Checking, Reflecting, Reviewing, and Adjusting on a Daily, Weekly, and Quarterly Basis

This is a part of a series that was cre­at­ed to help you get the prac­tice of out­bound prospect­ing built into your com­pany.  This series will walk through the process, nec­es­sary roles, in addi­tion to guides for each role to help your com­pany get started quickly.  In the next few posts, I’ll be releasing the contents of a quick start guide for Business Development Representatives to use to attain success during this process.

In addition to the daily conversations that you will be having with your manager, you will be meeting with him/her once a week for a regularly scheduled, private retrospective meeting. During this meeting, you and your manager will reflect upon recent activity against the daily/weekly metrics, and discuss any impediments that you may be facing (an impediment is anything that prevents you from performing your work as efficiently as possible).

Suggested days and times: Monday morning or Friday afternoon (reoccurring scheduled meeting in Outlook Calendar.

Suggested length of time: 30 to 45 minutes.

Example of a Retrospective Meeting

In this example, the company uses the Salesforce.com CRM platform and the business development representative is referred to as a lead qualification specialist (LQS).

1. Review and assess activities vs. metrics and trends.

• Review your dashboard in Salesforce.com
  • Calls vs. Call to Connect – did you meet your weekly conversation goals?
  • Call to Connect vs. Call to Connect (Power) – are at least 1/3 of your conversations with decision makers?
  • Lead to Opportunity Conversion – briefly update your manager on details of the opportunities you’ve created and the next steps in terms of pain points of prospects, preparation necessary for upcoming demos/calls, etc.
  • Bigger Picture –where do you stand for the quarter? Are you on par for hitting quarterly goals?
• Activity Trends – according the dashboard, how does last week’s activity compare to previous weeks’ activity?
  • If activity is down – what is the reason? Are you sticking to your schedule?
  • If activity is up – what is the reason? If conversations/points accumulated are higher than usual, how can you maintain the high activity rate in the upcoming week?
  • Feedback Trends – what are you hearing consistently in your conversations with decision makers? What are their pain points, content demands, product demands? What are they saying about the market and their industry? How can you use this feedback to improve your pitch? Can your marketing team use this information to improve the content it is providing for your team and the sales reps?

  2. Emphasize the positive – what’s working well?

  • Share your success stories from the recent week along with any improvements you have made. Ask your manager about any successes the sales team has experienced as a result of your efforts.

  3. What are your impediments?

  • Is there anything that is preventing you from performing work as efficiently as possible?

  4. Assess the current lead list you’re currently attacking.

  • At what rate are you navigating through the list (e.g., 50 new leads/week contacted at least once)?
  • How many leads remain in your view? Is it time for a new list to be imported into Salesforce?
  • How many follow-up activities do you have in your view? Are you allocating an appropriate amount of time toward completing these tasks? By Friday, there should be no follow-up activities assigned for the week left open.

  5. Map out the upcoming week – what activities/tasks are planned?

  • How are you mapping out your work days and work weeks? Are you leaving each evening with a plan for the next day?

  Similarly, you will have a quarterly retrospective meeting to look at the last three months as a bigger picture.

Next week, I will add a sample report for communicating results to your manager.