2. Enhancing Sales Performance with Psychological Safety
- Abishek Murthy CGO at Locus, Ex-COS at Freshworks
As a founder, you have lofty goals — we want to move from $1 million to $30 million, we want to acquire our first 100 customers, but imagine if you hire a Sales rep at 10 lakh rupees. These goals can be intimidating. Creating psychological safety for that rep is what will make them fight free. Knowing you’re there to catch them when they fall will make them win.
This means, say, you deploy a quota of $5 million to a rep. But you give them psychological safety at two and a half million dollars.
That means if they get two and a half million dollars, you don’t cover them on 100% quota attainment, but you at least cover them on 100% variable payment. You need to build that psychological safety for your team because that will keep their morale up, and sales reps and SDRs will always find more rejections than not.
This doesn’t need to be very scientific. The way I would think about it is to have a ‘Board number,’ a ‘Management number,’ and then a number that you will deploy to your team. A board number is lesser than your management number, and the number you will deploy will be the highest.
So, as an example, if you’re building about a $20 million business or revenue goal for 2023, $20 million is what you will deploy to all your sales team, your management goal will be probably at 15 odd million, the number that you will tell Blume is perhaps at 12 odd million.
This means that you build psychological safety for your sales team, and where you would pay them well will be at 15 or 14 odd million. You build psychological safety for yourself as a manager, and as a leader, you will say, “Hey, you know what, I’ve only committed $12 million, but I’m deploying more.” And you would have psychological safety, which means you’re more often than not successful.
And for Blume or any other investor on your cap table, we have a much better vision because you’re leading indicators of deals and engagements, and the pipeline will show that you’re marching toward something else.
This gives psychological safety both for your team, for you as leaders, and for your investors.
Even when we look at rep efficiency, I will only think about psychological safety.
For the rep to be efficient, you must have layers of psychological safety built-in. One way to do this is to set the right goals. Another is to build layers like a pre-sale function to help in technical sales, etc. If you’re a complex product, you might also have an onboarding specialist to help the rep sell.
If you’re a low ACV, instead of pre-sales, you will probably have somebody like a PMM here who will come and help you with Sales playbooks, a PMM who will come here then help you in your what to say to what customer, in your right messaging, etc. If you’re a low ACV or a different kind of product, you will probably have a support team, CSM team, or something else that will work closely on this instead of an onboarding specialist.
There is also a product team that you can involve either here or there, depending on your organization design, by asking them to build more use cases.
All of this creates psychological safety for your reps. You tell them you will only fail in closing if all these folks fail together. So you’re building psychological safety at every different, at every level, so that the rep is successful. And this is the same psychological safety that I would think for a PMM, Product Manager, or anything else.
This does not mean that metrics are co-owned, but you want to create some intersection.
For example, imagine you have a free trial. The Product team has built a product and a pay structure of $20, but 12 days of free, etc.
In this case, the PMM team will think about from day zero of sign-up till the 12th day of trial, which means they are responsible for product engagement, feature engagement, sign-up, usage of the product, etc. While PMM is solving this, the reps will also get in touch with the customer to help onboard the customer.
This ensures that there is an intersection between the PMM and a rep, and both of them are looking for engagement goals within the first 12 days. This sets the rep up for success as you approach the 12th day.
Once they are closer to the sale, your Support team might need to help the rep with solutions, or the Product team might have to come in and solve a use case level problem.
But you need to build these intersections so the sales reps can use them. This also means that you reduce your chance of hiring wrong. If you hire the wrong rep, your Product, PMM, and Support teams will all scream. The same is true with hiring wrong people for Product, PMM, or Support.
With this, you’re making your entire system more efficient and building psychological safety for everybody.