Remote Management Playbook

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Note: This piece was written for our customers as a tactical list of actions to take to implement the recommendations made in the Instrumenting Newly WFH Sales Teams overview deck.

As teams moved to work from home during the Covid-19 epidemic, we at Atrium wanted to help arm our customers with the tools they need to stay connected with their teams, motivate performance, and get ahead of changes in trends.  

Below you will find a recommended protocol for Dashboards, All Alert Views, and Opp Health Views for both easy viewing and distribution.  Our goal is to provide managers with the tools they need to ensure the team is staying on track while not being able to have the same “quick check ins” in the office together. 

1. Review goals that are currently set for team performance.

With individuals working remotely, it’s more important than ever to ensure that each person has clarity around what they need to do to be successful. If you haven’t set goals, or haven’t reviewed and updated them recently, here are some metrics that you may want to focus on:

Account Executives:
Bookings (Quarterly)
Days Between Opps Touches (Monthly)
New Pipeline and/or Total Pipeline (Monthly)
New Opportunities (Monthly)
Contacts Touched per Account (Monthly)
Meetings on Calendar (Weekly)
Untouched Opportunities (or Untouched Accounts, for ABM orgs) (Weekly)

Account Managers and CSMs:
Bookings (Quarterly)
Days Between Opps Touches (Monthly)
Accounts Touched (Monthly)
Contacts Touched per Account (Monthly)
Meetings on Calendar (Weekly)
Untouched Opportunities (or Untouched Accounts, where the AM owns the account) (Weekly)

Sales Development Representatives:
Pipeline Created (Monthly)
Opportunities Created (Monthly)
Conversion Rate from Opp Created to Accepted (Monthly)
Accounts Touched or Contacts Touched (Weekly or Monthly)
Emails Sent (Weekly)
Calls (Weekly)


Your Atrium CSM can help you determine where a goal should be set for each of these metrics, but a simple approach is to determine a minimum standard for any pipeline health metrics that you expect reps to reach, and for other metrics like meetings on the calendar or accounts touched, is to look at your most successful reps and mimic their behaviors (or set at 80% of highest performers)

 

2. Customize dashboards to send daily as part of a morning “standup”.

Many of our customers are now adding daily dashboard emails as part of a “daily standup” that’s happening either live over Zoom or asynchronously over Slack as a way to have a quick check-in with their teams to make sure that everything is running on track.

For most of our front-line managers, they are customizing the Last Week / Month in Progress dashboard to send on Monday mornings and the Rise and Shine dashboard to send each day Tuesday through Friday.

Your Atrium CSM can help you set these up / tune these.

Most common customizations:

 

AE Managers:

  1. Add New Opps and/or New Pipeline card(s)
  2. Add Opp Health
  3. Remove Calls cards

SDR Managers:

Simplify down to the most important cards for the individual team.

  1. Outbound teams may want to keep:
    1. Emails Sent
    2. Calls
    3. Accounts Touched
    4. Contacts Touched per Account
    5. Meetings Created
    6. Opps Created
    7. Pipeline Created
  2. Inbound teams may want to keep:
    1. Emails Sent 
    2. Calls
    3. Contacts Touched
    4. Meetings Created
    5. Opps Created

AM Managers:
Default dashboards are not yet built, but most of our customers have duplicated the AE Manager dashboards here.

CROs, VP Sales, and other top-level managers may want a simplified version of this dashboard with one team per card for a subset of metrics in order to be able to clearly see changes for each team over time. This will look like a trailing 90 days by week for each of the key metrics.

 

3. Customize saved views according to what makes the most sense for your team and your organization.

AE Managers

Opp Health

  1. Customize an Opp Health view to use during your pipeline review meetings (Pipeline This Month or Pipeline This Quarter) and broadcast to the team the morning before the meeting.
  2. Customize one or more Opp Health views that you can send out to your reps once a week in order to help them manage their pipeline:
    1. Disengaged Opportunities: Track opportunities without an outbound touch or inbound email in 7 or 14 days to keep on top of where things are going dark.
    2. Opps without a Next Meeting: Have a to-do list of opportunities where a next meeting needs to be scheduled.

All Alerts

  1. If you have several AEs who are ramping, create an All Alerts saved view to email out to yourself once a week that tracks “Ramping peer alerts” for  key metrics:
    1. Meetings
    2. New Opps
    3. New Pipeline
    4. Opps Owned
    5. Pipeline Owned
    6. Opps Advanced
    7. Win Rate
    8. Bookings
  2. If you have a large team that there are multiple strategy insights being generated, set up a saved view to email out to yourself once a week to review those strategy insights.
  3. If you’re worried about individuals becoming disengaged while working remotely, set up a saved view with personal alerts (an AE versus themself in the past) for key activity metrics as an early warning indicator.


AM Managers

Opp Health

  1. Customize one or more Opp Health views that you can send out to your reps once a week in order to help them manage their pipeline:
    1. Disengaged Opportunities: Track opportunities without an outbound touch or inbound email in 30 or 60 days to keep on top of where things are going dark.
    2. Opps without a Next Meeting: Have a to-do list of opportunities where a next meeting needs to be scheduled.

All Alerts

  1. If you’re worried about individuals becoming disengaged while working remotely, set up a saved view with personal alerts (an AM versus themself in the past) for key activity metrics as an early warning indicator.

SDR Managers

 

All Alerts

  1. If you have several AEs who are ramping, create an All Alerts saved view to email out to yourself once a week that tracks “Ramping peer alerts” for  key metrics:
    1. Emails Sent
    2. Accounts Touched
    3. Contacts Touched
    4. Email Engagement Rate
    5. Meetings Created (if applicable, by team)
    6. Opps Created
    7. Pipeline Created
    8. Conversion Rate from Opp Created to Accepted
  2. If you have a large team that there are multiple strategy insights being generated, set up a saved view to email out to yourself once a week to review those strategy insights.
  3. If you’re worried about individuals becoming disengaged while working remotely, set up a saved view with personal alerts (an AM versus themself in the past) for key activity metrics as an early warning indicator.

CRO/VP Sales

Opp Health

Customize an Opp Health view to send once a week that gives you an overview of the organization’s overall pipeline health, so that you can keep a pulse on how things are tracking for the quarter.

All Alerts

  1. If you have several reps who are ramping, have the All Alerts ramping view that’s been created for those teams emailed to yourself once a week as well.
  2. If you have a large team that there are multiple strategy insights being generated, set up a saved view to email out to yourself once a week to review those strategy insights.
  3. If you’re worried about individuals becoming disengaged while working remotely, set up a saved view with personal alerts (a rep versus themself in the past) for key activity metrics as an early warning indicator.

4. Create any additional dashboards required to support your own operational cadence.

This one will be much more idiosyncratic by team, but are there other meetings you’ve either been having or have added to your operational cadence as a result of moving to remote? What is the agenda for that meeting? What questions are you trying to answer? What data will help you answer those questions?