The 4 Essential Building Blocks of Selling Remote, with David Kreiger [Episode 792]

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David Kreiger is the founder and CEO of SalesRoads. Today, David and I dig into his 4 essential building blocks for effectively selling (and managing) remote.

Episode Transcript

Andy Paul: David. Welcome to the show.

David Kreiger: Great to be here Andy.

Andy Paul: It’s a pleasure to have you. So, where are you joining us from today?

David Kreiger: So from sunny, warm, getting to be sweltering, hot South Florida.

Andy Paul: Okay. Yeah. It’s about that time of year.

David Kreiger: It’s getting there. Usually we leave to go to Colorado, in about a month to get out of the heat, but it’s not happening this year for, for obvious reasons.

Andy Paul: So you spent the summer in Colorado.

David Kreiger: We do, we do to get out of the heat, get a little hiking, get, get in the mountains, that type of stuff.

Andy Paul: Nice. Nice. So do you have kids at home?

David Kreiger: I do so, eight and five. So, little ones.

Andy Paul: And how are they enjoying online school?

David Kreiger: So they miss their friends. and, so they would love to be back. And I think, mommy and daddy are harder teachers than their school teachers and are a little more critical. so I think would like to have a little bit of relief from the homeschooling

Andy Paul: Yeah. And how about you and your wife? Ready to have some relief from each other?

David Kreiger: Yes, no, it has been fun to relearn a second grade math and, you know, some, some of the basic social study things that you learned that at that time, that I, you know, have actually forgotten, you know, about rock formations and things like that. So it can be kind of fun.

Andy Paul: Well, yeah, so I, on my side, it’s, it’s, we’re here in New York as most people know they’re listening, but it’s yeah, I think maybe have my, my, estimation in the eyes of my wife has gone up because she said you worked from home 20 years. I’ve had my own business. I’ve always worked from a home office and it’s like, yeah. And she was like, after the first week it was like tearing your hair out. It’s like how you do this?

David Kreiger: I know, yeah. People can get it. My company is a hundred percent remote, so we are, we’re used to that part of it. But, but usually don’t have the kids at home and that’s been fun. We’ve learned to embrace at least on my end, you know, doing, an interview like this, where are other things where they come and jump on my lap and we just have to have, have fun with it and, and roll with the punches.

Andy Paul: I mean, that’s, that’s why I try to tell people is when we’re doing these types of things and you’re doing a zoom call or whatever is yeah. The dog shows up, the cat shows up, somebody walks behind you. It’s like, yeah. So what? It’s just like people like, Oh, we’re trying to be professional. It’s like, no, by definition. Yes, you can be professional in that, your demeanor and so on. But you’re human. Something happens. Life happens.

David Kreiger: Yeah, and it can be fun. I mean, my, my, my team, and even now some clients have gotten to meet my little kids and they they’ve enjoyed it. And, they, that might my kids, sort of wave to them and it, you listen, we’re all humans and it’s, it’s, it’s part of it. So you got to embrace it and, and, and have, you know, have fun with it. Cause it, actually, if you look at it through the right lens, it’s actually kind of a fun aspect of, of getting to see them throughout the day and things like that.

Andy Paul: Yeah. No, absolutely. Absolutely. So yeah, when I’m in a San Diego office and my producer, my son, Alec, is his dogs in residence at that time, yeah, she’s becomes the podcast dog, so all good. All good. So what, so you mentioned about your company sales road. So what does SalesRoads do?

David Kreiger: So we are a SDR outsourcing company. So our clients look to us mainly when they are looking to accelerate their sales through top of the funnel opportunities. And either they’ve built an SDR team in-house that they’re looking to augment, or they’ve struggled with, with the SDR functionality and building top of the funnel opportunities for their AEs.

And so we, come in and we, we become really part of their organizations that are outsourced, inside sales, SDR, company, basically just managing all aspects of the top of the funnel opportunity work for our clients.

Andy Paul: So it’s not, you know, an uncrowded field. I mean, there’s many, many more companies are getting into that. So what are you doing to differentiate yourself versus what other outsource SDR function companies are doing?

David Kreiger: Yeah, so there’s really, you know, two things that we’ve done. One, that some other companies do, but we, we really w. work with our companies in a very intimate way where we really come into their organization. We become part of their organization. We work with their marketing team, you know, we’re, we’re part of their sales meetings. They’re part of our sales meetings. And we really work hand in hand, with our organizations, with our client organizations and we find that that’s really the best way to create some amazing opportunities and develop learnings, both from marketing standpoint, from a sales aspect.

And so that’s one thing that we do, differently than some organizations. The other thing, which is a little different now, but, but I think we still approach it in a different way is I started the company, 13 years ago as a hundred percent remote organization. So at SalesRoads, we really have focused on recruiting the best sales talent, wherever they live, and really recruiting SDRs that are leader stage in their career, you know, versus the model of, of, bringing SDR’s out of college .

Andy Paul: Define later stage, I mean, later stage of their actual careers or…

David Kreiger: Correct. Yeah. So it’s two fold. One, either they really built their career in prospecting. So they’ve always been doing prospecting and this is what they love to do and they might be in a different point in their career where they want to be able to work from home, or maybe, you know, life has taken them to a certain area where there isn’t as much opportunity.

They want to be able to work, you know, we have an amazing SDR who is on a farm. She works for a farm, but she’s amazing talent. And, you know, there weren’t as many opportunities for around there. And we got the opportunity to get to work with her because of the, the remote, environment. And so on average, our SDRs have 14 years of sales experience.

So instead of just coming out of school they’d been working either doing prospecting for their career or have been in sales and maybe were AE’s maybe were traveling around and they would prefer to have, you know, a, a more, stay at home lifestyle and not have to do the full sales cycle and just really focus on what they actually love, which is the prospecting part.

Andy Paul: Well, don’t you think this is- I think there’s rampant ageism in sales and SDRs in particular. And it’s, it’s really rare to hear about companies that are prepared to hire what I call Career SDRs. You know, There’s this implicit thought, if not explicit in some places that, yeah. You’re, you know, you’re getting your thirties, you’re just too old to do this job.

You know, this is a tough job, you know, it’s like, I was like, come on, you have these people know how to, you know, become more proficient at it. Why are we tossing them aside? I recommend companies go find people in their fifties and sixties that can do this.

David Kreiger: absolutely. And one of the biggest pain points that a lot of our clients who have built it internally and have struggled is that, you know, revolving door, we continue to hear about with SDRs, both on the side, that somebody comes out of school and doesn’t realize how difficult this work is and you have to have a certain type of mindset to really enjoy it and thrive on it because it is very exciting in many ways, but you have to have that right mindset.

But then also the folks that really do thrive in SDR role, a lot of times want to get promoted to being an AE so on average, I think it’s about like 14 months people stay in this role. And so our clients really find that’s difficult when you’re investing in training and, and things like that to have such a revolving door.

And so one of the things that by recruiting somebody later stage in their career, like we’ve done, we’ve been able to keep people for long periods of time at SalesRoads invest in their training and really it’s been a win-win because we don’t get that revolving door and we can, you know, get a greater return on the training investment we put into our team.

Andy Paul: So, I guess the question would be is, there’s a trade off on the part of the company, the decision they’re making about whether to outsource this or bring this function in, in house is perhaps a perception that some knowledge, right? Some learning, some lessons and so on, just doesn’t get passed through the organization because it’s sort of resides outside the company. And so how do, how are you dealing with that?

David Kreiger: Oh, go ahead.

Andy Paul: Well, no, just, yeah, I’ve seen it before with companies that outsource certain functions say, Oh no, we’re really losing something, but not having that integrated into our team. Let’s bring it in.

David Kreiger: Yeah. Yeah, it’s a great question. I think it’s really something that’s important. And I think in some ways, just even build on that and then I’ll answer the question. You know, the SDR function can be looked at as the most important function in entire company, especially for early stage startups, because, you know, we are the window, to the prospect or even, you know, the potential prospect is companies.

You know, we work with a lot of early stage, SAS startups, and they’re trying to figure out the, you know, they might have an idea of who their targets are, but you know, you’ve got to kind of test it, right. And you’ve got to go out and those conversations and we are, you know, the, the entry point to that.

And so I, you know, I’d even argue a lot of times, you know, executives, you know CEOs, should be getting on the phone, especially at early stage startups as an SDR because of the amount that you can learn. So the reason that we’ve been able to make it work goes back to the first point that I talked about is to really do this well, both to create the right types of opportunities and appointments for the AEs, but also to not only have the knowledge transfer, but also to be able to, pivot, you know, pretty quickly and make, make adjustments is, you know, you’ve got to incorporate yourself into the organization as if you are an internal department.

And you’ve gotta be able to have regular meetings. You know, we’re on our client’s Slack. We’re not only meeting with, you know, the person who’s, who’s managing us. We’re also meeting with the marketing team, you know, we’re filtering back information on a regular basis, as far as what data they’re looking for in reports and call recordings and the, the back and forth communication is so critical.

And if you do more, what I would say, and have like a vendor model where you’re just booking appointments and sending them over to the AEs and that’s kind of just your responsibility. You might book some good appointments for them and they might get some opportunities, but you lose everything that you just talked about, which is so critical for an organization to be able to get the learnings, to be able to, to pivot, to potentially a different market, to be able to iterate the language.

So, you know, for, for what’s working, we might stumble upon a certain way of framing something or saying something to a prospect that marketing should pick up on right. Internally and vice versa. And so you’ve really got to put yourself within the organization, which is what we do with, with our clients to make sure that that knowledge transfer happens.

And then, you know, the reason why a lot of our clients will at least initially do it with, with a company like ours. Cause it is very difficult to build, and to do right, and to make sure that you don’t have that revolving door. And so our clients really love the fact that we can really take over that aspect of this for them as they are trying to scale their company, really, they can, they can trust us to build this right, to use the best practices.

They don’t have to think about that. They can really be working on their product, working with their ease, working on the marketing. And it’s one last thing that they have to worry about. And then at a certain point, if they grow to a certain scale, And they, you know, want to bring in somebody to really manage this department and, and, and grow it.

You know, we we’ve, we’ve worked with our clients on that type of transition, but really at a, at a smaller scale, you know, it’s hard to do this well, unless you really invested in bringing the talent to manage something like that, just internally.

Andy Paul: All right. So if you’re running a sales team and you say, okay, look, we’re going to outsource this functionality. What are you seeing? What is, or that, that point in time, you know, is that once the SDR team reaches a certain size or, you know, what’s driving the decision to bring it back inside.

David Kreiger: It varies. I mean, we we’ve been with clients through forever, you know, and they, they, they stay with us just cause they want to, but, but there are certain times, you know. So, so there isn’t a perfect, timing, but I’ll say it the time where they’re willing to invest in an executive level person to really manage the SDR team.

You know, not necessarily, you know, that’s when it’s, you can take it in house, but if you don’t have somebody really managing a knowing how to build a high producing, SDR team, More often than not either you or your team, isn’t going to be hitting their quotas. They’re not going to be doing well, or it’s going to be taking time away from either the CRO or somebody else within the sales team, to, to manage this part time.

which, you know, isn’t the most effective use of their time when they’re trying to really scale the company.

Andy Paul: All right. Well, what we’re going to transition ourselves here is, is because what we really wanted to get into was, working remote and managing remote teams. High-performing remote teams. And I don’t know, I’m looking at the landscape of what’s going on and. I don’t know, but this is not a genius insight or anything, but was worth something a see remote work.

I think being a more permanent part of the landscape. And you’ve just said you’ve worked remotely since the beginning. So we wanted to touch on some of that, but are you seeing that as well?

David Kreiger: Yeah, so we, we are, I mean, I think it was Twitter that just said that they are now going to be a hundred percent remote company firm, or you have the option to be a hundred percent remote company. And so I think all companies are going to. the, at least considering this, which is something, you know, when I started this sales rep 13 years ago, people thought, you know, there were companies doing remote work, but it was much more of a crazy concept.

This has made it standard and people realize that there, if done. Right. And we’ll talk about some of the things that I think are important to do it, right. It can be very powerful and can even be sometimes a better way to really, you know, Yeah, build your business and find great employees and make them more productive.

So I do think Andy, absolutely. This is, this is part of our landscape it’s, it’s sort of, we’ve been seeing remote work increasing over the past few years, and this is a tipping point where we’re going to see a lot of companies, either like Twitter and say, we’re going to go completely remote. We’re have to have a strategy where there is remote work incorporated into the culture and into the guidelines for how their employees can work.

Andy Paul: Yeah. Well, I think the first thing you think about in a sales perspective is the value of having a sales floor where, you know, think back to beginning of my career, we’re working on a big open sales floor for handful of years. It was like, There are a lot of, lot of things I picked up in that environment, not just lessons learned about sales, but real culture, friendships, you know, things that have, have had benefits later on like career. Do you ever find, like you’re missing that with your company being fully remote?

David Kreiger: So the answer is no, but you have to do it in the right way. and you have to be, those are still things that are really important to a company, you know, having cross learnings, right. Having great relationships with, with your fellow employees. But if you think about when you really work on it, those things can be recreated in a remote environment.

And we’ve seen people doing that. You know, we’ve seen a lot of the things people are doing, but, but there are lots of ways to recreate some of those things that you just outlined Andy, in, in a remote environment while taking advantage of the power of, of, of remote work. and I think sometimes the increase productivity you get from

Andy Paul: but it seems like one of the hard things to replicate and. Is the spontaneity, right? Is, is the water run, quote, unquote water cooler conversations, you know, sitting in the lunch break to me, that’s where the information has really passed. And, and I just look at like my wife’s schedule for her work.

And the joke is, yeah, cause it’s booked from like everybody these days booked, they feel like they’re working harder in lockdown than they did beforehand. But I think part of the contributors to that is, or one of the contributors to that is that. The spontaneous meetings have all become scheduled.

David Kreiger: Yeah. So it’s an interesting,

Andy Paul: it’s are hard that you have these spontaneous sharing of knowledge.

If you’re thinking well, let’s schedule a zoom to chat with somebody.

David Kreiger: So let me, let me, let me address that in two ways. So one. Yes, you’re right. The true spontaneity as you outlined and bumping into somebody in the hallway. Right. You know, or looking over your cube desk and, you know, or hearing something on somebody else’s call. You can’t completely recreate that in a remote environment.

however, you can give opportunities and create a culture where a lot of those types of things can happen. so for instance, I think a lot of companies have been doing it. We’ve been doing it for a number of years. We have a Slack channel just called water cooler. Right. You know, and where you post a question, you, you, you, you get people to engage with each other and people have a lot of fun with it.

And there’s a lot of spontaneity. You know, as far as a communication back and forth, just through that water cooler channel and it’s encouraged, right. You know, it’s encouraged to go sit around the quote, unquote, virtual water cooler, and you get that. the other thing we encourage is for people just to call their coworkers, you know, just have a conversation, right.

You know, just, just pick up the phone, it doesn’t have to be about work. Yes. Right. But you’ve.

Andy Paul: I think about in a generation that doesn’t call and doesn’t talk

David Kreiger: Well, they can text you, they can Slack each other. Right. But, but, but just, just get, you know, make sure that people are connecting socially within a remote environment and over those conversations. You know, it’s great. Now this is also prepared, but there’s a great little app called donut, which on Slack, all of our team uses and it sets up 15 minute, little, conversations on your calendar once a week with just a random person across the country.

And yes, tears, it’s not like bumping into somebody, right. But you get to talk to different people throughout the company. So you can, you can create that. and yes, it’s not the same thing, but I also would argue that though, there is a lot of rate spontaneity and conversations and knowledge sharing.

There’s also a lot of time wasted too, with some of those types of things. Yeah. Yeah. Where you get into a conversation, you might, you know, be, be really trying to focus on something else. So you don’t want to be rude or, you know, you, you just are pulled into certain meetings because you’re there and things like that, that don’t happen in a remote environment.

So yeah. You know, you’re never going to have a perfect recreation, but I think as long as you understand the importance of some of the things that you’re trying to foster and you don’t want to lose and remote work, you can find ways to, encourage those to happen and embellish the positive aspects while minimizing the negative aspects.

Andy Paul: And donut is a Slack app or it’s just a.

David Kreiger: It’s a third party app that integrates with, with Slack.

Andy Paul: that’s fine. Yeah. So,

David Kreiger: Yeah.

Andy Paul: just Don UT are

David Kreiger: Yeah, just like doing it, like have a donut, you know, have coffee, 15 minute coffee with four workers, basically.

Andy Paul: I think that’s very clever. I like that. Well, I’m not really feeds one of the primary themes you talk about, which is that communication becomes even more important, obviously in a remote work environment. and that it’s, you just can’t replicate.

What you’re doing before is you have to think differently about it.

David Kreiger: Yeah. And, and I think that’s going to be probably the number one challenge for companies going back to your earlier point, as they’re thinking about this tipping point with remote work, I would say it’s easier for us as a hundred percent remote company to build our processes, our culture, our way of communicating around remote work, because we have one way that we communicate and that’s remotely.

So we can think about that. And we have our different building blocks of how we do that. And, you know, in, in a rigorous way, When people and most of the companies I think are going to have both remote workers and office workers, and that will be a harder challenge to solve, I think, because

Andy Paul: some may feel disadvantaged if they’re not where the action is.

David Kreiger: Exactly. So I would encourage those, the leaders managing that transition to think about that, you know, and think about, you know, how you make that transition. And we’ll talk a little bit more about how we do it in a hundred percent remote, environment. And I think there’ll be some good lessons and learnings over in the things that we’ve done over the last 13 years.

But I do acknowledge it will be slightly different for companies who are trying to manage this, by doing both and it will be, have its own unique set of challenges.

Andy Paul: Yeah. Well, we see this in the way we’re implementing sales process and tools and technologies is that by and large, you’ll go away. People are calling technology is they’re basically automating what they were doing before then wondering, well, why aren’t we getting improved results out of this?

David Kreiger: right. Exactly. That’s a good analogy.

Andy Paul: Yeah.

So it’s really a problem. Yeah, I was just going to go through, I was thinking of some of the practices you have, so you have a daily huddle and, you know, companies do this. I’m a big believer in this, a standup meeting at the beginning of the day, you know, five minutes, 10 minutes. And, but you seem to have really sort of streamlined that because you’re talking about doing it as little as three minutes.

So what, what takes place in this daily huddle?

David Kreiger: Yeah. And I think the daily huddle is really important. it’s critical in a remote environment. And I think too, to your point, you know, it’s, it can be used in a, in a regular environment and it’s important just to make sure you’ve got constant communication. And so, you know, what we do is we have a. You know, it’s, it’s one time of the day, you know, in different, you know, every, every, every team has their own, their own huddle, with their, their team weed.

And we start off, you know, first,

Andy Paul: how, how big is your sales team?

David Kreiger: so we’re about 75, total

Andy Paul: And how would the team set up or the geographic or by account or?

David Kreiger: by account, by different clients. So it’s huddled by client.

Andy Paul: my client okay.

David Kreiger: And so what we do is we have a very quick check in one word, and that’s one important thing. Also in remote environment, you just want to always be able to check in on your team because you can’t see them. Right. You don’t see their body language as they’re walking through the hall and things like that.

You want to just know where they are, right. Quick, one word, you know, check in and you can kind of. Hear from either the word choice or the way they say at the leader just needs to be in tune to how that person’s feeling. Do they have energy? Do they have, you know, and keep that in mind, you might want to take something offline because you just got to know how your team is, is doing in a virtual environment.

Then. You know, w w they shout out their key KPI for the day. They usually it’s, you know, a number of appointments that are going to hit for that day. and then if any, and this is another critical thing, and probably the most important part of the daily huddle is anyone stuck on anything, because both in a regular environment, especially in a remote environment, you know, if there are blockers, if there are things that, that, you know, whether it’s a lead list or maybe a certain objection or things like that, if you can get that, have an opportunity to get that out of the way and, and solved.

On a daily basis, you know, in a team setting, it just allows your team to pedal faster. And so that is anyone stuck on anything, is so critical in that huddle. And if it’s something really quick, you can solve in the huddle, otherwise you just take it offline. Otherwise you’ve obviously can’t stick to the three minutes.

Andy Paul: And in those huddles, because they’re organized by account, is anybody, is the account liaison or whatever that person is. Are they in that as well?

David Kreiger: So the client isn’t in there, if that’s what you’re asking. So the coach, the coach who is coaching, that, that, that account, those STRs on the account is the one who, who leads it each day.

Andy Paul: All right. So you have your daily huddles, which again, great idea. Your weekly team meetings. So I presume outside work hours, you have a longer term, a longer timed meeting if you will.

David Kreiger: Exactly.

Andy Paul: And so what’s the agenda for that?

David Kreiger: Yeah, so that will go more deeply into the KPIs. So we always, anchor ourselves with metrics, you know, how are, how are things, you know, how are, how are we doing to going towards quota as a team, by individuals looking down at some, some of the sub metrics, as far as conversations, conversions rates touches.

so we ground ourselves in, in the metrics. and then we, Talk about, you know, our key priorities for the week. You know, it can be grounded in metrics, but it could be part of, you know, something that we took out of a coaching session. What are the key things that we’re working on on personally?

and then the magic in the team meeting, is. Bringing out the bigger issues about a campaign, you know? So what are the things that we need to solve as a team that might be getting in our way? and so that’s our time to really strategize, you know, maybe there’s a certain, you know, buyer persona we’re going after that, that we’re just either not finding the right messaging or we’re not, you know, targeting the, you know, or they might be the wrong, wrong person.

Right. So we’ll listen to some calls w we’ll really tackle bigger issues, macro issues. In that team meeting so that we made sure that every week we’re looking, you know, as a team, we’re looking strategically at the count and figure out things that, we can do better as a team.

Andy Paul: How about training? How do you integrate that? And so again, just for people to sort of make sure they’re keeping the right focus on this as these are best practices for working remote, because Hey, new with the managing your sales team. Cause new reality, that’s coming that. Yeah. And we’ll always have some, some fraction of what we’re doing wrong.

David Kreiger: Yeah. So if there is some training, maybe on a new product or service that you know, that that might take place there, or maybe there’s a new, new technique that we’re using company-wide or things like that, we could fit that into that discussion area, but the ongoing. Training is, is in the weekly coaching sessions, usually with, with the coach where they’re really going deep and listening into, you know, one-on-one calls and things like that.

And that’s where most of our training, you know, our one on is, is in that one on one setting. Correct.

Andy Paul: And when do you hold, and this is important question I’d start brought before, but when do you hold your, your weekly meetings? Cause this is so important that that to get good participation in the meeting to get people to be engaged in it. My belief as in my experience has always been as that. Hey, you have to take it outside selling hours and BS.

You have a really tightly defined agenda and you gotta follow the agenda and stick to the timeframe that you, you set out for it.

David Kreiger: Yeah, so we have a very strict, agenda and in time allocated to each slot. So, absolutely. So we, we, we stick to that, as far as. because we have people usually on different coasts and things like that, we do usually do it in the, in the middle of the day, which isn’t necessarily the best time, but it’s just to sort of accommodate for different schedules and usually in the middle of the week.

So we’ve got sort of a part of the week where we’ve got some, you know, things, things that are fresh and then we can implement them for the rest of the week.

Andy Paul: You say that one of the things that you make a habit of, and this is interesting is you were make sure you’re recording all those weekly meetings.

David Kreiger: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.

Andy Paul: And so do you haven’t transcribed. I mean, how do you distribute the recording or transcription to the team?

David Kreiger: Yeah, so, two ways, one we put into Otter so that anybody can search for something. I don’t know if you’ve used it, so that’s a great tool, you know, and then you can just search and look up, everything. And then we also have the video portion. Cause you know, just in case anything was shared and people want to look at it.

Yeah. they, they can just access the video and we just have that on, a little Dropbox area in the, in the auditors. Just email it to them.

Andy Paul: And so do you find that people actually using the recording or using the transcription.

David Kreiger: I mean, it’s there in case they want to go back. I don’t, I think that as long as they’re attentive during the meetings, it’s not as important. Right. You know, and they can take some of the, in those, any of the key lessons or key things can be reinforced for us in the coaching sessions. So it’s there, if they need to go back and look at it, and maybe there was an objection we talked about and they just want to kind of go to that game tape, but it isn’t necessarily something that are there, you know, we don’t want them to be real listening to the whole thing.

That’s not, that’s kind of a waste of time. Right. So.

Andy Paul: were like a coach as well, you know, in the meeting you committed to X, Y, Z.

David Kreiger: Oh, well, anything they commit to,

Andy Paul: he, I think he misunderstood me.

David Kreiger: okay. Yeah. Well, you can go about it. Yeah. But any other commitments, you know, first of all, usually their commitments are based upon what their KPIs are on their quota. So that’s all been hardcoded for the month anyway. and so, yeah, we can look right at the dashboard and see, see where they are and what they need to be able to do for them for the remainder of the month.

Andy Paul: And so you referred to your team leader, service coaches. So what, what background do they have? Yeah, this is the reason I bring this up is, is I’m increasingly vocal advocate for the fact that I don’t think managers should coach. I think you just have coaches on your team that coach, your sellers, cause most managers are reluctant to dedicate the time to it.

And they’re not very good at it, quite frankly. So who do you have as coaches?

David Kreiger: So they are all SDRs before. So, and they, came up through, through the organization. They’ve been with us, you know, we have very low, low attrition. So they’ve a lot of the coaches have been with sales roads for eight, nine, 10 years. So, you know, they they’ve come up, you know, through, through the system, they’ve proved themselves as good STRs, but also, you know, You know, they showed good introspection, right?

So that they could sort of listen to their own calls. You know, here, here we’re, we’re self-critical, you know, knew how to coach themselves, you know, that’s really an important, type of mindset. Yeah, absolutely. Ian we’re really, you know, I think a lot of people have talked about this, but we’ve really found it too, is that we want coaches who, aren’t the type that are just going to come in and Nessus, you know, we’re necessarily the best SDRs.

The best STRs can be good coaches, but yeah. But not, not always the case because sometimes the best STR is just have a great way of doing and they want to tell everybody, this is the way to do it. And, you know, I think the best coaching I’ve seen a lot of people write about this and talk about it in that way.

We’ve seen it in action is really the coaches you can ask. Just great questions. and they, they can hear something, and they can just probe about it and they can get that per and even better. They can get the, the SCR to, to probe themselves and be introspective and come up with the solution themselves, or be able to highlight the issue of themselves.

And so it sort of that guide or most, in those sessions. And so those folks who have that, that mentality who have that type of ethos are really make the best coaches at our organization.

Andy Paul: Yeah, I agree. I mean, it’s it’s and this is, I think what’s missing in some of your coaching these days is it’s so directive problem solving. Let me, so you tell me, right, what’s the problem here? You know, what’s the challenge for you in solving this problem? What can I do to help you as opposed to, Hey, just fix this for me?

David Kreiger: one last point too, on that, just cause I think the other thing that’s important, it’s really tough. You know, as, as coaches is also helping to try to prioritize because you know, you can oftentimes in a call here, a lot of things, it could be better. Right. And you might have a rep who hears all those things and says, Oh, here’s all the things I’m going to change.

But, but. You know, in a weekly cadence, you really want them to evaluate and think about the most important thing that they want to work on. And really trying to walk out of that meeting with almost, you know, we call it, you know, the one thing that one thing that they’re going to work on for the week,

Andy Paul: and that’s a good way to put it the one thing. so just last point I wanted to bring up cause that, that was a great recommendation too. Especially in this day and age with all of the messaging tools we have. And, and so on is that, you said sometimes a quick 10 minute meeting. Can resolve what 10 emails cannot.

I think that’s great insight. It’s you know, sometimes just as you mentioned before, just pick up the damn phone and call somebody and let’s take care of it as opposed to, Oh, we’ve got Slack. Let’s do 20 Slack messages.

David Kreiger: Yeah. And then you can go in a circle and then you bring somebody else in. It’s just kind of crazy how, how you can have miscommunication when, you know, if you just get somebody on the phone and really, and here’s the key thing when you get on the phone, because it can, you can go off. Of course, it’s very clearly outlined.

What is the issue that we’re going to solve in this 10 minute call and try to stick to it, right? So I’m calling you because we need to solve this and then you can go at it and you can get it done so much more quickly and come up with a better solution. If you do it over the phone.

Andy Paul: Great. All right. Well, David, unfortunately we’re run out of time, but tell people how they can connect with you and learn more about sales roads.

David Kreiger: Yeah, so you can visit us@salesroads.com. That’s our website, but also would love people connecting with me on LinkedIn, just David Kreger. K R E I G E R on LinkedIn. Please just, you know, connect with me, shoot me a message. Love to talk to folks. If you have any questions on remote work or SDRs, love to engage with people and, and speak that way too.

Andy Paul: David. Thanks a lot.

David Kreiger: Thanks for having me. And it was great speaking to you.