Has your team forgotten your client standards?
Hi y’all,
Before you focus on creating new SOPs for your sales process ahead of busy season, first do an audit of how you operated with clients last year.
How has your clientele changed? Looking back, which were the easiest clients to land? Why? How has your business changed from one busy season to the next? What resources do you have this year that you didn’t have last year, or vice versa? What do you actually have the bandwidth to commit to this year?
Here’s what I’ve learned from doing sales training with my team: I always think I need to come up with something really new and revolutionary. But quite often, my team just needs to be reminded of what my standards are and what our process is.
I’d bet that’s true for you: whether you’re a solo team of one, or managing an entire sales force.
During slower periods, teams can get loosey-goosey with the standards you’ve set. When busy season hits, they brace for impact and swing too rigidly in the other direction. Both create problems you don’t need.
The key is having decision-making frameworks, not just black-and-white rules. Your team members are humans, and you should trust them to make decisions when exceptions to the rule make sense.
Here’s how this works at Goodshuffle: We tier the quality of leads coming in based on who’s closest to our ideal client profile (ICP). Closest to our ICP are event rental companies. The folks on the fringes: golf cart rental companies or home stagers, for instance.
Can that type of business work for Goodshuffle? Absolutely. Is that who we’re best suited for? Probably not. So I might say we don’t do business with golf cart rental companies as a general rule.
But if our sales team gets on the phone with someone who’s genuinely excited about solving their problems with Goodshuffle Pro — especially if they’ve used our software at another job before — I expect them to recognize this as a good exception to the rule. They’re going to end up being successful users because they have familiarity and enthusiasm.
Part of keeping your team nimble is reminding them of the decision-making framework: here are the questions we want to ask, here’s how someone could be a good client even if they don’t fit our typical profile.
This reminder is powerful because teams get so caught up in their day-to-day that they don’t take time to refresh on these frameworks. It’s a familiar topic from onboarding that they don’t study or revisit.
Yet because it’s something they do every day, they need to be reminded of your standards and expectations.
See you next Monday,
Mallory Mullen
Goodshuffle
