Rhythm: movement of variation with patterned recurrence of a beat
Cadence: the flow or pattern of events – the beat, time, or measure
As a former marching band member, I know something about rhythm and cadence – it’s what made our band so great. But in business? How can sales grow based on these ideas?
Top sellers and sales leaders have always appreciated predictability such as specific dates on the calendar for annual planning, quarterly planning, coaching sessions, and reviews. So much of what we do in sales is not predictable that you are doing a disservice to your team if you don’t have specific traditions and blocked weekly and monthly times for certain sales tasks.
Recently I interviewed Kyle Porter, CEO of SalesLoft and he talked about the importance of rhythm and cadence in his company to accomplish goals and tasks. Kyle and his team are creating great services that help salespeople sell more and they get a lot accomplished. View the video or you can read the transcript below:
Biggest lesson I've learned is the importance of rhythm and cadence in our sales and marketing efforts –
We have incorporated this into our marketing and sales –
We are a content shop and put out a ton of valuable content. It’s extremely important to be of value to salespeople – not just from our product, but through the way we communicate with our community.
Every Sunday night I’ll take all the things that I’ve read and all the things I’m following, and I’ll load up a Trello project management board with all the things we want to do throughout the week. We’ll put in user stories for our content creation.
We get together as a company and the whole sales team gives metrics on a daily basis – what they did yesterday, what they are doing today, and what they need help with in any way. We have routine metrics that we are checking on weekly.
Having this predictable way of managing the business, it gives us a blood that pumps through the organization – is like the heartbeat of the company.
Are you a Disorganized Seller?
Top sellers are organized – they have blocks of time carved out and they nearly always honor those times.
For example, one of the sales leaders I work with also prospects, nurtures, and closes sales. He gets on the phone every weekday morning for one hour before he does anything else – making follow-up calls, introductions, connecting to referrals, and other specific sales focused activities. Then he has his first cup of coffee.
That ONE habit alone has given him ongoing referrals, new deals, and sets a great example for his reps in the office since actions speak so much louder than words.
If you feel very disorganized it is probably hurting your sales. Work on solving the organization issues.
Ideas for building your rhythm and cadence in the sales team:
Regular weekly sales meetings – keep them short for the whole team, and depending on how many reps you have, set up weekly or bi-monthly time with each.
Regular pipeline reviews – a group review can be very helpful as a teaching environment for the newer reps if executed well. This can be done in webinar format for team members that are spread out geographically, or in office weekly. Don’t cancel them.
Coaching time – put a plan in place for anyone under quota to get coaching that can help them dissect sales opportunities, work on their messaging, and help them with target prospects. We will have more on coaching in a future post.
Feedback time – sales leaders should welcome input so by having a weekly time at the end of the sales meeting or by encouraging this on every Friday, for example, more feedback will happen. Why not learn why reps don’t like something about the new service offering or what obstacles they have run into?
Marketing Rhythm and Publishing
From a content creation standpoint, every business now is a publisher. Things to think about that affect your company’s visibility and potential revenues:
Daily ideas jotted down in a singular place kept in the cloud – Google doc or Evernote
Weekly brainstorm with the entire team on what customers are asking about – this makes for great content
Quarterly editorial calendar to keep focus on who is creating what content to post where
What do you do in your business to get your rhythms of revenue going?
