear with your prospect about what you’re selling, what kind of results they can expect, and how long it will take to get those results.

Additionally, do your homework and show that you’re familiar with the prospect’s work — this will go a long way toward establishing an authentic connection.

GET THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO PRODUCT-LED SALES

Do you know which of your leads are most likely to convert?

How many of your free users are high potential opportunities?

What would a 30% increase in ACV mean for your ARR goals?

A Product-Led Sales (PLS) motion can answer all of these questions.

PLS is a go-to-market approach that relies on existing users of the product to drive revenue, including conversion, upsell, cross-sell, and expansion.

If you’re a revenue leader or scrappy seller looking to…

Add more qualified opportunities to your pipeline
Use product usage data to inform your sales motion
Crush your quota every quarter

This guide is for you.

You can now access the complete guide to Product-Led Sales on Notion, including templates, a playbook database you can copy to track and organize your experiments, and more!

The best part? Each section is a bite-sized explainer with tactical recommendations. You can check in a few minutes a day, skip around, and treat the guide like a mini course.

What you’ll learn

Step by step framework to launch PLS
Data needs, best practices, and tooling set up
Scoring models to surface high-potential leads combining product usage with customer data
Playbooks for every stage of the customer journey: conversion, expansion, and retention

Happy selling!

GET THE GUIDE

MEME OF THE WEEK

Source: Instagram -- Sales Humor

QUIZ

Which MLM company is the largest in the world?

A. Herbalife
B. Avon
C. Mary Kay
D. Amway

SALES FAILS

Each week, we bring you the most cringe-worthy sales moments from across the web. To submit your sales fail story for consideration, click here. (Don't worry, you'll remain completely anonymous).

I used to work for a mortgage company that did a lot of advertising on the radio and with flashy digital signs. We were a regional player. The company did really well for a number of years. The owner was known for being a colorful personality. He made a ton of money over the years though.

Back in 2011, the industry was still recovering from the great recession. The company wasn’t doing super well and management was brainstorming ways to bring in new business. They wanted to revamp their advertising messages and come up with new ways to entice people to call in to do refinances, since purchase volume was way down.

At the time, even though I was a mortgage rep, I wanted to get into marketing. I wanted a more steady paycheck and wanted to be more creative in my day-to-day life. So, when these discussions were happening, I had a great idea: I would go home and put together an entire ad campaign for the company to give to the agency they were using to write and perform the radio ads.

It took me about a week to put everything together. I thought my campaign was good and pretty funny. It talked about all the things you could buy if you saved money on your mortgage payment by refinancing, but it was funny/useless things (example: a $1,000 hat, etc.). Anyway, I put everything together in a nice laminated and bound folder and gave it to my manager who looked at it with a strange expression and promised to pass it along to the owner.

Can you guess what they did next? They FIRED me. Seriously. The week after, my manager asked me into his office and told me they were letting me go because I wasn’t focused enough on my own work. I couldn’t believe it. I was hitting my numbers while all this was happening, I just wanted to try something else. In retrospect, it was a blessing in disguise. Ten years later, the company fell apart. I tried marketing since then, but went back to sales because the money is just so good. Still can’t believe they fired me though!

Anonymous Location withheld

GRAPH OF THE WEEK

Source: LinkedIn Poll -- June 2023

WORTH A PEEK

Business dinners can be great, but if something goes wrong, it can be super embarrassing. We came across a HubSpot guide to surviving your next business dinner, which has some great tips that we never would’ve thought of, such as eating a little something ahead of time, waiting to sit until your host sits first, and more. If you sell in person or attend networking events, it’s worth a read. Check it out here.

ASK THE QUOTA

Want to submit a question and be featured in our advice column? Click here. (Don't worry, you'll remain completely anonymous).

Dear Quota Team,

I don’t want to reveal too much about my current role since it might make it obvious who I am, but recently, something happened at work and I’m wondering how to deal with it. I am an individual contributor at a medium-sized (I think) company. I have been here for over two years.

A few weeks ago, I had an issue. Basically, a coworker of mine and I were both coincidentally working on a deal at the same company with two different people at the company. This happened because of the way we filled out the information in the CRM. We basically identified the company in different ways, even though it was the same company.

Technically, I was the first one to make contact. But my coworker got further along in the process and was closer to closing the deal. When we realized what was happening, we went to my manager and explained the situation. Normal protocol is that the first person to make contact is the person who gets to keep the deal. So technically, it was supposed to be my deal.

My manager, however, told the other person to take the deal, because he was further ahead in the process, which I don’t dispute. He said that when the deal closed, I would be entitled to 25%. Now I am angry. Not only was this my deal to begin with, but the rules (they are not written out, but more informal) state that the deal belongs to the first person to make contact.

I feel like my manager completely threw me under the bus. What should I do? Any advice would be helpful. Thanks in advance.

Furious in the U.S.

Dear Furious,

We can see why you’re upset. Your manager definitely didn’t abide by the unspoken rules, and the deal should have remained yours. But, to play devil’s advocate, he was (probably) thinking about an outcome that was more likely to get the deal closed for the company. That being said, 25% is too low of a figure in our opinion. It should have been closer to 50/50.

How far do you want to push this? Is it worth putting your job at risk? For you, maybe it is. If so, then put together a non-angry email and send it to your manager explaining your position. Stick to the facts, and try to leave your emotions out of it. Or have the conversation in person, just be ready to defend your position, which is that the rules were not followed and you want to make sure that you’re being treated fairly.

The other option is, as always, to move on. These types of things happen in sales, and now you have some insight into your manager and how likely he is to go to bat for you. This will probably help inform your decision-making process when you start thinking about looking for somewhere else to work. You definitely have a reason to be upset, but don’t let it consume you. Life is short and there are plenty of other deals and opportunities out there. Good luck!

Quiz Answer: D – Amway (you can read the source article here)

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Today's email was written by Ken Kupchik, Erica Furgiuele, Steve Rado, and Emily Hill.

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